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Still, there are already signs that we are too culturally polyglot to turn back the clock out of a yearning for comfort. The cast of The Producers' singing God Bless America on Broadway was all the more defiant for its squareness. But there was also something strangely appropriate about MTV's playing Kid Rock's American Badass in honor of rescue workers on a special episode of the video-request show TRL: the video's star-spangled obscenity, its bikers and bikinis, was somehow a perfect riposte to an act of cultural-conservative terror ordered from within a land where TV is illegal.
Some art will risk offense to stay relevant. In December playwright Tony Kushner opens Homebody/Kabul, set in Afghanistan in 1998, the year of American air strikes in response to bin Laden's U.S. embassy bombings in Africa. Despite the now incendiary subject, Kushner says he "wouldn't change a thing" in the script. "Even a country at war has a moral imperative to think about the people with whom they are fighting and ask questions about them," he says. All of us are likely to crave escape in the months ahead. But we should be afraid to live in a country where entertainment that deals with people's fears is untouchable, where satire is impossible. A country where it is forbidden to mock the President by popular consensus is no freer than a country where it is forbidden to mock the President by law.
The irony (yes, irony) of pop culture's crisis is that critics have spent many Britneyed, Rush Houred and Spy TVed years bemoaning a shallow culture suited to trivial times. Our war culture, if it comes to that, may well go both darker and lighter at the same time in response to today's troubles. It may even, in some perverse way, improve. But could anyone be blamed for counting the days until we can be so unfortunate as to live in shallow, trivial times again?
--Reported by Jess Cagle and Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Amy Lennard Goehner and Lina Lofaro/New York