Aziz Ansari and Drake at The Bing Bar

Day 2 of the Sundance Film Festival found The Observer snowbound in the extreme. We're talking enough snow to give Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City transit system nightmares. Astronomic surcharges became the norm as Park City's anemic livery force struggled to even make the most ludicrous time frames: "Yeah I can have a guy up there in like 3 and a half hours?" deadpanned one audacious taxi dispatcher, who seemed to take pleasure in seeing so many city slickers squeal.

Despite the odds, The Observer met up with Ogilvy Entertainment's Creative Director Otto Bell to snag tickets for what would be our first activity of the day—a 3:30 screening of Escape Fire, an uplifting exposé on the pitfalls of the American healthcare system—which marked our event sans bottle service.

• While procuring popcorn, we overheard a cinema staffer: "Dude that's totally the president from 24, and those car insurance commercials..." And in typical Sundance fashion, it totally was.
• Dennis Haysbert found the film "Spectacular!" noting that everyone in America should see it. We had a hard time disagreeing.

Next stop: Back to the den of debauchery and Xbox game demos, the Bing Bar, for Lay The Favorite's cast dinner.

• Seconds in, we find ourselves in front of a freshly bandaged (just a little "don't worry I'm fine" melanoma) William H. Macy who revealed that he took "the Jitney!" to get to where he was at this very instant.
• As it turns out, a slightly more surly Corbin Bernsen "rented a fucking car."
• Mr. Bernsen could pass as a stunt double for co-star Bruce Willis.
• Chick-boner magnet Joshua Jackson claimed that it was in fact "the shuttle bus" that got him here today, which he conceded was "a bit of a smart ass response, but I'm gonna stick with it. Final answer."
• Cigarettes have not been kind to Laura Prepon, but man is her raspy voice awesome. Keep it up, Laura.

A quick stop to the Grey Goose Blue Door for the cast dinner of Arbitrage

• "Troubled hedge fund magnate" Richard Gere illustrated that no matter how many bespoke suits he may be forced to wear on screen, he's most comfortable in jeans and a baseball cap.
• Grey Goose employs a suspiciously attractive waitstaff. We were fine with this.

Sucked back in, we head to Bing Bar to see what Aziz Ansari and Drake have up their sleeves.

• A friendly (read: not so friendly) turf war erupted on the red carpet between film crews for VH1 and MTV after The Observer posited that VH1 clearly had the cooler microphone of the two.
• Mr. Ansari took the stage, promptly reminding everyone just how well he knows Kanye West.
• Drake's seemingly insulting observation that he knew way too many here right now that he didn't know last year ("Who the fuck are y'all?") was incredibly well received.
• Cuba Gooding Jr.

In it's last gasp of life, our phone lit up reminding us that Ryan Raddon aka. DJ Kaskade would be taking the stage shortly at our favorite petting zoo: Tao.

• Door girls at Tao Sundance did not find it amusing when we informed them that their balaclava and floor length parka outfits resembled North Face Burkas.
• Lil Jon somehow didn't smell like pot, an observation that was quickly rendered obsolete.
• Josh Hartnett had nailed down this look that said, "I'm Josh Hartnett."
• Mr. Ansari genuinely cares about the exposed legs of his nearly all-female posse.
• All bars should be open bars.

À demain.

"Mr. Smith rushed back to The Times’s bureau in Washington to repeat the story to Robert H. Phelps, an editor there, who took notes and tape-recorded the conversation, according to both men. But then Mr. Smith had to hand off the story — he had quit The Times and was leaving town the next day to attend Yale Law School."—Richard Pérez-Peña, 2 Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First, The New York Times, May 24, 2009.

Birth of Jesus Christ, circa 6 BC

Why The Times missed the story: Paper not founded until September 18, 1851.

Attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Why The Times missed the story: Hawaii bureau chief was out walking his dog.

Beginning of the Twentieth Century, January 1, 1901

Why The Times missed the story: Assigning editor deemed so-called new Century "unimportant" and "faddish."

Amelia Earhart disappears while attempting to circumnavigate the globe, July 2, 1937

Why The Times missed the story: Aviation reporter, hung over from bi-wing plane junket the previous night, told his editor, "We'll write about it when the lass lands."

Woodstock Music and Art Fair, August 12-15, 1969

Why The Times missed the story: Internal Times consensus was "peaceniks rolling around in mud" is not newsworthy.

Iraq WMD's, 2002-2004

Why The Times missed the story: What? They had the story.

Birth of Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt in Namibia, May 27, 2006

Why The Times missed the story: Busy covering 6.3 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia that killed 6,000 people; also, exclusive pictures of Shiloh too expensive for Times photo department.

The four things that have made me laugh the most this summer were parodies of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. Just a coincidence? I don't think so. I think it indicates two things. First, conspiracy theory-apparently embedded in the collective unconscious of the culture like a smoldering information virus-has flared up again. The hot new development is 9/11 conspiracy theory, specifically Complicity Theory-the belief the Bush White House was in league with or behind the 9/11

attackers.

But even J.F.K. theory is back in the news. Did you see that New York Times story (Aug. 3, 2004) about some new computerized analysis of a Dallas police Dictaphone tape made in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963? "About a year from now," The Times said, "one of the most vexing mysteries in American history may finally be solved: Did Lee Harvey Oswald act alone?"

Which makes it sound as if the official position of the Newspaper of Record is that the J.F.K. murder case is still not quite solved. Fascinating, whatever you believe. (For the record, I've come to lean toward believing Oswald acted alone; I'd argue that the real grassy knoll, the iconic site of doubt, is inside Oswald's mind, you might say-the unsolved mystery of his motive.)

I think it was on the same day The Times published the news of the new J.F.K. inquiry that I read about Stephen Hawking's remarkable turnaround: the renunciation by the esteemed physicist of the most radical contention of his original theory of black holes. Mr. Hawking used to believe that no information escaped a black hole. Like the roaches in the Roach Motel ad, information checks in, it just doesn't check out. But now Mr. Hawking seems to believe (to oversimplify things) that some information may emerge, although it may not exactly check out: Information may emerge damaged in some complicated way. It's beginning to seem that the J.F.K. assassination is just such a black hole, from which only damaged information emerges.

Damaged information-a good way of describing our era: the Age of Damaged Information. Alternate name: the Age of Bad Intelligence. Still, in the face of conspiracy theories, these Weapons of Mass Deconstruction, we must subject them to skeptical investigation. The truth is not relative, even if it is elusive or even irretrievable, and conspiracy theories-particularly, now, 9/11 conspiracy theories-have begun to reach the point where they've generated parodies because they've passed the point of self-parody.

The first and sharpest parody I came upon this summer was Henry Beard's book-length, drop-dead-funny send up, The Dick Cheney Code , which cleverly makes the connection between the Da Vinci Code craze and Bush-era conspiracy theories. The hero of Mr. Beard's mock-novel is a hack author of Da Vinci Code knock-offs with such titles as The Pompeii Perplexity , The Rosicrucian Cryptogram , The Soros Palindrome and The Kennedy Doublecrostic .

In The Dick Cheney Code , he stumbles into a tangled web woven in part by Skull and Bones (my favorite overinflated conspiracy-theory target-see my most recent thoughts on the problem in The Observer , March 22, 2004). It seems the Yale secret society (which counts George Bush and John Kerry as members) is in league with the Bush White House to conceal a shocking secret about the origin of the Republic.

And then there's the shrewd parody by Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell, in the McSweeney's humor anthology ( Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans ), that purports to be a transcript of commentary-from the "Platinum Series Extended Edition" DVD* of The Lord of the Rings -by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Sample dialogue:

CHOMSKY: This episode in Bree should cause us to ask, too, how much Frodo knows about the conspiracy … I think at first he's an unwitting participant, fooled by Gandalf's propaganda.

ZINN: I'm much more suspicious of Frodo than you are ….

Third parody moment: Gore Vidal's hilariously, obliviously self-parodic appearance on Da Ali G. Show , in which nascent conspiracy theorist Vidal (who informed the world in October 2002 that he had "evidence" of the Bush White House's complicity in the 9/11 attacks-evidence the 9/11 commission investigation somehow failed to find) is completely taken in by the ridiculously fake hip-hop interviewer act of Ali G. One would expect that someone with the sagacity to see through the whole 9/11 cover-up to the evil conspiracy beneath would be able to see through Ali G.'s deliberately preposterous guise. But no …. Not even when Ali G. pretends he's mistaken Mr. Vidal for Vidal Sassoon and starts asking him questions about haircuts. (More about Mr. Vidal's "evidence" later.)

In recent months, 9/11 Complicity Theory-once the province of subterranean Internet babble-has broken out and virtually been mainstreamed. "Why did Bush knock down the Towers?": a line from a No. 1 album this summer. "Only a metaphor," says Jadakiss, the rapper who wrote it, and no doubt this is true for him. But for a growing number of Complicity Theorists, it's no longer a metaphor. The Bush White House was complicit with those who murdered 3,000 or so people on 9/11. According to some versions of the theory, they weren't just in complicity, didn't just know 9/11 was coming and deliberately let it happen, as Weak Complicity Theory has it (the F.D.R.-foreknowledge-of-Pearl-Harbor allegation model). Rather, in the Strong Version (I'm using "Weak" and "Strong" in the way physicists discuss Weak and Strong Versions of the Anthropic Principle, say), the White House was in on it from the beginning: 9/11 was an inside job. The World Trade Center has become the post-millennial grassy knoll.

2) Roswell-Level Claims

Although it shares some characteristics (lack of evidence, for one) with the Clinton conspiracy theories of fond recall, Bush complicity conspiracy theories have taken things a quantum leap further. After all, Bill Clinton only murdered a few dozen people, tops. There's Vince Foster, of course, and the witnesses to Vince Foster's murder, and the guys who snuffed the witnesses to Vince Foster's murder, who later had to be snuffed to cover up the snuffing, and maybe some of the snuffer snuffers-I haven't followed the Great Chain of Snuffing as closely as I should have. But even if you add in the handful of people Mr. Clinton had killed to cover up his coke-smuggling ring in Arkansas, you still don't break into three figures. What a wuss! Mr. Bush killed more than 3,000 in one day.

Complicity Theory is insinuating itself into quite respectable places these days. Mr. Vidal's theory that someone (guess who?) must have issued "stand-down orders" to ground the interceptor jets allegedly able to have stopped the hijacked planes from destroying their targets on 9/11 is now available in bookstores.

And The Nation found room for one of its valued contributors to commend a book called The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, a new compendium of 9/11 theories which breaks new ground in Complicity Theory culture and makes some truly extreme Complicity Theory claims. Roswell-level claims.

The one about Flight 77, for instance. That's the one YOU thought (and THEY wanted to you to think) crashed into the Pentagon. Turns out Flight 77 (the one Barbara Olsen called from) didn't hit the Pentagon at all! The Pentagon was probably hit by a "missile" fired by an unmarked jet. And Flight 77-you know, the one that DIDN'T crash into the Pentagon? Well, it seems that it may have crashed somewhere else, maybe "in Kentucky." (The fact that no remains of the missing airline have been found testifies to a truly effective clean-up operation.) But it might also be true that it didn't crash, it was "diverted"-the passengers were kidnapped, in effect, and are being held someplace (Area 51?), presumably forever, so they can't talk about not dying in the Pentagon crash. ( The New Pearl Harbor is undecided on the Question of the Missing Passengers, conceding admirably that it poses a "problem" for the Strong Complicity Theory. Maybe the missing passengers are being held in reserve to vote in Florida this November if things look close.)

And, oh yes, the big breakthrough of The New Pearl Harbor -the centerpiece of the Strong Complicity Theory, what you might call the Unified Field Complicity Theory-is the "proof" that the World Trade Center towers didn't collapse because they were hit by the planes anyway. Again, that's what THEY want YOU to think. The W.T.C. towers collapsed because each tower was extensively wired with explosives by demolition teams who apparently swarmed all over the buildings planting girder-melting explosives unobserved by any living (or unsnuffed) witnesses. The argument here is that the cabal behind the 9/11 attacks knew that the planes alone couldn't cause the towers to fall. (Which raises the question: Why use the planes at all if wiring the towers for demolition alone would do the trick? Oh, wait-because the planes were needed to blame it on the "patsies." Osama was the blameless Oswald of 9/11. And, by the way, the plane that "crashed" in Pennsylvania was actually shot down because the passengers found out about the conspiracy when they took over the plane and thus had to be snuffed.)

3) O.J.'s "Real Killers" Revealed

All those Clintonistas who demanded-rightly-that people like Jerry Falwell stop lending respectability to Clinton murder-conspiracy theories have of course spoken out against this stupidity, right? Not exactly. (Although 9/11 conspiracy theorists are now denouncing leftists and left publications for not speaking out in favor of their 9/11 theories.) Fortunately, Chip Berlet-tireless conspiracy-theory debunker for the left-minded Political Research Associates (publiceye.org)-has taken on the "evidence" for The New Pearl Harbor in an extremely thorough and persuasive refutation for anyone who takes them seriously, and The Nation 's David Corn has discredited a key pillar of Gore Vidal's silly speculations. (See my critique of Mr. Vidal's theory in these pages, Nov. 11, 2002.) I recommend you read the transcript of the debate between Mr. Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor 's author, and Mr. Berlet on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now Web site (www.democracynow.org), and the exchange between the two on Mr. Berlet's publiceye.org Web site (search under The New Pearl Harbor ). Pay attention to Mr. Griffin's contention that no one witnessed an actual airliner crash into the Pentagon (so it must have been a missile), and especially the part where Mr. Griffin defends the idea that an A.P. reporter who supposedly did witness the airliner does not exist-and Mr. Berlet proves the guy does exist. Sad.

But if you spend some time on the Web sites of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, you find a sad and angry subculture of damaged information-one that has floated so far from reality that it's reached the point where people say anything "just because they can," as Bill Clinton might put it. And speaking of Mr. Clinton, one of my favorite 9/11 conspiracy sites-in addition to entertaining debate over whether the W.T.C. too was not really hit by planes, but by missiles and some kind of destructive death-ray "hologram"-wanders afield to solve the O.J. murders. And at the end of a long chain of links, I learned that the "real killers" O.J. has so assiduously been seeking were hired by none other than Hillary Clinton ! Apparently the then First Lady arranged the murder of O.J.'s wife to distract attention from Ms. Clinton's upcoming Whitewater grand-jury appearance. Good thinking, Hillary! And a milestone of sorts in conspiracy theory: the moment when Clinton and Bush conspiracy theories meet and marry.

As a longtime student of conspiracy theory, it's been fascinating to watch the growth and embellishment of these flights into fantasy, and to speculate about what needs they serve. If one were to form a timeline, one might have to begin with the false dawn, as it were, that arose in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the Myth of the Missing Four Thousand.

You know about them, right? The 4,000 Israelis-or was it 4,000 Jews?-who worked at the W.T.C. and were warned by the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service (which was behind the whole 9/11 plan, of course), to stay home on 9/11. It's true that it's been thoroughly discredited, and it's not technically a Bush Complicity Theory, except for those-and there are more than a few-who believe that Mr. Bush is merely a zombie slave of Z.O.G., the "Zionist Occupied Government" that many conspiracy theorists seem to believe in.

The Myth of the Missing Four Thousand seemed to die down, but it has survived on the Internet and has spiked again with the McGreevey scandal, when someone named Andy Martin-who identified himself (in a press release I found on the valuable Memeorandum site) as "America's most respected foreign-policy/intelligence analyst"-declared that the McGreevey affair was a Mossad operation somehow designed to counter the fact that "since 9/11 there has been barely suppressed anger at the fact that Israeli intelligence knew about the [9/11] hijackers and said nothing." This is, of course, Weak Mossad Theory. Strong Mossad Theory, modeled on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , has Israel behind it all , although I recently came across an article that advocated what you might call Super-Strong Israeli Theory, which is that the REAL MASTERMINDS want us to see through the first level of deception and point the finger at the Israelis, who are merely red-herring PATSIES to conceal the Hidden Hand of the True Conspirators. Of course, even this could be a clever Israeli plot to throw us off the Mossad trail, and so we're back to the Missing Four Thousand.

4) Missingness

Sometimes it's useful to attempt to read the tea leaves of conspiracy-theory subculture for some connection to something real and hidden in the larger culture. Consider the Missing Passengers from Flight 77 and the Missing Four Thousand from the W.T.C. This fascination with Missingness. And now the Missing 4,400: I don't know if you've seen that USA Network miniseries that debuted in July, The 4400 . It's about 4,400 humans who were abducted from earth by aliens over the past half-century and have been missing for periods ranging from months to decades. Suddenly all 4,400 (any significance to that number, do you think?) are returned to earth, returned to their previous lives with no memory at all of their missing period.

Missingness: I like the concept. (That's what conspiracy theories do, isn't it-supply Missing Links?) We all miss someone, we all long to be missed, we all feel we've missed something in life. I'm misting up at the very thought of Missingness. Or perhaps the Missing narratives are secularized versions of the apocalyptic Rapture.

Needless to say, there's a sinister as well as a sentimental side to it: The Myth of the Missing Four Thousand (Jews) is, in fact, a kind of downsized version of Holocaust denial-they are like the allegedly Missing Six Million victims of Hitler in the denier's sick imagination.

In any event, the next milestone in the post-9/11 conspiracy-theory time line would probably be Thierry Meyssan's L'Effroyable Imposture ( 9/11: The Big Lie , in its English translation), published in March 2002 in Paris, which first advanced the Pentagon rocket-hit theory. Mr. Meyssan's book didn't make much of an impression in America, although it was taken very seriously the world over, a kind of respectable successor to the Mossad-did-it theory: Bush did it. It became the dark underside of Bush-hating.

The next step was Gore Vidal's London Observer piece, which appeared in October 2002 and gave the Great Man's mantle of respectability to Meyssan's "Bush did it" claims. Some Vidal sycophants who couldn't bear any criticism of the Master didn't understand either the logical fallacies of his argument or the focus of my critique. Of course Mr. Vidal has every right to criticize the Bush government and intelligence agencies (in my Observer piece on Mr. Vidal, I said the many incompetents in the intelligence agencies should be fired), but he's actually doing something else: He's accusing the White House of complicity in mass murder on 9/11. Here are his words: "Obviously somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until … what?" And yet Mr. Vidal's sycophants don't understand either the radical nature of his charge or the lack of proof he offers.

I'm thinking of one blogger in particular who tried to hijack the reputation of Edmund S. Morgan to use it in support of Mr. Vidal's complicity theory-and against those, including myself, who dared to criticize Mr. Vidal. The blogger left the impression that Mr. Morgan, emeritus professor of American history at Yale (I took his lecture course-a brilliant scholar who deserves better), had endorsed Mr. Vidal's complicity theory. This is either disingenuous or a failure of reading-comprehension skills.

What Professor Morgan said in a review of some of Vidal's fiction and nonfiction in The New York Review of Books was that Mr. Vidal offered "evidence" for his theories. But evidence is not the same as proof. As Professor Morgan was compelled to point out for those who misread or deliberately distorted his words: "I was reporting Vidal's views, not endorsing them" (letter in the March 11, 2004, issue of the NYRB ). How embarrassing for the blogger (who failed to acknowledge it). It was like that moment in Annie Hall when Marshall McLuhan steps up to some movie-line pseud talking about him and says, "You know nothing of my work."

The point is that not all evidence is equal; some evidence is false, some is conflicting, and some is true but misleading. And negative evidence, such as that which Mr. Vidal and conspiracy theorists like the author of The New Pearl Harbor offer us (the hijacked jets should have been shot down; because they weren't, it wasn't incompetence-someone must have ordered them not to be) can be the most misleading of them all.

5) The Real Story Behind Christmas in Cambodia

In part because of the absolute lack of any positive evidence for the mass-murder charge that Mr. Vidal and others were insinuating, Complicity Theory went into hibernation for nearly a year and a half, until Michael Moore reinsinuated it into the culture. While Mr. Moore was too shrewd to make as big a fool of himself as Mr. Vidal did on this issue, a subtle strain of-at the very least-Weak Complicity Theory frames his entire narrative of 9/11. Makes it seem as if the mass murder that day was something the Bush White House would have welcomed because it rejuvenated it politically. Mr. Moore begins with the cloud of illegitimacy left behind by Florida, then talks about the way everything was going bad for Mr. Bush by the time 9/11 came around. And offers the Afghan Pipeline Theory of the whole affair. Mr. Bush-or his evil associates-were happy about 9/11, if not behind it, because it allowed them to install a regime in Afghanistan that would be more cooperative than the Taliban in building a natural-gas pipeline. (So their thinking was: We want a pipeline, let's get some Saudis to knock down the W.T.C. and destroy the White House and the Pentagon, O.K.?)

Afghan Pipeline Theory has long been a feature of 9/11 Complicity Theory, as has something else Mr. Moore focuses on ominously: Mr. Bush's remaining in the grade-school classroom for several minutes after being notified of the second plane hitting the towers. It feeds into Complicity Theory certainty that Mr. Bush didn't have to move, or didn't WANT to take action, because he knew he was safe and didn't want to interfere with The Plan. (Mr. Moore doesn't draw this conclusion himself, but the clip he shows is cited by Complicity Theorists as "evidence.")

Mr. Moore prepared the ground for-and has not, to my knowledge disavowed- The New Pearl Harbor , which in turn sums up and extends the work of previous Complicity Theorists, especially the French fantasist Thierry Meyssan, who pioneered the idea that a missile rather than a jetliner hit the Pentagon.

I want to make clear that I do not believe that conspiracy theories should be rejected a priori merely because they posit conspiracies. History is full of conspiracies-Julius Caesar's and Abraham Lincoln's assassinations, to cite two.

But it comes down to the quality of evidence. When the disparity between the absence of evidence and the magnitude and certainty of the claims based on that absence becomes so great, it becomes legitimate to speculate about the appeal of such theories. One is entitled to ask: Why the appeal of Complicity Theory?

I'd venture a conjecture here that fear has something to do with Complicity Theory-but not just fear, something well-intentioned as well. The actual people who committed mass murder on 9/11, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, are scary and committed to doing it again and again. Whatever the terror-alert color code is, our lives are not likely to return to "normal" for decades. It doesn't take many terrorists to terrorize. This is a bitter, tragic truth about the way the world changed for everyone in America after 9/11.

Nobody likes hard, bitter truths that condemn one to a lifetime of unease, if not terror. However large and dark the conspiracy that Complicity Theory posits, one thing it means is that we don't REALLY have to fear "terrorists" at all: We did it to ourselves. We can even vote the culprits out of office (unless they pull another 9/11 to cancel the election). Evil as George Bush may be, he's not as scary on some level; "Bush did it" is comforting.

Another comforting aspect of Complicity Theory, at least on the left, is that if Osama and Al Qaeda didn't do it, one doesn't have to be hostile to a Third World person. In addition, one doesn't have to implicate oneself in the ethically complex acts of exacting vengeance on the mass murderers. One doesn't have to become Hamlet; one just has to get Bush out of office. A sense of ethical complexity is noble, although, as Hamlet demonstrates, it can also be paralyzing.

My friend Mark Horowitz, the magazine editor, has a theory about Bush hatred that was recently given some exposure on Virginia Postrel's blog (www.dynamist.com). Essentially, it suggests that a certain kind of Bush hatred (not Bush criticism, but frothing, obsessive hatred) stems from a kind of sublimated fear, especially here in New York City, still traumatized by the wounds of the 9/11 attack, still targeted for the next one. A fear so unbearable that it must somehow be transferred, projected upon someone more under our control: the Daddy who didn't protect us. If we vote Mr. Bush out of office, we can be nicer to the terrorists and they won't interrupt our beautiful lives.

Unless, of course, Mr. Kerry's in on it, too. In the comments section of some blog, I saw someone point out the similarities between the narrative of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and The Manchurian Candidate . Mr. Kerry is set up as a war hero by his crew-but only by the crew of that one boat that went into Cambodia, who are fanatically devoted to him. Meanwhile, another veteran doggedly tries to prove that Mr. Kerry's a pawn of the Communists (with Teresa Heinz Kerry as the Angela Lansbury/Meryl Streep controller). Maybe now we know why the illusory "Christmas in Cambodia" is "seared" into his memory. That was when he and all the men on his boat were captured and hypnotized, and came back hailing him as a war hero. Tracks perfectly. "Christmas in Cambodia" is only a screen memory, so to speak. Just a theory. No real evidence. But, that hasn't stopped Complicity Theorists.

The idea that a President, even this miserable excuse for one, would cause to have the Pentagon attacked flies in the face of perhaps the one constant in history, which is that the king never knowingly diminishes his own power. Nevertheless, 60 years ago much the same was said of Franklin Roosevelt. It was whispered that he had connived in some way to have the Pacific fleet sunk at Pearl Harbor.

Even if the men in the White House had nothing to do with the attacks, Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center do have at least one thing in common: They were both surprise attacks, and in both instances those charged with the responsibility of defending against such surprises failed. The excuses given are similar: It was inconceivable that the Japanese could successfully mount such an attack, and who in their wildest imagination could have guessed that the Arabs were smart enough or gutsy enough to convert passenger airliners into flying megabombs?

The 9/11 failure, which has cost the lives of thousands of people both on the day of the airliner attack and in the subsequent fighting around the globe, is chalked up to such items as the inability to "connect the dots," intelligence "stovepipes," interagency rivalries and feuds, lack of coordination, too little money/too much money/too much money improperly spent, poor communications, computers that couldn't talk to each other, people on the wrong radio frequencies, and on and on and on.

One element is never mentioned-not, I suspect, because American officials are suppressing it, but because it has not occurred to them. That element is contempt for the enemy.

Without a doubt, contempt of the enemy played a part in the American defeat at Pearl Harbor. The accounts of the days and the hours leading up to the bombing of Battleship Row by the Imperial Japanese Navy reveal a relaxed attitude by the higher-ups in the American military. They didn't take the "Japs" seriously, regarding them as an inferior lot afflicted with buck teeth, bow legs and a penchant for sneaking around posing as tourists, clicking off pictures of American inventions and then going back to Tokyo to make inferior copies thereof.

Although the military and political history of the Far East over the previous 50 years should have made it clear that Japan was a force to be taken seriously, it didn't. Underlying all the other factors that contributed to the Pearl Harbor disaster was a disdain for the short, bandy-legged "Nips," a disdain which robbed those in command of the sine qua for effective defense: a respect for the putative enemy and the damage they might do.

Since many officials high up in the American government consider Arabs little better than animals, the chances that they could imagine any kind of successful attack being launched by the Muslims were extremely small. If the word "animal" strikes you as over the top, please consider the following Reuters dispatch from mid-June: "The U.S. general in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was told by a military intelligence commander that detainees should be treated like dogs."

The cages at Guantánamo Bay's Camp X-Ray look like dog runs. This less-than-elevated view of Arabs isn't held only by the American military: Our Israeli comrades-in-arms are famous for their conviction that Arabs are slightly subhuman. But beyond what soldiers may think, the public air in the United States is saturated with contempt for all things Arabian. Arab and Muslim culture are routinely scored off as backward, mired in the Middle Ages, hidebound, rigid, dogmatic, intolerant, woman-oppressing and inflexibly unable to rise to the standards of the 21st (or even the 20th) century.

The low opinion of Arabs is reflected in the conduct of the Americans who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Like the British Raj in India, the Americans have chosen to have as little contact as possible with the people they have been rulingÊin the past year. If that seems something of an exaggeration, consider the following from The Washington Post :

"Life inside the high-security Green Zone-what some CPA staffers jokingly call the Emerald City-bears little resemblance to that in the rest of Baghdad. The power is always on. Shiny shuttle buses zip passengers around. Outdoor cafes stay open late into the night. There is little effort to comply with Islamic traditions. Beer flows freely at restaurants. Women walk around in shorts. Bacon cheeseburgers are on the CPA's lunch menu.

"'It's like a different planet,' said an Iraqi American who has a senior position in the CPA and lives in the Green Zone but regularly ventures out to see relatives. 'It's cut off from the real Iraq.'"

If Arabs in general and Iraqis in particular are an inferior species, then "aggressive interrogation techniques," as Americans say-or "torture," as non-Americans call it-are permissible. The Iraqis are not subject to the same rules because they are not people in the sense that you and I are people. If they were, they would fight fair, which they don't, and the laws and standards which apply in our conduct toward our fellow human beings do not apply to Arab dogs.

This principle was enunciated by John Yoo, a former Justice Department official who is a professor of law at the University of California in Berkeley. "This is an unprecedented conflict with a completely new form of enemy that fights in unconventional ways that violate the very core principles of the laws of war by targeting civilians," he wrote. Only a law professor could be as wrong on the facts and the conclusions. It follows from Mr. Yoo's premise that if the Arabs had jet airplanes, smart bombs and wore uniforms, it would be against his rules to torture them.

But since these camel jockeys do not own the tools of civilized warfare, under Yoo's Rules questioning them by use of what we will call innovative inquisitorial strategies isn't torture. To be guilty of torture, the torturer must have "specific intent," which he does not have even if he "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective …. " Mr. Yoo and his colleagues make other distinctions, such as: Pulling out two fingernails is O.K., three is borderline excessive, and four might be considered cruelty by an animal-control officer, so be careful.

For C.I.A. agents, military intelligence officers or Department of Justice inquisitors who may be puzzled as to how far to go, do not consult the Geneva Conventions or any other international agreements which, according to the Yoo school of jurisprudence, are null, void and nonapplicable. Just Google up the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and be guided by what the ASPCA has to say about the treatment of Arabs.

Even as the colonel spoke, Osama bin Laden had lodged himself in his Afghan puppet state. Between the colonel's remarks and the air date, Mr. bin Laden struck-and we struck back, not with overwhelming numbers à la Desert Storm, but with drones, native levies and Special Forces riding on horseback. We used much less manpower than we had in the Gulf War-or, for that matter, during the Whiskey Rebellion or the Battle of Trenton. But what we used was equally overwhelming. Al Qaeda claims that Mr. bin Laden is alive in a hole somewhere, and Mullah Omar may be with him. But their regime is gone, men may shave, and women can look at the world.

The latest flurry of war talk holds that when we move on Iraq in the fall, it will be in a similarly lean fashion. No more Norman Schwarzkopf punching a right hook through the desert. (The Saudis, for one thing, will be rooting for the other side, not offering us bases.) But we will find other little ways. The face of war changes, and American war-making changes with it-always belatedly at first. Almost every war the United States has fought has begun in confusion, accident or defeat-Detroit, the Alamo, Bull Run, the Maine , Pearl Harbor. But in almost every case, the United States has summoned its concentration and its force and won decisive, sometimes annihilating victories.

One way this war has changed is the vulnerability of American civilians. There were no soldiers in the World Trade Center. Al Qaeda has claimed responsibility for attacking a synagogue in Tunisia, and its agents and cheerleaders would no doubt like to attack some in Brooklyn. The new level of risk explains why Jose Padilla, the American citizen and Muslim convert that Al Qaeda was trying to slip back into the country when he was nabbed by the F.B.I., is now being held at a naval base, without any famous civil-liberties lawyers at his side. When the Nazis inserted saboteurs (some of them American citizens) into the United States during World War II, President Roosevelt ordered them tried by military tribunals-a decision the Supreme Court approved. So it goes in wartime, when the suspects-if they turn out to be guilty-are not wicked individuals or even members of a criminal enterprise intent on personal revenge or gain, but agents of a hostile power who seek to mutilate the liberty of the community as a whole. When the nation is attacked, the nation must defend itself. The safety of the people is the supreme law.

It is true that President Bush, though he speaks frequently of our War on Terror, has not asked Congress to make a formal declaration of war. He should have done so, though it's easy to understand his difficulties. Our enemies have not been kind enough to make such formal statements themselves (even Hitler declared war on the United States, in support of his Japanese ally, after Pearl Harbor). Osama bin Laden issued fulminations before 9/11, but what legal standing do the pronouncements of a bandit in a cave have? Until our enemies repair their omission, they must excuse us for arresting them without crossing every diplomatic and legal T.

But all the talk of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda will probably turn out to be a polite fiction. The notion that a fanatical son of a Saudi construction magnate could run a worldwide terror enterprise from Afghanistan or the Sudan, completely unassisted by professionals, is fantastic, isn't it? If Donald Trump had a bloodthirsty crusader nephew, could he set himself up in the Yukon and successfully plot to destroy the most impressive buildings in Riyadh, if there are any? To be less whimsical: Could the Irish Republican Army blow up Big Ben? Are the Ulster Protestant terrorists capable of torching the Vatican?

Osama bin Laden has imagination and charisma, if you find dream interpretation and Koranic midrash charismatic. But isn't it likely that he and his network have profited from the help of a government-and not the dirt-poor kakistocrats of Khartoum and Kabul? Who is the obvious candidate, in terms of both resources and grudges? Our intelligence agents have dismissed the report that hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague, but the Czechs have not backed down from it. At home, we are looking for a rogue American scientist as the source of last fall's anthrax letters. But then came the story that one of the 9/11 hijackers checked into a hospital emergency room with lesions that the attending physician now says were consistent with exposure to anthrax. If that is true, where then did Osama bin Laden get his stash? If Saddam Hussein had been living a monk's life, he would still be a danger, because he's manufacturing nukes and germs to incinerate and poison Israelis and whoever else displeases him. But his vows of peace may already have been broken.

Most Americans will celebrate the Fourth of July weekend as they always have-by relaxing, partying and watching fireworks. But this year, we should reflect that not celebrating is our right; that, in many parts of the world, putting on a bathing suit or even drinking beer is forbidden; that, if we hear a sermon over the weekend, it will be a sermon of our choosing; and that when we see the fireworks, they stand for all the explosions from Long Island to Hawaii to, yes, Germany, Japan and Afghanistan, when Americans fought for their rights and their indulgences, and exacted terrible vengeance on our enemies.

Fortunately, we tend to forget all the bad movies of the past as the years go by, with the result that we tend to remember the past as a continuous golden age, unlike the dispiriting present. Instead of generating a theory of progress for the medium, the movie scene substitutes a theory of regress. My own theory is that the past was not all that good, and the present is not all that bad. But the one thing that has changed is that everyone's become a critic, and it's harder for us supposed professionals in the field to impose our tastes on the Internet masses.

Another change from the past is the disappearance of the studio system, with its pejoratively regarded code name: Hollywood. The so-called majors, each with a distinctive logo, are now almost entirely distributors rather than producers. The MGM lion can roar all it wants, but there's no distinctive studio style to go with the roar, as there was in the 30's and 40's. As a New Yorker, I can avail myself of all the independent American films from the Sundance Film Festival, all the films from the Anglophone periphery of Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Scotland, Ireland and Canada, and the foreign-language subtitled films from the four corners of the earth. And if all these alternatives to Hollywood don't keep me busy enough, the development of VHS-video, laser-disc and DVD technology enables me to turn to the movie classics of the past for aesthetic nourishment.

So I've never had it so good, movie-wise.

Of course, I haven't forgotten 9/11–but it so happens I kept going to the movies while my family was on relief during the Great Depression, and after Pearl Harbor, and while I was in the Army during the Korean War, and I am certainly not going to stop now that I'm actually making a living out of my lifelong vice of sneaking off to the movies when I should've been working, studying and reading.

Ever since the malignantly motivated events of Sept. 11 were supposed to have changed our lives forever, we comparatively parochial commentators on the movies have been asked where Hollywood should go from here. Sylvester Stallone has already threatened to unleash Rambo in the narrowing (as I write) search for Osama bin Laden and his evil henchmen. Karl Rove was dispatched weeks ago by the Bush administration to secure the film industry's cooperation in the war against terrorism.

But it's not clear what Hollywood can do beyond outlawing plane hijackings and crashes and fireballs as box-office spectacles. In any event, every movie shown by the end of 2001 was conceived and executed before 9/11. One or two movies have already tagged the Muslims as villains, but, ironically, it may be harder to make Muslims the bad guys after 9/11 than it was before. From the White House on down, word has gone out that the Muslims in our midst are not to be treated as harshly as the Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor. Back then, Jap-bashing was not limited to certified bigots; even our liberal President got into the act. One may wonder if the conservative President now in office is thinking of Muslim Americans as much as he is salivating over all the oil in Saudi Arabia. Japan didn't have any oil of its own. That's why it bombed Pearl Harbor: to get a free hand with the oil riches in Southeast Asia, especially in the British and Dutch East Indies.

One trend in recent pre-9/11 American adventure movies has been the complete demystification of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. as stuffy, clumsy organizations blocking the efforts of the individualistic action heroes at every turn, sometimes with criminals and traitors inside the organization. I hope we aren't going back to the days when J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. was considered a model of probity and efficiency while it was wire-tapping Martin Luther King. With an Attorney General straight out of the Inquisition, this is no time for movies to become conformist in the name of patriotism. What we don't need right now is excessive flag-waving on the screen.

Anyway, movies have long since yielded their relevance in current events to television, especially the breaking-news-crawly CNN, which seems actually to dictate our foreign policy. So as I wish my readers a Happy New Year, I remain confident that enough good movies will come from somewhere, with or without subtitles, to make for lively conversations among us–not just to escape reality, but to discern more deeply the dramatic spectacles of human and social behavior illuminated on the screen. My own biases remain in the realm of narrative live-action cinematography, but that has always covered an enormous amount of territory.

So without any further ado, here are the movies and performers that impressed me in 2001:

Best English-Language Films

1. A.I.

2. Gosford Park

3. Innocence

4. Mulholland Drive

5. A Beautiful Mind

6. Iris

7. The Man Who Wasn't There

8. Lantana

9. The Golden Bowl

10. Bridget Jones's Diary

Films Other People Liked But I Didn't

1. Amélie

2. Monster's Ball

3. In the Bedroom

4. The Deep End

5. Moulin Rouge

6. L.I.E.

7. Ghost World

8. Memento

9. The Others

10. The Royal Tenenbaums

Best Foreign-Language Films

1. The Road Home

2. The Devil's Backbone

3. With a Friend Like Harry

4. The Town Is Quiet

5. Va Savoir

6. The Taste of Others

7. Faithless

8. The Day I Became a Woman

9. Amores Perros

10. The Circle

Runners-up: Fat Girl ; The Closet ; Divided We Fall ; Kandahar ; Under the Sand .

Best Nonfiction Films

1. My Voyage to Italy

2. The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

3. The Turandot Project

4. The Gleaners & I

5. Go Tigers!

Best Animation Feature

Shrek

Best Directors

1. Robert Altman, Gosford Park

2. Zhang Yimou, The Road Home

3. Paul Cox, Innocence

4. David Lynch, Mulholland Drive

5. Jacques Rivette, Va Savoir

6. Richard Eyre, Iris

7. The Coen Brothers, The Man Who Wasn't There

8. James Ivory, The Golden Bowl

9. Ron Howard, A Beautiful Mind

10. Ray Lawrence, Lantana

Best Lead Actress

1. Stockard Channing, The Business of Strangers

2. Julia Blake, Innocence

3. Judi Dench, Iris

4. Kerry Armstrong, Lantana

5. Charlotte Rampling, Under the Sand

6. Ariane Ascaride, The Town Is Quiet

7. Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive

8. Renée Zellweger, Bridget Jones's Diary

9. Reese Witherspoon, Legally Blonde

10. Cate Blanchett, Bandits

Best Lead Actor

1. Russell Crowe, A Beautiful Mind

2. Billy Bob Thornton, The Man Who Wasn't There ; Bandits

3. Tom Wilkinson, In the Bedroom

4. Anthony LaPaglia, Lantana

5. Charles Tingwell, Innocence

6. Jeremy Northam, The Golden Bowl ; Gosford Park

7. Daniel Auteuil, The Widow of St. Pierre ; The Closet

8. Geoffrey Rush, Lantana ; The Tailor of Panama

9. Colin Firth, Bridget Jones's Diary

10. John Cusack, Serendipity

Best Supporting Actress

1. Frances O'Connor, A.I. ; About Adam

2. Kate Winslet, Iris

3. Julia Stiles, The Business of Strangers

4. Cameron Diaz, Vanilla Sky

5. Jennifer Connelly, A Beautiful Mind

6. Maggie Smith, Gosford Park

7. Emily Watson, Gosford Park

8. Helen Mirren, Gosford Park

9. Eileen Atkins, Gosford Park

10. Kelly Macdonald, Gosford Park

Best Supporting Actor

1. Jude Law, A.I.

2. Steve Buscemi, Ghost World

3. Tony Shalhoub, The Man Who Wasn't There

4. Jeremy Piven, Serendipity

5. Ed Harris, A Beautiful Mind

6. Jim Broadbent, Iris ; Moulin Rouge

7. Hugh Bonneville, Iris

8. Alan Bates, Gosford Park

9. Derek Jacobi, Gosford Park

10. Richard E. Grant, Gosford Park

So what about the two franchise films that have made all the money? I must shamefully confess that mine is the kind of sensibility that is more deeply stirred by a few seconds of Laura Linney's posing nude in Rob Morrow's Maze than in the hours and hours of boyhood romance in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and The Lord of the Rings . It's not a question of good and bad: Maze is not all that good, and the two box-office gold mines are not all that bad. But I reserve the sovereign right to pretend that Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings never happened, even if I've seen them all the way through to their maddeningly inconclusive endings. And no, I haven't read the respective books in question, and I don't intend to. So there with my "Bah, humbug!" to grown-ups who blather on about the little child in us all. There was never a little child in me, even when I was a little child. Perhaps that is my curse.

And now into the New Year of an already old millennium.

In one sense, I suppose I've become accustomed to the other-worldliness of film sets, the real hurricane that hits when a film production arrives in town: the caravan of 18-wheeled equipment trucks. The caterer. The wind machines. The armorer, with his cache of prop weapons. The sight of 10 electricians, standing in the back of a golf cart, careening off to dinner like some kind of localized version of the Taliban. The grizzled, hard-case military adviser, who struts around like a popinjay wearing Army camo gear and chain-smoking unfiltered Camels, and who is invariably referred to-no matter what his real name may be-as "G.I. Joe."

(Forgive the digression here, but I just love this guy: Ask him a question-any question, even one as simple as "Is this the trigger?"-and he will inevitably frown, start field-stripping the Camel and launch into a 45-minute soliloquy that begins, "Well … back when I was in Nam…. ")

As I said, I'm used to this. But on the other hand, taken from a slightly different viewpoint, I can also see how all this might look somewhat surreal. Particularly tonight: The entire location has been lit by eight giant helium-filled nylon balloons-bobbing just above the tree line-with a single, brilliant white arc light glowing inside each one.

Since the balloons went up at 5:30 this afternoon, we've been buzzed by a near-continuous procession of private planes and helicopters-all of whom, I'm told, can probably spot the lights from 25 miles away.

Maybe it's the screenwriter in me, but I can't help imagining the conversations in those cockpits:

"Damn, Vern! Would you look at that!! Glowing orbs! It's aliens! We got aliens down there!"

"Shit, Henry. What did you expect? It's a goddamned abandoned military base! Where else would they land?"

So what, you ask, am I doing down here-other than trying to amuse myself? Basically, this is what you've been reading about in The New York Times with regard to the film business: I'm down here as a friend of the production-specifically, a friend of the director and his producer-giving the script a quick once-over to see that it reflects what is now euphemistically called "the new sensibility."

Translation: The story we're shooting was written several years ago, and concerns some sort of intrigue at the U.S. military base in Panama. Thus, today, out go the corrupt D.E.A. agents and evil Colombian drug lords; in come military men with a higher sense of purpose, and covert C.I.A. operatives who will go off to fight a different kind of evil when this particular nastiness is cleared up.

In terms of screenwriting, we're talking nips and tucks here, not major rewrites. Course corrections rather than 180-degree turns. About 10 days' work.

On the set itself, there is little talk of Sept. 11. The focus is on the job at hand-namely, making the movie. And no one cares about the recent New York magazine profile of Harvey Weinstein. This isn't a Miramax film. But the odds are that everyone here will probably end up working with Harvey-if they haven't already. He makes great films. Moguls are supposed to be larger than life. His behavior is beside the point.

At the same time, however, there is a great deal of snickering down here about the recent Sunday-afternoon summit meeting between Karl Rove and the studio chiefs-and the notion that Hollywood is suddenly going to start pumping out PG-13 propaganda.

Sure, there'll be small changes, like the ones I'm making here.

But the general consensus is that overall, not a damn thing is going to change. Why? It's a long, long way from the ballroom at the Peninsula hotel (where the Rove meeting took place) to the office of a 28-year-old development executive looking for "edge." These are people who probably haven't seen The Best Years of Our Lives or Yankee Doodle Dandy , let alone have a clue how to modernize their sentiments. Hollywood will still make as many good movies as bad. But the difference will probably be that the really dreadful films-the despicable movies-will now be slathered with a patina of patriotism.

Meanwhile, almost no one I know inside the film business is buying any of the hype surrounding military-oriented films that are coming out in the next few months. They're being touted as the dawn of a new era of filmmaking. In a word, this is foolishness.

Year in, year out, Hollywood has always made military movies with heroic characters. The list in the last few years alone includes Three Kings , Men of Honor , Rules of Engagement , The General's Daughter , U-571 , Courage Under Fire and (drum roll, please) Pearl Harbor .

In truth, all of these films-including the ones coming out in the near-distant future-owe a lot more to Steven Spielberg and the success of Saving Private Ryan than they do to Osama bin Laden.

The movie business has always been a matter of luck, and timing. Or, as someone summed it up here on the set a few minutes ago: "Poor Michael Eisner. If he'd waited only six months to release Pearl Harbor , we'd be calling him a goddamned genius again."

As I finish this diary tonight, forgive me, if you will, for a moment of sentimentality.

As strange as my present surroundings may be-standing on a film set, at an abandoned military camp in Florida, watching a fake hurricane rage-this trip has been far stranger to me for an entirely different reason: It's the first time I've spent any length of time apart from my children, Thomas and Elizabeth, since they were born 15 months ago.

Just before dinner, I called to tell my wife that I plan to go directly from the set to the airport when we're finished shooting tonight. And after discussing the details (along with some gossip from the set), she put the phone to Thomas' ear.

"Tom-o," I called out. "It's Daddy. I'll be home in the morning."

For a moment, there was silence at the other end of the line. Then a simple exclamation: "Dah-dah!" After which, he proceeded to pull the phone entirely out of the wall. (To my wife's great credit, she sweetly surmised that he was trying to pull me home. My own assessment was that I'd made a drastic mistake switching his bedtime reading material from Goodnight Moon to articles about Harvey Weinstein.)

In any case, of all the roles I've played in life so far-husband, son, writer, friend-it occurs to me now, tonight, on this set, that nothing has come to mean so much as the word "father."

And the tug at my heart-the desire to look into Elizabeth's eyes and see Thomas' smile-is like nothing I've ever known.

I can't wait to get home.

The pacifists are a beleaguered minority now, and rightly so. But their case has a history and a certain consistency, and when the next bloodlettings occur they may rise again, so they ought to be addressed. The main mistake of the unthinking pacifist is to imagine that it takes two sides to fight a war, therefore one side's demurral will end it. But this is untrue: One side can wage a war all by itself. If its enemies do not fight, then it wins. The thinking pacifist must either hold a religious belief that this world is a child of the devil, or of illusion, and hence not worth our efforts; or, if he is not religious, he must will the victory of the aggressor. In this case, that would mean willing a world that was both impoverished and less free, as crusader terrorists disrupted and preyed upon commerce and surviving states hunkered down into self-protective, authoritarian postures. Young college-age pacifists, taught to scorn capitalism and liberty, may think such a state of things no great loss-perhaps even an improvement in some respects-but as they lost their student loans and their CD's, they might think again. Older, thoughtful pacifists probably do foresee such a state of things and desire it, either because they are guilty about being prosperous, or because they hope to be commissars in the communes of the future. They are unlikely to find many Americans eager to share their vision.

President Bush's response to the crisis began shakily, and many noticed it. I was reminded of a savage estimate of the Marquis de Lafayette, not as the hero of our revolution but as the goat of his: You cannot draw a trumpet's note from a whistle. I hoped better qualities would emerge, and as the days passed they did. It should be a reminder to us all how small some of our leaders have looked in the early days of their greatest challenges. Representative Charles Francis Adams, son and grandson of Presidents, thought Abraham Lincoln's speeches in the interval between his election in 1860 and his inauguration "put to flight all notions of greatness." George Washington, who commanded America's armies the last time New York was attacked, struck officers on his own staff as indecisive and out of his depth. Some leaders do or say the right things right away, as Mayor Giuliani did. Others reveal themselves more slowly. The beefy word warriors and the pinch-faced hacks will, of course, never cut Mr. Bush any slack. But the rest of us should remember the stumbles of the great.

So much for the past. What will the war ahead be like?

The next strike will not be a hijacking. Copycats may try to repeat the stunt, but our enemies will move to other things. The likely candidates are germs and poisons, or atomic bombs, bought in the former Soviet Union or smuggled out of Pakistan by friends in the military. There will be many near misses before this is over, and some direct hits. Other American cities may well envy New York for having gotten off so lightly.

We have announced that we are fighting a coalition war. By chance I was reading Winston Churchill's biography of his ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, which concludes with the War of the Spanish Succession, which pitted most of the nations of Europe against Louis XIV. That war did not have much in common with this-Louis XIV had much better couture than Osama bin Laden-but it offers a classic case study of the dynamics of coalition warfare. Each nation pursues its interest, and since no two nations' interests are always identical, cross-purposes are the inevitable result. Our allies will give us every species of frustration, from minor annoyance to spectacular betrayal.

Confusion abroad will be joined by rancor at home. Most American wars have been conducted athwart noisy, and sometimes treacherous, peace movements. Disaffected states have toyed with secession; politicians and entire communities have aided the enemy. From Tories during the Revolution to Copperheads during the Civil War to the disaffected Germanic masses of the Midwest during World War I, the motto of millions of Americans has been, "My country, wrong-and maybe not my country."

Most wars are longer than most of ours have been. The Civil War and our participation in World War II lasted four and under four years, respectively. But the American Revolution was eight and a half years, from Lexington to the British evacuation of New York. The Thirty Years' War and the Hundred Years' War were aptly, if approximately, named. Suppose this war is the median? I see the hugely pregnant, their bellies straining, as maternity fashion now dictates, against sheaths of Lycra. The children within are entering a troubled world.

But the war will end in victory-not over all enemies for all times, but over these enemies, now. When Winston Churchill- prime minister, not popular historian-learned of Pearl Harbor, he had the following reaction, which is worth pondering: "I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! … Silly people-and there were many, not only in enemy countries-might discount the force of the United States. Some said they were soft, others that they would never be united. They would fool around at a distance. They would never come to grips. They would never stand blood-letting. Their democracy and system of recurrent elections would paralyze their war effort. They would be just a vague blur on the horizon to friend or foe. Now we should see the weakness of this numerous but remote, wealthy, and talkative people. But I had studied the American Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch. American blood flowed in my veins. I thought of a remark which Edward Grey had made to me more than thirty years before-that the United States is like 'a gigantic boiler. Once the fire is lighted under it there is no limit to the power it can generate.' Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

it is a date that some of us assume every fresh-faced school child associates

with the war from which there is no escape. Even if the schools believe that

this kind of knowledge is not helpful in the self-esteem-building process, the

kids could hardly not know something about both dates. After all, June 6 and

Dec. 7 are celebrated in movie blockbusters starring the grandchildren of that generation-you know the one. June

6 has its Saving Private Ryan ; Dec. 7

now has its Pearl Harbor. Somewhere

in the last 20 years, we forgot about V-E Day and V-J Day. Those days are for

fogies, young and old, who don't necessarily learn history from Hollywood.

Memorial Day (a barbecue-and-beach holiday originally set

aside for the decorating of soldiers' graves) brought the predictable plethora

of World War II programming on the tube, a staple of which was the shot of the

bowed and graying veteran revisiting the battlefields of his youth: Normandy

and Anzio; Iwo Jima and Okinawa-peaceful places now. Interspersed with these bittersweet

images were black-and-white clips of the fighting and the dying from so long

ago.

The message was pretty clear. Because of these bowed and

graying men, because of the horror they endured, children laugh as they run

along the sands of Northern France; couples share romantic dinners along the

Italian coast; and an economic colossus has risen along the Pacific Rim. That

is, of course, the moral of the World War II literature-America's citizen

soldiers, and their allies (the wise-cracking tommy; the dour Russian; the

haughty Resistance fighter), fought, suffered and died to liberate humankind

from oppression.

Like most other Americans, I believe in and indeed cherish

that story, that legacy of sacrifice. And that may explain why I find the story

of Saipan so appalling-the antithesis o f the story of the good war and its

soldiers of liberation.

The Marines landed on Saipan on June 15, 1944. By the time

they secured the island, 22,000 of Saipan's32,000 Japanese defenders were dead,

and about 4,000 were missing. Fewer than 2,000 were taken prisoner. About 3,000

Marines died and another 10,000 were wounded in some of the most desperate

fighting of the war. The Battle of Saipan was overshadowed by the gigantic

events underway in Normandy, but it was a pivotal moment in the Pacific war.

Americans saw what they would face for the remainder of the conflict-suicidal

Japanese defenders, sometimes charging Marine positions with handmade spears.

Admiral Nagumo, who directed the attack on Pearl Harbor, committed suicide to

inspire his troops to do the same; after the battle, Japanese Prime Minister

Tojo resigned.

Saipan today is at peace, but perhaps next Memorial Day some

creative television producer will invite a Marine back to the battlefield. What

he will see will shock him, and perhaps inspire some decidedly unsentimental

reflections. Saipan is an island sweatshop, a place where, were it not for

liberators of another sort-those much-ridiculed anti-globalists-workers still

would be held in virtual slavery on behalf of some of America's most famous

fashion labels.

Until sweatshop monitors sued the island's garment industry,

the liberated people of Saipan were among the most exploited workers in the

Pacific Rim. This may sound like a variation on a theme: tinpot South Pacific

dictator and crony capitalists colluding in the oppression of the citizenry,

while reaping enormous profits to be spent on golf courses, yachts and shoes.

The problem with this formula is that Saipan is an American territory, freed by

the blood of U.S. Marines, answerable to the Labor Department and various other

bureaucracies charged with the well-being of workers of the several states.

Among the conditions on Saipan cited in the anti-sweatshop

movement's lawsuit were unsanitary company housing; 12-hour work days, seven

days a week; illegal union-busting; and recruitment contracts that made

employees virtual indentured servants of their employers. And because Saipan is

an American territory, garments made under these conditions carry a "Made in the

U.S.A." label.

Since the lawsuits were filed and the public began paying

attention to Saipan, more than a dozen companies, including Calvin Klein Inc.,

Donna Karan International Inc., J. Crew Group Inc. and Tommy Hilfiger U.S.A.

Inc., have settled without admitting wrongdoing. But other brand-name companies

have not, and sweatshop monitors continue to press their case.

The Marines of 1944 stormed the beaches of Saipan to

liberate the island from oppression, not to make it safe for unscrupulous

haberdashers. One wonders if a Marine returning to Saipan would get misty-eyed;

more likely, he would become enraged.

Not something we're likely to see as part of the next

Greatest Generation celebration.

Vicky Jenson, from a screenplay by Ted Elliott, Terry Russio, Joe Stillman and

Roger S. H. Schulman, based on the book by William Steig), and Pearl Harbor (directed by Michael Bay,

from a screenplay by Randall Wallace). Shrek

has had nothing but good reviews; Pearl

Harbor almost nothing but bad. After seeing Shrek with an appreciative audience, I decided its good notices

were fully justified, and I dreaded what promised to be the three-hour ordeal

of Pearl Harbor . But Pearl Harbor was not nearly so hard to

take as I had anticipated. I even got a bit teary-eyed over its full-bodied

romanticism and anachronistic nobility, which reminded me of a period I had

experienced firsthand, though admittedly at the hyper-susceptible age of 13.

My more justifiably enthusiastic response to Shrek , however, had to overcome my

habitual resistance to animation as an alternative to live-action

cinematography. Still, I am willing to concede that animated films are more

"artistic" than live-action films in that there is more human control in the

former than there is in the latter. This is to say that Kate Beckinsale was not

created by the filmmakers who utilized her talent. There is an irreducible core

of reality to her feisty beauty.

The point is that Shrek ,

possibly the most accomplished and articulate animated film ever made, lacks

something that one experiences with even a very ordinary-and, at best, only

marginally meritorious-war movie like Pearl

Harbor : a feeling of kinship with images of life in real time on the

screen. I am perhaps indulging a humanist bias on my part that is totally at

odds with the tastes of today's more gadgety and cyberspatially driven young

people, who make up the target market audience for this new movie millennium.

Nonetheless-and here is the ironic twist in my acceptance of Pearl Harbor -the parts I liked most are

the parts before and after the digital destruction of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese carrier planes.

For me, the only use of spectacle here, as in Titanic , is for the enhancement and

redemption of the major characters. Mr. Bay and Mr. Wallace borrow proudly and

shamelessly from many old movies, not the least of which are Gone With the Wind (1939) and Children of Paradise (1945). They

achieve only faint echoes of the originals, of course, but there is more than a

suggestion of Scarlett with the wounded in Atlanta, and of Garance offering

herself to the misguidedly noble Baptiste in Paris, in Ms. Beckinsale's Nurse

Evelyn Johnson. In one instance, Evelyn is overwhelmed by the carnage in Pearl

Harbor; in another, she is disappointed by the misplaced scruples of Ben

Affleck's Rafe McCawley.

Mr. Affleck has taken a lot of heat for not being a big

enough star to carry a love story in a special-effects superproduction, but he

is as good as most-if not all-of the $20 million superstars. Indeed, I have

seen him be good in so many underrated melodramas that I can't dump on him

here. In the end, Pearl Harbor is not

so much about World War II as it is about movies about World War II. And what's

wrong with that? We certainly don't need to revive our hatred of "the Japs" at

this late date. A few years after the war, Nat Holman, then basketball coach at

City College, visited Japan to give some basketball clinics, and he was

astonished to discover that these polite and civilized people were the same

ones who had bombed Pearl Harbor. This is something Pearl Harbor doesn't pick up on: the sheer disbelief in the United

States that a despised race of people would have the technical and strategic

know-how to destroy the mighty American fleet, and then sink two British

battleships that had sailed confidently to relieve Singapore. This

condescension to Japan lasted into the 50's, when American cineastes were

amazed to discover, in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon

and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu , the

spearheads of a vibrant Japanese film industry going back to the silent era.

Still, what Pearl

Harbor cannot be forgiven is its $135 million price tag-as if with all that

money a filmmaker should be able to purchase Shavian dialogue and Chekhovian

pathos. This is hardly the first time critics wound up reviewing the money

rather than the movie. I was in Cannes in 1979 when Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now was unveiled, and all

that the American and British critics on the scene wanted to talk about was its

fiscal extravagance in the face of its anemic commercial prospects. Twenty-two

years later, the uncut Apocalypse Now

was hailed as the best film at Cannes, and no one seemed to care about how much

it had cost.

Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles were buried in Hollywood

under the tombstone of needless extravagance, and even Michael Cimino was

treated more roughly than he deserved for Heaven's

Gate (1980), a film that stays in the mind despite its undeniable

bottom-line follies. And let's not talk about Max Ophüls and Lola Montès (1955)-after Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Jean

Renoir's The Rules of the Game

(1939), my favorite box-office disaster.

Pearl Harbor is

not in this class of creative extravagance, and as I have suggested, its

celebrated bang-bang scenes are closer to animation than to live-action

cinematography. As for the widely panned kiss-kiss scenes, I cannot recommend

them to my readers, because that would arouse expectations that could not be

fulfilled. The best way to see the movie is as I did: expecting nothing and

being pleasantly surprised, and strangely moved, by Mr. Bay's audacity in

filming his lovers in end-of-the-world close-ups, however briefly. This is a

choice I applaud, despite the risks it runs with reviewers.

There is less to say about Shrek that has not already been said many times over. The film has

been heralded as the antithesis of everything Disney stands for, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Pearl Harbor . Still, as much as I like

and admire Shrek , I am not prepared

to give up Dumbo (1941), Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), and especially Thumper, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and

all the inspired Goofy sports cartoons. And, of course, there is Tex Avery, and Mr. Magoo, Bugs Bunny and the Road

Runner-and let's not forget The Simpsons

and South Park . Have I implied that I

don't like animation? Let's say I've kept looking at it out of the corner of my

eye-or, better still, let's never say never. Or, even more embarrassingly,

let's say that we never entirely grow up.

I'm not sure I can adequately describe the advances in

animation represented by Shrek , which

may be another reason why I shy away from posing as an authority on the

subject. I know what I like on the narrative level. The backgrounds look

interestingly detailed, and the donkey in particular has his anatomy and its

movements imaginatively integrated with his smart-ass personality. What Shrek is saying to both its adult and

child audience is mainly that ugly creatures can find happiness together if

they find and appreciate each other's inner beauty, or some such sentimental

and politically correct nonsense. Since most of us look more like the Ogre in Shrek than what most people would

consider an adequate prince in shining armor, it's a fairly popular message to

send. Of course, looks don't matter in the game of love-as long as that assumption

is not tested too often on the screen.

What gives Shrek

its special artistic distinction is its witty and knowingly sassy dialogue,

delivered by vocally charismatic performers whose voices remind us of their

stellar screen personae in live-action movies. As we were leaving the theater,

my companion and I wondered aloud why Mike Myers and Eddie Murphy didn't have

marvelous Shrek -like lines in their

recent live-action bonanzas. Here was Shrek ,

a cartoon directed largely at children, with more adult dialogue than either

the Austin Powers or Nutty Professor idiocies in which Mr.

Myers and Mr. Murphy were enmeshed, respectively, for the benefit of their

bankbooks. We had almost forgotten how subversively funny both could be. And

the same complaint can be made for the corny, vulgar vehicles in which a comic

genius like Robin Williams has found himself trapped in recent years. Perhaps

he needs a Shrek -like regeneration to

regain his comic and satiric edge.

Cameron Diaz as the spunky Princess Fiona and John Lithgow

as the grotesquely diminutive Lord Farquaad round out the cast of iconoclasts

trampling on the flowers of chivalry as well as the blessed creatures from

Disney's Magic Kingdom. For once, all the "inside jokes" work, so that takeoffs

on televised blind-date shows and the magic mirror in Snow White , and a lovesick, fire-spouting dragon who encapsulates

all the anthropomorphic excesses of the Disney oeuvre , do not slow down the narrative flow to a trickle.

I was happy in the end for Shrek because he was both

discriminating enough to accept his limitations and courageous enough to

realize that he didn't need a beauty to complete or transform him. I am

reminded of Marlene Dietrich's (or was it Greta Garbo's?) complaint after a

screening of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and

the Beast (1946), with its conventional ending of the Beast transformed

into a prince. "Give me back my Beast!" she cried. Still, Shrek goes even further by imagining the blissful union of two

Beasts, figuratively speaking, and that makes for an original fable, indeed.