The Misanthrope's Corner.(social impact of terrorist attacks)(Brief Article)(Column)

In my February 19 column, I wrote, "I can't shake my sense that the Bush presidency is star-crossed," but I never thought female intuition would be this accurate.

As soon as it happened, so many commentators called it "our second Pearl Harbor" that my mind drifted back to our first one. I was not quite six in 1941, so my memory of specific events is sketchy, but the general emotional flavor is engraved on my mind as a classic example of my family's bent dynamic.

My passive father didn't want to go to war and my aggressive mother ached to. As usual, she relieved her frustration with dazzling cascades of profanity, rattling off politically incorrect fivefers such as "little yellow slant-eyed pissant bastards!" She spent four years yelling, "We oughta blow 'em off the map!" and when we did, she cut the photo of the mushroom cloud out of the paper, pasted it over the serenely pastoral "Cottage at Sunset" illustration on our kitchen calendar, and yelled, "Little yellow slant-eyed pissant bastards, BOOM!"

Always sports-minded, toward the end of her life she became, of all things, a sumo-wrestling fan. Thinking she had mellowed with age, I reminded her of her Pearl Harbor sentiments and asked her what she now found different about sumo wrestlers. She thought a minute and then said, "They're not little."

She would be in her element if she were here today. Saber-rattling jingoism is in the air. Stores are selling out of flags, the national anthem is being sung in artsy venues like Washington Square, and there is even talk of issuing war bonds. Enlistments are up, the old knee- jerk caution, "another Vietnam," has faded away, and college boys sound more and more like hard hats as they describe in sanguinary detail what they would like to do to Osama bin Laden.

We are intent on infusing our Second Pearl Harbor with the same unequivocal bloodlust that marked the first-but it won't work. We have been in a psychological lockbox too long and the conflicts that put us there have not gone away for good. They'll resurface, as unresolved conflicts always do, and thrust us back into the same old moral paralysis we were in before.

Most of these conflicts come into view when we couple the new, soon-to- be cliches that have poured from the media since last Tuesday with the familiar, shopworn cliches that were already etched on the national brain before last Tuesday. A few examples will illustrate the emotional taffy-pull we are in for: