In 1969, the year of the original True Grit, 15 inches of snow fell on New York City, nearly putting an end to John Lindsay's mayoral career. The outer boroughs went unplowed for days, and it was precisely the working-class and lower-middle-class enclaves in the outer boroughs where Lindsay's popularity was in jeopardy. People went nuts, and called for Lindsay's head.

But that's where the similarity to Mayor Bloomberg's recent snow snafu stops. Lindsay was reelected, but not before having to undergo the most tumultuous electoral contest in the city's history, which included a run for mayor by Norman Mailer, accompanied on the ticket by Jimmy Breslin for City Council president. "The difference between me and the other candidates," Mailer liked to say, "is that I'm no good and I can prove it." When Mailer visited Queens to stump for votes, a man asked him how he would clear the streets of snow if, during his mayoralty, another blizzard hit New York. "I'd piss on it," Mailer promised. Nineteen-sixty-nine was like that. It abounded in colorful personalities who took on their environment.

In 1969, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators descended on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, forcing Nixon to withdraw thousands of troops from Southeast Asia even as he implored the "silent majority" to continue to support the war. In 1969, members of the gay community in New York changed their lives forever by taking matters into their own hands during the Stonewall riots that erupted in Greenwich village. Woodstock happened. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. It was the beginning of the end for Nixon and the war.

Plenty of other things came to pass in 1969, good, bad and all degrees in between. The unintended consequences of those events were rife and multivalent, but if you had to sum up that year, and that moment, you would have to say that it was the year of living willfully. People  encountered each other, went into the world, and things happened.  Many of the seeds of the individual protections and  pleasures that we enjoy today were planted then.

Forty  years later, and presidents have to be more careful about breaking the law  (blatantly breaking the law, anyway); blacks, gays and women are  safer and more in control of their own  destinies; crime is down; the streets are not simmering  with rage; people lead healthier lives; our daily  existence is, thanks to the Internet, infinitely more convenient. But even our best public officials live in terror of being shamed and humiliated; we are plagued by war, mired in joblessness, banged around by soaring health care premiums and deductibles (the result of health care "reform"), slaves to the distractions and importunings of our proliferating gadgets, swamped by inarticulable unease.

The 1969 True Grit--about a young girl who hires a tough, hard-drinking U.S. marshal named Rooster Cogburn, played by John Wayne, to help her catch and kill the hired hand who murdered her father-had layered characters and great lines. As a ne'er-do-well, played by a young Dennis Hopper, lies dying on the ground after being stabbed by his no-good partner, he says about the man who has taken his life: "He never played me false until he killed me." The language captures a situation and evokes a character at the same time. How quaint that is becoming.

In the Coen brothers' version, that line has not survived. Nor has Mattie's threat, repeated again and again in rising comedy, to summon her lawyer, "J. Noble Daggett," to her aid. Daggett's name has uncomically disappeared. And the Coens jettisoned the witty bit of repartee in which Rooster Cogburn asks La Boeuf, the Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell), why there is such a little reward for a man who killed a state senator. "He was a little senator," replies La Boeuf, seemingly surprised by a naïve question. In one stroke, you got both men's unsentimentality about money, Cogburn's worldliness and La Boeuf's weakness for whimsical explanations.

The Coen brothers' film is beautiful, all at once cannily real and surreally uncanny, so masterfully paced that it seems more choreographed than filmed. The wintry landscapes are precise illuminations of the characters' desolate interiors. There is something almost Wagnerian about the way Carter Burwell's music and the painterly cinematography together mold poetic meaning--that is, if Wagner had been a pair of deadpan Jewish siblings.

But the characters, even Jeff Bridges' almost campily oversized impersonation of Cogburn, exist as pasteboard cutouts adorning the evocative  landscape. They have been stripped of meaningful speech and psychological motives. You can barely understand what Mr. Bridges says, in fact. In the original, Mattie gets the better of a horse-trader by accusing him of passing off geldings as breeding horses to her unsuspecting father. In the Coen brothers' film, she gets the better of the dishonest horse-trader, but you have no idea why since the geldings have disappeared from the script.

The original film was shot in autumn, and the shimmering golden trees, with their descending leaves, hint at mortality but don't stifle you with explicit meaning. At one point, the golden trees serve as the backdrop to Cogburn and La Boeuf, while giant evergreens sway behind some bad guys who oppose them. The two images work to vaguely direct your thoughts and feelings, but you are not oppressed by overt symbols.

The Coen brothers give us not only the explicit wintry landscapes, but fablelike starry skies--The Indifferent Universe--and whirling snow at the beginning and toward the end of the movie--The Transience Of Time. You know the snow symbolizes fleeting time because an older Mattie explicitly proclaims time's transience in the film's final minutes. Physical environment in the Coen brothers' film is like a running caption that fills in for character and dialogue.

In the original, Cogburn tells Mattie about his lonely, loveless life around a campfire, and she looks at him with furtive affection, then goes to sleep as he watches her protectively, with tenderness. Their exchange is filmed in intimate  close-ups. In their version, the Coen brothers have Cogburn tell her, barely comprehensibly, an abbreviated account of his life as they ride through the woods while the camera hovers in a long shot high above them. Cogburn's desperate horseback ride with Mattie to save her life after she's bitten by a rattlesnake has no sense in the remake. There is no connection between them. That's why the Coen brothers shift into fable mode for that scene and portray Cogburn and Mattie looming abstractly against a star-filled sky. No story or character to give the audience? Present them with a symbolic image that they can mentally click on and then link to big meaning.

The point of the starry sky--as was the point of the Coens' stylishly pointless No Country for Old Men--is to present the universe as amoral. It is as indifferent to who we are and to the stories we tell ourselves as it is to our fabricated categories of good and evil. These are themes straight out of freshman lit, but the critics are always mightily impressed when they find them in a Hollywood movie. Still, they might want to take a look again at the original True Grit. There the mingled yarn of good and ill, to coin a phrase, is exposed when you subtly learn that Mattie's father, good man that he seems to be, also treated his killer like chattel. The Coen brothers excised that, too.

Instead you are left with that stunning, slowly swirling snow. It sent me back to 1969, and I wondered wistfully what characters might emerge and stories unfold if it was not  cleaned up within a reasonable amount of  time.

lsiegel@observer.com

It's simple: We don't have the guts and the brains to build and sustain an empire. The proof of our inadequacy is that our best and brightest young people would prefer to get jobs here rather than overseas. By best and brightest, I mean graduates from Havard, Yale and the other Ivies, not people who went to second-rate "small liberal arts colleges" or third-rate state universities. (I warned you that I was going to be blunt.) The only way we could have turned our occupation in Iraq into a successful imperial outpost was to get the smartest Americans to administer it. That never happened.

Instead we got a lot of hardworking, lower-middle-class first-generation immigrants. After so much death and destruction, we should be honest with ourselves about these kids. They had plenty of guts but woefully little brains. They had names like Edward Chin and Kemaphoom Chanawongse, not Roosevelt or Wilson, and they lacked the social and intellectual pedigree that every colonial administrator should possess. Not only that, but there are a lot of African-Americans serving some of the longest tours of duty. No wonder Iraq is still a mess. How different we are from the British imperialists, who held together a vast empire for generations because they sent products of the elite institutions of Oxford and Cambridge to rule their colonial possessions.

Are you appalled by what I just wrote? Disgusted? Enraged? Me, too. Those are not, I can assure you, my thoughts or my sentiments. Incredible as it may seem, that stream of viciousness was published in The New York Times Magazine in April 2003, just weeks after the American invasion of Iraq, and it was emitted by one Professor Niall Ferguson, of Harvard University.

In that article Professor Ferguson lamented "the difficulty the American empire finds in recruiting the right sort of people to run it." This is because, he sniffed, "America's brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia, but to manage MTV; not to rule Hejaz, but to run a hedge fund;  not to be a C.B.E., or Commander of the British Empire, but to be a C.E.O. And that, of course, is one reason so many of the Americans currently in Iraq are first-generation immigrants to the United States--men like Cpl. Kemaphoom Chanawongse." Why an American would want to be a "C.B.E." escapes me. But Professor Ferguson presses on, his Big Idea rattling in his little head: "The products of America's elite educational institutions are the people least likely to head overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays," he writes. Instead of these elite products, the professor instructs us, you get lots of African-Americans, who shockingly make up "12.9 per cent of the population, 25.4 per cent of the Army Reserve" and who are among those "who serve the longest tours of duty." As a result, Professor Ferguson warns that "if the occupation of Iraq is to be run by the military, then it can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number of African-American officers in the Army" rather than those cherished "products of elite educational institutions." You see, I wasn't joking. 

As we brood over the catastrophe in Iraq, which is not over but whose economic and political ramifications are just beginning to bring us down, we need to remember creatures like Niall Ferguson, a standout figure in the motley assortment of opportunists who used the occasion of the Iraq war to begin, jump-start or further their careers. These journalists, intellectuals, academics shaped the warped public consciousness that sent us into Iraq and thus into what is perhaps the worst foreign policy mistake in the country's history. We need to understand the mechanisms by which they distorted--and by which they were allowed to distort--reality to the point that war was turned into peace and a new type of national incarceration into freedom.

Of course, not everyone who advocated toppling Saddam Hussein and establishing a democracy in Iraq was a scoundrel. Not by any means. It was perfectly honorable to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and to want to destroy them. It was perfectly honorable--if naïve and even obtuse--to wish to liberate the Iraqis who had suffered so terribly at Saddam's hands. Most of the people who advocated war in Iraq underwent painful, conscientious revolutions in their thought when they saw the debacle unfolding; many of them visited Iraq and experienced the factual rebuttal of their theories. A reader knew that they were writing honestly when they publicly wrestled with the consequences of their original thoughts about freedom and Iraq. You know when someone is writing honestly.

But then there were the others, whose intellectual reversals were executed with so little agony, with such a small amount of personal inconvenience, that their about-faces seemed the stuff of satire. Consider Peter Beinart. In 2006, Mr. Beinart published a book arguing that liberals will only be worthy of the name liberal if they learn how to fight the "good fight," the noble conflict in this case being the subjugation of Iraq. Just a couple of months ago, however, he published another book, this time arguing that liberals will be worthy of the name liberal only if they learn how to restrain their "hubris," the product of sinful pride in this case being the subjugation of Iraq.

Mr. Beinart is so shallow and empty that he could be mistaken for a hotel ashtray. Reading him, you feel that he has the soul of a receptacle. But should he be laughed away? In November 2001, Mr. Beinart responded to those who compared the American slaughter of innocent civilians in Afghanistan to the Taliban's own brutality: "For the United States," he wrote in The New Republic, of which he was the editor, "killing civilians is a tragic by-product of war, not its purpose." He went on to say that "killing 5,000 Afghans could indeed be necessary to save American lives--if that were the only way to destroy a terrorist government that, if allowed to endure, would surely kill more Americans in the future." In other words, the chastiser of American hubris in the form of American military aggression believed, just a few years ago, that killing 5,000 innocent men, women and children "could indeed be necessary" if the unknowable future decided that it should be so.

Still, the slippery Mr. Beinart pales in comparison to Professor Ferguson. This imported Scot's toxic sentiments were bad and un-American enough, but the professor's argument was just as miserable. Great numbers of British colonial administrators might have matriculated at Oxford and Cambridge, but that did not mean that they were not morally, intellectually and spiritually depleted as persons. In fact, as Orwell knew and wrote, Britain's colonial satraps and their underlings were often people who could not find gainful employment in Britain. (If you can't teach, teach gym; and if you can't teach gym, go run India.) For a historian, Professor Ferguson has a dismayingly unsophisticated grasp of how the world works. Or maybe as an immigrant Scot seeking work in the American Empire, he is in a snit of denial about the nature of colonial arrivistes. He is certainly just plain ignorant of what is sometimes the inverse relationship between America's top schools and the judgment and character of their graduates. You would need a calculator to add up the number of Ivy League grads behind the catastrophe in Iraq. How, after
 David Halberstam's famous book, could this academic huckster use the phrase "best and brightest" without irony?

At the time Professor Ferguson's essay was published, no one thought to call him out on his vile sentiments. But we had better remember the precise form his and others' moral imbecility took seven years ago, at that fateful turning point in our history, or we will find ourselves there once again, faster than you can pronounce the beautiful names of all those "first-generation immigrants"--not at all the "right sort of people," as Professor Ferguson puts it--who died in the sand in Iraq.

editorial@observer.com

Seeing Annette Bening in The Kids Are All Right—seeing her face register a spectrum of feeling as if it were the evening news—I was more than ever convinced that she is one of the greatest ever American film actors. And it's all in that magnificent face, which is arguably the face of our moment.

Every great Hollywood face has a distinguished genealogy. In Ms. Bening's, you find a strong echo of Ida Lupino's determined toughness and the faintest trace of Jean Seberg's waifish androgyny. But Ms. Bening has her unique quality: an unforgettable indistinctness. What is special about Ms. Bening's face is that it is a series of almosts. The nose is too strong to be demure, and too delicate to be large; the chin stops just short of being either rounded or dramatic; the mouth could be full or thin, depending on her mood or yours.

Part of the genius of director Lisa Cholodenko in this small masterpiece is to capture an elusive butchness in her star. Behind Ms. Bening's presentation of heterosexual beauty is a robust laughter at men and at the comedy of sex with men. Ms. Bening's short hair, with its meticulous dishevelment, with its punkish and puckish tufts, seems to be hinting at another identity altogether, the way V.S. Naipaul's African jungle is always about to reclaim civilization, or the way an expensive perfume so subtly hints at a primal scent. The crux of Ms. Bening's artistry is the way she expresses a startling simultaneity of antithetical qualities. In what is perhaps Ms. Bening's most playfully autobiographical role, Virginia Hill, Bugsy Siegel's lover-Bugsy played by Ms. Bening's real-life husband, Warren "12,775" Beatty-she shocks you by revealing the sudden vulnerability and fear underneath the callous seductress, and then shocks you again with the revelation of ruthless amorality underneath the vulnerability and fear.

Of course Ms. Bening, like all great American actors, is telling us what we think we know about her real-life story as she is performing her character. Any wife of Warren Beatty who has had four children with him has got to have reached a level of irony about custom and conventional appearances that is somewhere at the elevation of the Hubble Space Telescope. And since we are all, on the social and the personal level, moving through what seems like some daily realignment of everything we thought we knew to be steady and true, Ms. Bening's distillation of her experience into her characters' faces has a universal quality.

There is one exemplary moment in Ms. Bening's film career that captures this environment of blurry, running certitudes. It occurs at the end of Mrs. Harris, another one of those tiny gemlike films with prismatic themes and characters that Ms. Bening is drawn to. She plays Jean Harris, the prim, neurotic, dreamy, obsessive headmistress of an exclusive private school who has fallen in love with the egomaniacal Herman "Hy" Tarnower-performed to perfection by Ben Kingsley-a Westchester cardiologist who wrote the best-selling Scarsdale Diet book. For years, they have been torturing each other, with Jean getting the worst of it, as the Beatty-like Herman betrays her again and again. Having just discovered yet another betrayal, Jean confronts Herman on a stormy night in his bedroom. They argue, she pulls a handgun from her purse and shoots him four times. As he lies dying on his bed, Jean tries to call for help, but she can't get through. "Hy," she says, "it's broken. I think it's gone dead."  "You're probably right," he mutters. Sitting on the edge of the other twin bed, resting her chin in her hand as if bored by the same old quarrel between them, she replies, almost in exasperation, "That's the only civil thing you've said to me tonight." 

Ms. Bening delivers the line with such exquisite, balletic poise that it is impossible to describe using a single quality. Just when you think it might be deadpan, you realize that it possesses an inflection of meaning, but you cannot fathom just what that meaning might be. It is a sincere reproach, which makes it absurd and perhaps insane, given the fact that she has just fatally wounded him; it has a hint of self-conscious malice; it has an import of irritation as if she, the murderer, has been genuinely put out by having to drive five hours in the rain to shoot her lover only to encounter rudeness and a lack of generosity. Underneath all that, there is a kind of cosmic laughter emanating from the actress herself, as if she had experienced in her very bones the fact that all the world is a stage.

Or in a different emotional key entirely, watch the expression on Ms. Bening's face as the regretful, embittered, broken, surviving character in Mother and Child witnesses her elderly mother suddenly die in her hospital bed. The mixture of surprise and disbelief and pain slowly expanding through fascination into horror strikes me as utterly contemporary, precisely the response of we who, cushioned by technological wonder, are possibly more removed from the reality of death than any previous civilization, until it suddenly arrives.

Crazy, mobile, ever-shifting American truth now resides in Ms. Bening's 52-year-old face. Her age is significant, just as the fact that she seems not to have done any cover-up work on her face is significant. The Kids Are All Right is like a defiant gesture to an industry that discards actresses at the age of 40, as well as to a culture that has every woman, young and old, walking around tormented and stuck inside the burqa of a commercialized ideal of feminine beauty. To top it all off, Ms. Bening's postmodern simultaneity reaches the pitch of perfection in this film: She is the masculine-feminine harmony that, in Aristophanes' old parable, got tragically split into the two sexes. Yet her character is essentially, timelessly conservative. She is a lesbian Father Knows Best.

Along with the superb Julianne Moore's unabashedly ripening face, Ms. Bening's deepening lines and the loosening skin on her neck and her life-heavy eyes tinted with wisdom and humor compose a kind of quiet militancy. The Russians once had Anna Akhmatova, the symbol of strong, enduring Russian women who kept their families and society together as their men were executed or disappeared into the gulag. We have Annette Bening. If she can flip the bird to shallow aesthetics, flaunt her beauty through her aging and survive even Warren Beatty, then America has a future in its decline.

editorial@observer.com

To read the social critic Lee Siegel’s latest treatise on the deleterious effects of Internet culture is to find oneself exultantly blurting things like “Mmm-hmm!”, “That’s right!” and “Sing it!” Overhearing me ejaculate thusly, my friend Mike said he imagined a bunch of geeky white journalists sitting in a Baptist church, huzzahing a sermon whose highlights included, for example, the declaration that the Internet “has forced traditional news outlets to seek out more and more trivial news,” and that it has “engorged the ‘old’ media with streams of useless information.” Ain’t it the truth, brother!

“But I feel like I read posts about that stuff every day on Romenesko,” said skeptical Mike, referring to the oft-clicked “media news” Web site. (Mike is a sometimes television writer who doesn’t share Mr. Siegel’s tastes in that particular medium.)

I excitedly pounded my pew—O.K., the arm of the sofa. “But that’s exactly it! This isn’t a link on a Web site. It’s a book.” God bless it, a book!

Not to romanticize overmuch, but how strangely novel it seems to read an argument about the digital world sustained over almost 200 creamy paper pages, instead of in fits and starts on that cold, blue, migraine-inducing screen that now follows the affluent citizenry pretty much everywhere they go. It’s a good book, an exciting book, a necessary book (and a short one, appropriately enough for the many of us whose attention spans have been perhaps forever truncated by our ingrained daily routine of incessant pointing and clicking and hyperlinking).

Also, let’s be frank, kind of a nervy offering from a writer who only a little over a year ago was busted for posting vituperative self-aggrandizing e-mails under the nom de plume “sprezzatura” in response to online detractors of his work in The New Republic. Though surely those of us still learning to negotiate cyberspace like so many early astronauts bobbing around in Apollo capsules can conjure more sympathy than schadenfreude toward the hot flush that must’ve coursed over Mr. Siegel’s visage at the moment his ruse was discovered. We’re all so naked out there, misfiring e-mails and trying to erase embarrassing Google searches.

Who could blame the critic if he’d gone into hiding for a good long while after the sprezzatura incident, spun in the book as a “rollicking misadventure”? But “in true American fashion,” Mr. Siegel elected instead to capitalize on it. That is, intellectually capitalize.

He has evident scorn for those fellow public thinkers—“advance men for the Web” such as panel-hopping New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, catchphrase-coining New York Times columnist David Brooks, seminar-cruising consultant Douglas Rushkoff and so-called “techno-hustler” Steven Johnson—who have the audacity to profit from their theories by seeking and glorifying a mass audience; they might as well be Paris Hilton shilling a new handbag line.

Mr. Gladwell in particular is “obsessed with popularity,” his adversary all but hisses. “Back in high school, people like him were the reason you drank, brooded over Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and imagined which celebrated figures would speak at your (imminent) funeral.” Though Mr. Siegel is 50 years old (according to one of his many scourges, Wikipedia), fully domesticated in Brooklyn with a wife and son, he’s in many respects still that misfit in a black T-shirt scowling by the corner locker while everyone else is whooping it up at the basketball game. You almost feel like he doesn’t want Against the Machine to gain widespread acclaim, lest he be, heaven forfend, branded as a sellout.

And the Internet, Mr. Siegel is essentially arguing, makes sellouts of pretty much anyone who engages with it in any significant way. College students, formerly “the active arm of society’s conscience”—marching on picket lines, starting literary magazines or handcuffing themselves to administrators’ desks—now spend most of their waking hours baring their bodies and souls online in bottomless spirals of narcissism. (Or worse, they drop out of college altogether and make billions of dollars starting Web-based platforms for such narcissism.) Commentator-enthusiasts of the new online order blithely fling around buzzwords like “freedom ... individualism ... democracy ... epidemic”—that last line of rhetoric particularly troubles Mr. Siegel, who notes that “the terrifying idiom of plague” has been converted by Mr. Gladwell into “the happy nomenclature of commercial triumph.” (Later, he remarks, discussing the “viral” efforts of American Idol contestants: “It depresses me to equate illness with success.”)

Network programmers solicit suburban audiences, themselves busily uploading their home movies to YouTube, to participate in creating their own entertainment: sort of the large-scale equivalent of those old Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novels, except now, as then, there’s nothing artistically adventurous about so doing.

The author is a big believer in art with a capital A, “a form of expression that mysteriously accommodates our experience without actually addressing our particular experience,” as distinct from the “self-expression” so ubiquitous nowadays, which he sneeringly compares to a 4-month-old pooping on someone’s lap. Get a grip, people—nothing on the Net could possibly be as mysteriously divine as Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring, ya dig?

But it’s not just that most of what’s out there on the blue screen is junk, “time-wasting ephemera”—a statement with which one imagines most modern sentient beings would agree. (Who, after all, hasn’t felt faintly sick following an afternoon noodling on the computer while the real world ticks by?) No, Mr. Siegel is grimly prophesying big cataclysmic social events; the relentless intrusion of economics into leisure time; the end of privacy as we know it; even—dum-de-dum-dum—“democracy’s fatal turn.”

Does he have a prescription for getting matters back on the right course? Not really; in fact, with his concluding catalog of “eight open secrets” and “five open supersecrets” of the blogosphere, he veers ironically into the Gladwellian lingo of best-seller-dom. But you know, there could be worse fates.

Alexandra Jacobs is editor-at-large of The Observer. She can be reached at ajacobs@observer.com.

For Lee Siegel, such bluster is a dispiriting sign of the times: no engagement, no freewheeling back-and-forth—the sine qua non of a healthy intellectual life—just a mischievous jape about seeing the critic in the dock. (In fact, speaking of freewheeling back-and-forth, Mr. Siegel recently endured a dose of public censure and was temporarily suspended from The New Republic—all as a result of his dodgy blogging antics in the midst of a cyberspace contretemps.) Mr. Siegel thinks that for a critic, giving offense is part of the deal. He’s happy to hold up his end, but the rest of us keep letting him down.

Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, he mounts a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names—which weakens his case—the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”

The obstacles to unfettered imagination are everywhere: reality TV, memoirs galore, novels propped up by historical “research” (The Da Vinci Code)—all examples of a culture afflicted by a pernicious “art-suspicion.” Fewer and fewer people are willing to submit to the genuinely made-up, to put themselves “in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.”

His complaint is not new: “It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media,” he fumes, “or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts in direct consultation with gallery owners and book and magazine editors.” Enough of that, he declares: “The critic’s passion should be to expose the shams, the false consciousness, the cleverly accommodating patter that are turning expedience into culture …. [The critic] interprets the work under scrutiny almost as if it were a lesson in freedom, or in some of the ways of being, or not being, free.”

There’s a touch of immodesty—not to say melodrama—to all this hand-wringing: Mr. Siegel as the lonely, embattled man of letters, telling us all like it is, or how it should be, because no one else has the good sense to do so. As for the charge that the cultural world has been corrupted by business values, I’m not sure if this is entirely true. Unless you’re a Jeff Koons (O.K., a fraud) or a Philippe de Montebello or a Jonathan Safran Foer, or a hustling freelancer who writes for high-minded glossies (Lee Siegel, for example), making a living in arts or letters is, trust me, plenty hard, so two cheers for a little entrepreneurial zeal.

Not that he would care either way, but liking Lee Siegel is a bit difficult. You just can’t win with this guy: You either a) don’t get it or b) are part of the problem or c) are obsequiously climbing the ranks. Still, I’m going to go right ahead and praise him. No better, more important collection of criticism than Falling Upwards has been published this year. There’s plenty to deplore out there, and Mr. Siegel hates all the right tendencies—the fatuous reductionism of queer literary theory, the subject of a long essay that showcases Mr. Siegel’s forensic grasp of post-structuralism’s bad habits, or the phony pieties and even worse prose of Barbara Kingsolver, who writes books for people impressed with their own rectitude. Ms. Kingsolver fancies herself a serious writer who grapples with weighty, geopolitical issues, but she’s merely a lightweight who peddles “a potpourri of tried-and-true soppy attitudes that are attached, with demographic precision, to an array of popular causes.” That’s right on.

In the essays themselves, collected mostly from Harper’s, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Siegel airs his themes with more grace and subtlety than he does in his heavy-handed introduction. In a brilliant appraisal of Saul Bellow, for example, Mr. Siegel uses the career of James Atlas and his ill-fated decision to write Bellow’s biography—a project Mr. Atlas had no business undertaking—as a gauge of careerism in the literary world. Siegel notes that Mr. Atlas was once a fine literary journalist, but he chucked all that aside, becoming an incredibly crass, status-obsessed charlatan with no concern whatsoever for genuine literary value. The Bellow biography proved to be his undoing. Mr. Siegel wonders whether Mr. Atlas was “driven insane by his subject’s cosmic laughter”—whether Bellow’s “wildness,” his “demonic vitality,” could have “curdled” Mr. Atlas’ spirit.

“Demonic vitality”: Mr. Siegel’s criterion for artistic worth invariably turns on such terms. He’s here to tell you that good art—art that matters—is necessarily unruly, unbound by dogma or programmatic concerns. (Can’t be reminded of this too often.) What raises his hackles is “screwing a utilitarian handle on the imagination.” Embracing his inner Lionel Trilling, who famously endorsed “variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty,” Mr. Siegel applauds “‘high’ art” and its “saving complexities”: “Art and literature humanize us into enduring life’s paradoxes and ambiguities, its setbacks, calamities, and disappointments.”

For all of Mr. Siegel’s love of great writers—D.H. Lawrence, Dante and Jane Austen, subject of a tender and original piece of criticism—he’s hardly a Harold Bloom bloviating about the canon. Mr. Siegel is a zigzagging cultural omnivore: He takes on Harry Potter (a hearty thumbs-up), The Sopranos (ditto), and Sex and The City (not buying it). He’s what you might call a confrontational enthusiast. Ever skeptical when a unanimous round of yays or nays goes up, he’s an expert demolisher of critical group-think. On the acclaimed Richard Yates, an important influence on Richard Ford, André Dubus, Richard Russo and Tobias Wolff, among others, Mr. Siegel shows how misguided it is to glibly compare Yates to Hemingway (standard critical M.O.); rather, Yates brought fiction back to naturalism, “from the drama of free will back to the crisis of determining circumstances.”

Two of the best pieces in Falling Upwards—one on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the other on socialist realist painting—show how unpredictable a critic Mr. Siegel is. In the latter, he turns art history upside down, showing how misguided critics have been about a genre wrongly derided as meretricious propaganda. It’s a loving, well-argued bit of advocacy that had me scrambling to get to a museum. As for Eyes Wide Shut, you might think Mr. Siegel would have been a part of the anti-hype brigade that attacked all the gushing about Nicole and Tom that attended the film’s opening. Nope: Mr. Siegel convincingly argues the critics failed to see an authentic example of movie art.

All of this combativeness can make you weary, but he closes his book with a lovely, almost gentle meditation on Chekhov. Still, he can’t resist getting in a few jabs at the conventions of lit-crit. For Lee Siegel, the dukes are always up.

Matthew Price writes for Bookforum and other publications.

The New Republic’s cultural critic was on the phone on Sept. 4, explaining what was coursing through his mind when he fired off comments in the “Talkback” section of his own New Republic blog, “Lee Siegel on Culture.” In the missives, he heaped praise on himself and insulted his critics—all under the anonymous handle “sprezzatura.”

Mr. Siegel’s barely camouflaged Internet self had offered him swift entry into the race to the bottom known as online reader commentary. In a sample posting, from Aug. 27, “sprezzatura” wrote to another poster, a nemesis named “jhschwartz”: “You’re a fraud, and a liar. And a wincingly pretentious writer. You couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces.”

“It never occurred to me” that it was wrong, the 48-year-old Mr. Siegel said of his frame of mind at the time. “This is really cowboy territory, with very few boundaries. I think now that it was wrong. I assumed an alias, I guess, because I didn’t want to stoop to their level, not realizing that I was stooping to their level.”

On Sept. 1, The New Republic concluded that it wasn’t such a gray area after all and terminated the “Lee Siegel on Culture” blog; in its place, an editor’s note apologized for Mr. Siegel’s deception and informed readers that Mr. Siegel had been suspended from writing for the magazine.

“The transcendent rules of journalism apply, even in the ‘Talkback’ section of the magazine,” Franklin Foer, The New Republic’s editor, said. “We don’t let our writers misrepresent themselves to readers.”

Mr. Foer said that Mr. Siegel’s suspension is “indefinite.”

Mr. Siegel is known as an increasingly rare breed—a combative intellectual generalist, whose omnipresence in print sometimes made it seem as if he was monopolizing the review columns at every media outlet in town. In addition to writing for The New Republic, where he was hired by the magazine’s literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, and has been on the masthead since 1998 (as a contributing writer, a contributing editor, a television critic and, most recently, as a senior editor), he was the art critic for Slate and a book critic at The Nation for a year. His own book, Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination, comes out this month, from Basic Books. He’s notorious for engaging in heated, sometimes hysterical arguments with detractors or those whose work he’s already trashed.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Mr. Siegel’s exposure as his own worst self-promoter set off ripples of horror and schadenfreude over Labor Day weekend. In some small corners of the literary-blog community, the reaction was practically giddy: “Well, I was pointing out to people that you obviously needed a long rest in some soothing and undemanding place, and now I am happy to see that you will have more free time, at least. For once you have got something that is well-earned,” Christopher Hitchens wrote to him in an e-mail, following up with a lengthy entry about Mr. Siegel and his comeuppance on Mr. Hitchens’ Web site.

Mr. Siegel was first drawn into Internet anonymity last February, after his condescending column offering advice to Jon Stewart before he hosted the Oscars inspired dozens of nasty comments in response. Under the heading “Siegel is my hero,” the first of 15 posts by “sprezzatura” read: “How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn’t like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos …. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep.” It followed later with: “Groupthink from a mob of bullies cowering behind their user-name aliases. Groupthink! Groupthink! Naaa naaa naaa-naaa naaa!”

Another “sprezzatura” post appeared in June. That comment, on Ruth Franklin essay about the Holocaust, was sweet and flattering, almost out of character in its gentility. Reading the final stream of exchanges leading up to Mr. Siegel’s suspension, however, was more akin to watching a locomotive speeding toward a dog paralyzed on the train tracks.

After several days of debate about Mr. Siegel’s critique of an academic whose essay had appeared on Slate (“Little Miss Sunshine: American’s Obsession with JonBenet Ramsay,” by James Kincaid, Aug. 21), “sprezzatura” got into a tangle with a poster identified as “jhschwartz.” “Jhschwartz” had stepped in to defend Mr. Kincaid at length (“Why is Siegel wrong about EVERYTHING?” he began). Screens and screens of text later, he invoked an essay about the sexualization of children published in the literary journal n+1 and written by one of its editors, Mark Greif.

Mr. Siegel responded with two blog posts under his own name. Just prior, in early August, Mr. Siegel’s wife had given birth to their first child; by this point, the baby was colicky and Mr. Siegel was operating, he said, on three hours of sleep a night. Finally, after a few more days of online back and forth, he obviously couldn’t take it any more, and “sprezzatura” came raging forth:

“You have quite an obsession with Siegel!” he thundered to “jhschwartz” on Aug. 27. “Sounds to me like you’re an envious young writer …. If I had to guess, you’re this person Mark Greif himself. Or someone in his circle. Every young writer in NYC has it in for poor Siegel it seems. They all write like middle-aged hacks. He has the fire and guts of a young man (I assume he’s middle-aged himself, or somewhere near there.) Who am I? Someone who knows who you are.”

After goading his adversary with several paragraphs of accusations, “jhschwartz” finally came back with: “I would say with 99% confidence that ‘sprezzatura’ is a Siegel alias.”

Mr. Foer said that one of the magazine’s writers had been reading the “Talkback” section and brought the recent “sprezzatura”/“jhschwartz” interaction to his attention, which prompted him to investigate the matter.

“I think that it was pretty clear from the ‘schwartz’-‘sprezzatura’ exchange that there was at least the possibility that ‘sprezzatura’ was Siegel,” Mr. Foer said. He determined that the two were one and the same, although he was still looking into the question of whether Mr. Siegel also had help producing the posts. On Sept. 5, he published an open letter to New Republic readers soliciting feedback on where anonymity in the “Talkback” section should be allowed.

Mr. Siegel, in the meantime, seemed convinced that Mr. Greif or someone affiliated with n+1 was out to get him and might have been behind “jhschwartz” and his downfall. The two camps have a history of petty infighting. In its inaugural issue, n+1 printed a manifesto, on behalf of all four of its editors, lamenting the state of criticism in America and naming The New Republic and Mr. Siegel specifically as problem centers. Mr. Siegel later made a bitchy comment in response in The Observer. Despite their rich history, however, Mr. Greif and other n+1 editors denied having anything to do with Mr. Siegel or his blog, although Keith Gessen, one of the editors, acknowledged: “It’s not a bizarre accident that our name got mentioned in this.”

But the mysterious “jhschwartz” turns out to be an associate at the New York law firm Kramer Levin named … Joseph H. Schwartz.

Mr. Schwartz went to Columbia (class of 1998) and N.Y.U. Law School, practices white-collar defense work, is married to a writer, and described himself as “a reluctant lawyer” and a “frustrated” fiction writer. He is friendly with the n+1 crowd (he went to high school with one of the founding editors, Marco Roth, and is a regular at social events with the group), although he said that he wasn’t acting in conjunction with them when he posted on Mr. Siegel’s blog.

Mr. Schwartz said that he regretted his goading of Mr. Siegel online and was horrified when he saw that the blog had been dismantled, an action that he said struck him as “draconian.” When he saw the editor’s note last Friday, he immediately called Mr. Foer, leaving a voice mail and following up with an e-mail, imploring him to show leniency for Mr. Siegel.

“I felt like I had some special responsibility in the whole thing,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I thought it was needlessly cruel.” He said that Mr. Foer responded respectfully that he had to have a “zero-tolerance policy” on such matters.

The young lawyer described himself as “sort of a New Republic fan.” So how much time does the busy attorney spend poking around the magazine’s Web site? “I don’t know,” Mr. Schwartz said. “Don’t damage my law career, but probably too much time.”

Mr. Wieseltier was sanguine about the situation. He described Mr. Siegel as a “fiendishly gifted critic and an unusually cultivated individual,” and saw the issue more as one having to do with the nature of the Internet itself.

“The larger problem, of course, is that we planted our flag over a piece of the Wild West known as the blogosphere. This left us divided against ourselves,” Mr. Wieseltier said. “Since we do make ourselves factually and morally responsible for what appears under our flag, we have to apply the same stringencies to our blogs, too. I don’t like the blogosphere for many reasons; one of them is its assumption that a person’s first thoughts are his best thoughts, which is quite obviously false.”

Jon Meacham Wants Newsweek to Be More Like Hayes' Esquire

“I think it’s a good time to be doing this,” Jon Meacham said.

It was the afternoon of Sept. 5, the day Newsweek announced that Mr. Meacham would be its next editor. An incoming editor is required to be excited about new times and new technologies, even if the ad economy is collapsing and the readership is all on HomeStarRunner.com or whatever it is this year.

But Mr. Meacham’s excitement had some specifics theories behind it: For instance, at least he doesn’t have to run a newspaper. A newspaper, he noted, has to put a daily report up on the Web, then figure out some other kind of daily report to put out on paper. A newsweekly, on the other hand, has the luxury of working in two different time frames, leaving Newsweek “institutionally better prepared” for a blended Web-and-print future.

“We now have the means to be a daily part of people’s lives,” Mr. Meacham said.

Newsweeklies? Part of what? The mind drifts through imaginary headlines in an imaginary dentist’s office: TEARS OF A CONTINENT … ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH CORN? … HOW TALL IS TOO TALL?

But the famed ever-accelerating news cycle could speed up the weeklies to the point of relevance again. Follow the moving parts: The Web supplies the breaking news the dailies used to provide. The daily paper, filling in the stories behind headlines readers have already seen, “becomes … what Time and Newsweek were a generation ago,” Mr. Meacham said. And Newsweek brings out a print edition that has, Mr. Meacham said, “production values that we used to associate with the monthlies.”

(And the monthlies would read like quarterlies …. Point to Mr. Meacham!)

But what monthlies of old would Newsweek care to emulate? “Harold Hayes’ Esquire was a little like this back in the day,” Mr. Meacham said. “Was Harper’s like this under Willie Morris? …. I think when Esquire was at its best, when it was doing those iconic covers.”

Newsweek’s eternal rival, Time, contemplated the current pace of things and decided last month that it would switch its release date from Mondays to Fridays. Mr. Meacham said that Newsweek has no immediate plans to follow it. “We’re not dogmatic either way,” he said. “We’ve looked at it in the past …. I can see a case for both.”

With the cycles out of sync, Mr. Meacham said, he expects the news to break in Time’s favor half the time, and in Newsweek’s favor the other half. “On that, it’s probably a wash,” he said.

Time’s new managing editor, Richard Stengel, told The New York Times that he wants to be more like The Economist. Atlantic owner David Bradley has also said he wants his magazine more like The Economist. Is Mr. Meacham joining the Economist parade?

Mr. Meacham laughed.

“I read The Economist,” he said. “I am a longtime reader. I think The Economist does what The Economist does very well, but newsmagazines, it seems to me, are not a zero-sum game.” A newsmagazine, he said, should combine analysis with reporting. “I think you have to do both,” Mr. Meacham said, “and The Economist doesn’t even attempt to do original reporting, particularly.”

What about the division-of-labor theory, in which the Web is for breaking news and print editions are for thinking about it? Doesn’t the Web break all news nowadays? “I don’t really accept that,” Mr. Meacham said, “except in the strictest sense, that as the magazine is being printed, we go up online …. I don’t think that every piece of reporting you have has to immediately go up online.”

“I don’t think you only stroke your chin, nor do you only meet people in dark garages,” Mr. Meacham said. “It’s both, because both are important.”

Thus the daily and weekly versions of Newsweek, Mr. Meacham said, will be coming out of the same news operation. Mr. Meacham said that “one of the next dramas” will be the full integration of online writing and reporting with the print operations, getting rid of “any lingering stones in the wall between the two that sort of sprang up in the late ‘90s.”

Mr. Meacham was scrupulously polite to Time magazine. “I’m honored to be in the arena with them,” he said, after allowing that he believes “we bring more original reporting to our pages.”

Unlike Yalies who buck convention by saying “Yale and Harvard,” Mr. Meacham consistently spoke of the tandem as “Time and Newsweek,” the way everyone else in the world does. “What Time and Newsweek have always brought to the game [is] important,” he said.

The institutional power of a newsweekly can still make itself felt, Mr. Meacham said. “There’s a kind of attention that, if we rise to the occasion, will be there for us,” he said.

And the occasion, Mr. Meacham said, is ripe for serious news coverage. There is the ongoing multi-front war—“a generation-long struggle that’s not unlike the Cold War in many ways.” Two years from now, there will be a Presidential election with neither an incumbent President nor Vice President in it—the first, Mr. Meacham said, since 1952.

“We will be doing everything we can to try to own that story,” he said. “It’s about what we are.”

—Tom Scocca

E.L. Doctorow’s voice is habitually mild, even watery, but there was a defiant, almost querulous edge to this pronouncement. Though he had already turned 70 when he started writing his big new best-selling novel, The March, he saw nothing unusual in an elderly author undertaking a major project: “I don’t understand why age is a factor if you still have your wits about you.”

Reviewers of The March, and those of us who confidently expected it to win the National Book Award (the prize was stolen by William Vollmann, who’s a generation younger), are in no doubt about Mr. Doctorow’s wits. In The Observer, Lee Siegel called The March—a retelling of Sherman’s brutal subjugation of Georgia and the Carolinas in the waning months of the Civil War—“brilliant and compulsively readable.” Mr. Siegel noted that by the end of the novel, “it’s not really war you come to hate. You despise what seems like the secret complicity between war and everyday life.”

Sitting in the bright window of a Greenwich Village bar on a warm winter afternoon, the passing pedestrians casting long, crisp shadows, Mr. Doctorow looked back on a career that began in 1960 with the publication of his first novel, Welcome to Hard Times. “That was a long time ago,” he said, seeming somewhat surprised by his own endurance.

“I don’t write to make a mark,” he said. “I never thought of it as a career. It’s just something I could do and I felt good doing it.” He worked in publishing as a young man—when he quit in his late 30’s, he was halfway through The Book of Daniel (1971) and had risen to be publisher and editor in chief of Dial Press. “It turned out to be very useful,” he laughed dryly, “to see how many really bad books were being published. It was very encouraging.”

When Mr. Doctorow laughs, his face, normally shaped like an ice-cream cone— the neat V of his beard under a generously domed forehead—changes radically, so that it’s round and merry, not sober and high-minded; his eyes go round, too, behind wire-rim glasses.

“I thought of myself as a writer when I was about 9—I just decided that.” He laughed again. “I didn’t really feel I had to write anything, but I read everything I could get my hands on. I was just living on that nerve, the way I’ve always lived: on that nerve.”

The only way he could explain “the nerve,” he said, was to describe it in terms of the arc of his career: “I published another book, and that was Ragtime [1975], and everything has gone on from there …. Maybe it all goes back to the fact that when I was a child in school, I wrote good book reports.” He added, “It’s that way in a book, too: When you’re on the nerve of the book, you feel good. When you get off the nerve, something’s wrong and you’ve got to go back and see where you lost that electric impulse that drives the sentences, that makes them live. It’s the same way with life.”

A Bronx native—married, father of three—Edgar Lawrence Doctorow has been teaching creative writing for 23 years in the English department at New York University. He’s generally impressed with his students: Every year, three or four of them get published. In fact, he believes that writing programs could be said to subsidize publishers with a steady flow of “workshopped” first novels, all pretty much ready to go to press. “Young writers today know more technically—they know more about writing,” he said. But the implicit comparison with the old days, when writers had careers, often in journalism, suggests that perhaps these youngsters don’t know very much about the world beyond the ivory tower. “The patronage of the university can be dangerous,” he noted.

“There’s always room in the literary dance,” he said, “for anybody who takes a shot at it and does it well, whether you’re 20 or 70.” But, as he also pointed out, “As you get older as a writer, part of the deal is learning about your own psychology, and when something’s not right, you learn to admit it. A still small voice says, ‘Wait a moment—you’re off the nerve.’”

John Crowe Ransom, one of Mr. Doctorow’s professors at Kenyon College in the 1950’s, had a theory about age and literary talent that seems to favor maturity. As Mr. Doctorow explained it, “If you take two people of equal talent or gift and one starts writing at the age of 17, one at 50, at age 51 they’d both be writing at the same level, the same degree of achievement.”

And what exactly would that feel like?

“When you’re writing well,” he said, “you’re out of yourself, you’re not the person you used to be, which is all to the good. There’s no sense of time passing; you’re living in the sentences. And when you’re well along in the book, the only way you can get out of the book is through the last line, and so you stay there and you don’t think of anything except being there. You don’t worry about readers or reviewers or publishers or money or anything. And you look up at the clock and the whole day has passed.”

That description called to mind an oft-quoted Doctorow aphorism: “Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.”

“Don’t repeat that,” he said—apparently the remark got him into trouble with mental-health officials. “It was a little flip.” He chuckled, but it was clear that he was actually sorry to have caused offense. Behind his gentle insistence on the importance of the writer—the “independent witness”—lies a preoccupation with moral justice and the responsibilities of citizenship.

An early and steadfast critic of the Bush administration and especially of the war in Iraq, Mr. Doctorow has made his opinions very public in the last couple of years. In May 2004, he gave a commencement address at Hofstra University in which he explicitly condemned the “stories” President George W. Bush told to sell the public on his plan to invade Iraq. The speech was loudly booed. Four months later, he published in The East Hampton Star a moving denunciation of Mr. Bush as “the president who does not feel.” The essay, which has been widely circulated on the Internet, closed with a powerful kicker: “He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.”

These political gestures raised the suspicion that The March, with its graphic representation of the human cost of war, was yet another, more oblique indictment of the Iraq war.

Not so, Mr. Doctorow said: “I had no conscious intention of drawing an analogy …. But whenever you write about the past, obviously you’re going to reflect the present. If there are any analogies to be made, I leave it to the reader.” Make that many, many readers: Random House reports that it has printed 273,000 copies of The March.

Another one of Mr. Doctorow’s aphorisms about writing seems an apt description of his evolving career: “It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

All this torrent of instant fictionalizing put me in mind of a moment in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A harmless drunk named Boggs, who’s been playing at terrifying the small town where he lives, is shot dead by one Colonel Sherburn, who either calls Boggs’ bluff out of impatience with pretense, or is taken in by Boggs’ performance. Minutes after Boggs falls lifeless to the ground, some townspeople gather around him, and they do something quintessentially American: They begin to act out the killing that just took place. Nobody knows how Boggs came to be murdered—he’d been pretending to scare everybody for years. And nobody knows whether Colonel Sherburn is a cold-blooded killer or a gullible fool. Amid the confusion, all that Boggs’ fellow citizens can do is enact the confusing event itself, again and again, as if brooding over an insult. The only thing that dates Twain’s familiar-seeming scene is the fact that none of the performing townspeople is accompanied by an agent.

I feel a certain low-intensity emotional and intellectual stupor lying like a shallow pool of grease in New York. When the subject of Iraq comes up, people seem to experience an anxiety, perhaps even a despair, over not being able to think or feel anything definite at all. They—we—return, with this low-intensity numbness, to their everyday lives. And so much of New York’s everyday life has to do with culture—with conversations about the products of culture, those little universalizing mediations of experience that hold people together in a big city. That’s a good part of what it means to be urbane. Talk about the war leads immediately to talk about representations of the war. Few people want to argue any more about our involvement in Iraq itself, to approach the fact of that directly. They refer immediately to a book or an article they’ve read, to a movie or television show they’ve seen. They are, in a sense, enacting from indirect angles the confusing event of the war, again and again, as if brooding over an insult to the intelligence. Somehow, the provincial figures in Washington have, for now, heightened New Yorkers’ urbanity.

The war has barely touched New York. Rather, Sept. 11 indelibly touched New York, and the conflict in Iraq is a warped betrayal of that sudden violence. The architects of this senseless slaughterhouse stole from us a terrible clarity about suffering, and being human, and living in history, and instrumentalized it into a purpose that even they can’t explain now. That betrayal puts New Yorkers at a double remove from the war.

You know you should suffer along with the Americans and Iraqis who have been maimed or killed, you know that it’s right to feel sympathy and outrage—whatever your politics, whatever the object of outrage—you know that this is what good people, and educated people, and sensitive people, should feel. But your heart refuses to oblige your conscience. Partly, of course, this is because there never has been an American war whose purpose was less clearly defined than our conflict in Iraq.

The Vietnam War began to affect the national nervous system when the anticommunist purpose for pursuing it started to unravel into the other convulsions that were pulling the country into a maelstrom. In this case, we don’t even have a purpose that can unravel. There are no general convulsions. There are, to take one example of erstwhile public passions, no intellectual donnybrooks at Town Hall, as there were during the Vietnam era. But those are the types of thunderous verbal conflicts that happen when a city ceases to be merely urbane, when style surrenders to raw experience. When conversation stops taking detours into culture in order to evade the facts.

Yet the deeper reason for our inability to feel what we know we ought to feel is that the intimate ferocity of Sept. 11 has produced in many New Yorkers the odd impression that this particular war is over. The worst is behind us, it seems—and unthinkably before us. But the present, what’s happening in Iraq, is their present, their war, the liars’ adventure, a war waged without our consent by narrow-minded people in the name of, to begin with, injuries suffered by cosmopolitan New York.

And this war is prosecuted against whom, exactly? Saddam’s Baathists have been defeated; Al Qaeda, we’re told, is everywhere and nowhere; the “jihadists” are from outside Iraq; the “insurgents” comprise different Iraqi sects that hate us and each other. And now we can’t even leave without creating the very situation—a bastion for terrorism—that our government pretended existed in order to provide a pretext for invasion!

An intensely commercial society like ours fosters in people, especially urban people, an instinct for knowing when you’re being suckered, and a reflexive revulsion against the one doing the suckering. There may not be widespread depression about Iraq in New York, but there’s a disabling cynicism toward the powers that deceived us. It’s a cynicism that repels even sympathy for soldiers and civilians dying abroad. It’s remarkable how Bush and Co., by means of their outrageous war, have created in hyper-liberal New York a mental situation that tolerates the war.

The 19th-century French sociologist Auguste Comte spoke of organic periods and critical periods. The former create new forms of thinking and feeling; the latter react sharply to the prevailing old forms. Organic periods brim with sympathy and imagination; critical periods are cold, wary, unfeeling. Great cities alternate between the two conditions. New York passed through an organic period of artistic originality after the Second World War, and another moment of artistic and political ferment in the 60’s and early 70’s. You could say that since the 80’s, the city has experienced a critical period, during which the super-scrutinizing news media grew and loomed larger than any artistic or intellectual trends.

The war in Iraq has reinforced the current critical state of mind and strengthened New Yorkers’ innate coldness, wariness, cynicism. It has amplified the city dweller’s defensive passiveness. For now. Sooner or later, the facts will detach themselves from the liars and the fools who set them in motion (we’ll get to the bottom of our Colonel Sherburns); before long, the war’s immediate reality will pierce the mediating representations that currently caricature and obscure it. That’s when television will give way to the street—to Town Hall. That’s when the horrific overseas deaths will snap us back into life.

Lee Siegel is the book critic for The Nation, TV critic for The New Republic and art critic for Slate.