NOT SCARED.(London bombings)

In the hours after the Thursdaymorning bombings in London, it seemed as if everyone was on the streets, walking home. With the Tube shut down and buses barred from the central part of the city, hundreds of thousands of people went trudging in the bright sunlight--across Westminster Bridge and in front of Westminster Abbey and down Birdcage Walk, next to St. James's Park, which, in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, was lined with ancient ambulances from the Blitz.

To anyone who had been on the streets of New York on September 11th, the resemblance was both sickeningly familiar and startlingly different. The sense of a city turned inside out, of a shock too large to quite analyze--that was there. But the consuming terror was not. No one ran, or cried, or even talked much about what had happened. Businessmen walked side by side from the City to the South Bank, still doing business, jiggling their cell phones impatiently in a futile attempt to make them work. Visitors just off trains marched toward their West End hotels, bags in hand or thrown over the shoulder. The police had an emergency plan--blocking off some streets, and redirecting human traffic to others--that seemed marked by a preternatural calm and a long-considered certainty. So calm and certain, in fact, that when, near Victoria Station, on Buckingham Palace Road, American tourists clustered around police officers and demanded directions, the bobbies took maps from the blue-rinsed legions and kindly, patiently, even chattily, showed them how to get from where they were to where they wanted to go.

Much of the difference, of course, was a matter of scale. Big Ben had not collapsed; the dead were going to number in the dozens, not the thousands. By some hideous new standard, as the security services allowed, London had "got off easy." And there was no image to run again and again on television; Hell was mainly hidden underground. In New York then, we had to make an effort to get to "normalcy," and in London now people almost had to make an effort not to be normal, not to allow the swiftly resumed flow of life to remove them from the reality of a tube far below the street, with hundreds of mangled and murdered people inside. (A woman, we were told, was found on one of the trains by a policeman who saw that, though she was moaning, she had neither legs nor arms.)

In the absence of fear, what asserted itself was, simply, tradition--a habit of responding shaped not only by memories of the Blitz but, more acutely, by the I.R.A. bombings of the past three decades, which were random and deadly. (In England, the I.R.A. was responsible for the mutilation of scores of people and the deaths of almost a hundred, including two senior Conservative politicians and Lord Mountbatten; in 1984, it very nearly got Margaret Thatcher herself, at a Tory Party conference at Brighton.) And without the corrosive presence of fear the argument about what had happened in London became, very quickly, starker, blunter, and more faceted than the argument has been allowed to be in America. The patriotically correct nationalism of the Murdoch media is less paralyzing in Britain than it is here. The London argument pits not left against right but the old right and the old left against the Thatcherite right and the Blairite left. And, while in America the argument that a war on terror might not be ...