Family romance.(At War III)

AT one point in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, Dick Diver, the hero, notices, on his way to an assignation, a party of Gold Star mothers--American women whose sons died in World War I--and feels momentarily abashed by the contrast between their unostentatious sturdiness and his frivolity. He had not seen the antics of some of the 9/11 "families."

After 9/11, the survivors of the innocent dead properly received a nation's sympathy. The deaths of their relatives marked a style of warfare appropriate to the 21st century, when civilians will be the primary target of those who are clever, cowardly, and wicked. Our sympathy was tinged by sober thoughts of kinship: There, but for the grace of God, went us. There will go some of us, in the next attack that gets through even our heightened defenses, or the next--for there is no perfect defense against terror, and all have been enlisted, willy nilly, in freedom's army.

But bad things began to happen to the families as a group, and to some of them as individuals. The charity they received was construed to be an entitlement. They became organized and, as in all organizations, operators rose to the top. Some of ...