MIRROR, MIRROR OF THE FALL

Maureen Dowd
New York Times News Service

   WASHINGTON - Through many decades, Americans were on an odyssey of self-discovery. As a woman told a man at a party in a 1991 New Yorker cartoon, “I don’t know anybody here but the hostess — and, of course, in a deeper sense, myself.’’
   Since September 11, our long voyage of personal awareness has only intensified. Every day, we check our image, looking for ways, big or small, that we might have changed. We ponder if the changes are good or bad. We puzzle over whether the president has metamorphosed. We palaver about how the country has been transformed.
   We gauge whether we are as great yet as the Greatest Generation. We wonder how deep we have gotten and how long our deepness will last.
   We’ve absorbed 9/11 into our shallow fixation on self-image, turning the crisis into a makeover saga. This is what we looked like in the mirror before. This is what we look like in the mirror with ash all over our suit.
   Will we still be amused when Carrie Bradshaw’s boyfriend’s pooch chomps down on one of her Manolos?
   Will we still want to see Arnold Schwarzenegger play a firefighter who loses his wife and child in a terrorist bombing?
   Will we still crave luxury and pampering or will that seem frivolous?
   Will we stop staring at the stock tables and get into volunteerism?
   We pore over box-office receipts and ratings to see how our taste in entertainment has changed. Not at all, as it turns out.
   “For the most part,’’ USA Today reports, “content and the habits of those who tune in haven’t dramatically shifted. Moviegoers packed theaters for the hits (some quite violent), rap has seen no slump, Britney is still in the Top 5 and TV doesn’t look any cuddlier.’’
   A Washington Post poll showed that most Americans felt the country had permanently changed, and that those changes were for the better. Respondents said they were more affected in the way they feel than in the way they live.
   Our obsession with how much we’ve changed simply shows how much we’ve stayed the same.
   We keep superimposing the epic narrative of a heroic transfiguration on a president who is doing fine without it. Boomers keep trying to draw the president into their navel-gazing - even though he has never been emblematic of his generation and has always regarded introspection as “psychobabble.’’
   George W. Bush reacted with impatience the other day when asked, yet again, if the terrible autumn had changed him. “Talk to my wife,’’ he said. “I don’t know. I don’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror. Except when I comb my hair.’’
   It’s reassuring that the president is more focused and that he has found a mission. But we don’t need to build that up into a mythic transformation.
Reinvention can be exhausting. Have we already forgotten how jarring the Protean Presidency of Bill and Hillary was?
   At best, there’s a shift of emphasis, an acknowledgment of the shrillness of our old materialism and narcissism. Turning down the treble, turning up the bass.
   Yuppies are accustomed to instant gratification. We don’t want to wait five years to assess whether we have learned to be more patient at airport checkpoints and whether we have prepared ourselves for any sacrifices that may come and whether we have grown as worthy as the World War II generation. We want that validation NOW!
   The revolutionary change would be if we stopped trying on identities and decided to keep one, stopped wondering what we’re like on the inside and looked outside ourselves.
   The reality of ground zero renders all discussion of the unrealities and surrealities of our culture moot.
   We’re casting about for an external statement about the effect of Sept. 11 on us when the truest response is silence.
   Anyone who’s truly changed doesn’t wonder if they’ve changed. By constantly checking our emotional temperature, we keep the endless self-hyphenated loop going -- self-admiring, self-denigrating, self-regarding.
   The only real change would take place if we removed our fingers from our pulse.