ROY EDROSO

Shocking as it may be to say so out loud, many conservative writers have been weirdly smug about September 11, seeming to celebrate the attacks as a salutary shock to their jaded, insufficiently serious fellow-citizens. At OpinionJournal.com, three bizarre examples recently appeared:

Claudia Rosset (Jan 3) descries our pre-attack Era of Good Feeling: "America in the 1990s had the odd feel of a place where all that really mattered was to hang on to the sense of youth," she fulminates. "It was cool to make money without quite knowing why." While Rosset acknowledges some real reasons for not liking 9/11--the dead folks and all that--she marvels that some silly people aren't happy to have been transported to the current, economically depressed wartime state. "I keep reading or hearing how sad it is that we can never again be young," she sneers, "never again bask in the bliss of total security, never again, in effect, stick our heads deep, deep in the sand and feel oh so OK about life." Good thing some of us are sufficiently grown-up to appreciate the New Seriousness!

Daniel Henninger (Jan 4) picks up the thread. "After eight years of the Clinton melodrama, public life simply looked unserious," he sniffs. Ah, but then the healthful, cleansing fire! "Much lasting good may carry over from September 11," Henninger writes--though he adds, oddly, that public schools probably won't get a lift from it (and "That's too bad").

The strangest silver lining is found by music critic Terry Teachout (Jan 4), who attributes the recent chart success of Diane Krall's "The Look of Love" to guess what? "I've been thinking that it might have a little something to do with Sept. 11," he writes. "Unless I miss my guess, beauty is becoming fashionable again." Beauty was made unfashionable, Teachout explains, by liberals who declared artists such as Louis Armstrong "unwitting capitalist tools, used to prop up the decadent ruling classes of the West." (No citation for this charge is offered.) But the horror of 9/11 reawakened a nationwide passion for "the solace that only great art can provide." Among Teachout's examples of this: Placido Domingo and the film of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Really.

The best answer to all this nonsense was delivered, by all people and in of all places, Ramesh Ponnuru of the National Review back in September. He warned of writers who "say how good it is that America has at last woken up from its torpor, that we are turning serious again after a season of frivolity. This is a mistake not least because our 'frivolity' has been a byproduct of our freedom, and it is freedom we are fighting to defend."

Rosett: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=95001678
Henninger: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=95001686
Teachout: http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=95001683
Ponnuru: http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru091401.shtml