Following Sept. 11, Nation Accepts the Unprecedented With Unimagined Ease

The “new normalcy,” as Bush administration officials like to describe life in America post-Sept. 11, has been heavy on the new and light on the normalcy. It’s the abnormal that’s suddenly normal. The Marines have a slogan: “The difficult, we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.” The new motto for America should be: “The unprecedented we accept immediately; the impossible takes (only) a little longer.”

The speed with which the unprecedented now becomes the unnoticed is breathtaking. Hardly anyone lifted an eyebrow last week when President Bush’s trip to the World Series was accompanied by a ban on commercial flights over Yankee Stadium--or a ring of snipers on the stadium roof. Or when the Postal Service announced it wanted billions of dollars from Congress to sterilize the mail from biological threats. Or when the administration announced that Vice President Dick Cheney, yet again, was being dispatched to an undisclosed “safe location”--in effect being hidden in a cave for fear of a man who lives in a cave.

It didn’t even seem that odd late last week when reporters asked Thomas J. Ridge, director of the White House Office of Homeland Security, about the risk of attacks on U.S cities from “suitcase-sized” nuclear bombs. Or the dangers of kamikaze airplane assaults on nuclear power plants. In this environment, it even sounded perfectly reasonable for the Pentagon to solicit script writers for out-of-the-box ideas on what terrorist schemes it needed to defend against. “Unfortunately,” Ridge said, in a chilling yardstick of the new normalcy, “the business we’re in, we have to deal with ‘what if.’ ”

Only California Gov. Gray Davis managed to stir debate late last week when he publicly warned that terrorists might be targeting bridges along the West Coast. Like lawyers, politicians long have been accused of chasing ambulances--exploiting tragedies to advance an agenda or draw a spotlight. Davis may be the first politician accused of preceding an ambulance, with some critics quietly gibing that the governor was more concerned about attracting cameras than repelling terrorists.

Yet it seemed difficult to indict Davis for alarmism when Ridge, the next day, announced that the administration’s warning of a potentially imminent terrorist attack would remain in place . . . indefinitely. Compared to such an open-ended, unbounded cry of alarm, Davis’ meager trumpet about the California bridges seemed almost restrained and cautious.

Davis and Ridge--and hundreds of other officials at every level of government and law enforcement--all were grappling with the proper balance between vigilance and reassurance. Unfortunately, no one has yet to calculate the perfect mixture between the two. That uncertainty is another mainstay of the “new normalcy.”

It was only days ago, after all, that the administration drew criticism for initially downplaying the anthrax threat. “Premature efforts at reassurance and transparent efforts at spin have done more damage to Americans’ confidence in their government than any outbreak of alarmism would have,” conservative strategist Bill Kristol wrote.

Public health officials and postal administrators now are under fire for not moving more quickly to test Washington post offices for anthrax contamination. In New Jersey, where three of the anthrax letters were postmarked, the acting governor wants the federal government to pay for testing every post office across the state. It’s probably not long before pressure builds for testing every post office in the nation.

Against that backdrop, it’s difficult to blame public officials for doing everything they possibly can to signal that they are on top of the problem. After Davis’ news conference, no one could accuse him of under-reacting, as critics had Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson after the first case of anthrax in Florida. If terrorists strike again, no one can say the Bush administration ignored the straws (spores?) in the wind--the warning is there, on the record, for all to see.

The incentive isn’t all political; as Davis suggested, publicizing a potential threat may legitimately discourage terrorists from pursuing it. In that sense, better safe than sorry isn’t a bad guidepost for officials debating whether to disclose ambiguous information.

The cost of this diligence, however, is dissonance; these calls to permanent vigilance are like a fire alarm screaming through Bush’s urgings that the country return to normal life.

Which is not to say there aren’t signs the country is returning to normal--especially outside Washington and New York, the cities most jolted by the hijackings and anthrax attacks. A reassuring frenzy is building for the release of the first Harry Potter movie. Politicians are enthusiastically flaying each other in the final hours of Tuesday’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. And the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks produced a World Series for the ages--along with the reminder that resilience may be the most characteristic American trait of all.

Yet it is the image of Bush at that one World Series game that bounds the limits of this new normalcy. Presidents have been attending baseball games for decades. But none ever traveled with as much security as Bush did; if he were visiting Kabul, Afghanistan, it’s difficult to imagine that the Secret Service would have demanded much more firepower than it insisted on for the Bronx.

There’s something ineffably, immeasurably sad about that. The thought that the president can only travel to New York after what amounts to an occupying army had cleared his way suggests just how much America has lost since Sept. 11. Possibly not since Abraham Lincoln, en route to his inauguration, was secreted onto a midnight train through Baltimore--to foil a suspected assassination plot by Confederate sympathizers--has a president’s travel inside the union demanded such precautions.

Lincoln endured, and the nation survived the searing crucible of the Civil War that his train carried him into. America will undoubtedly survive this challenge too. But perhaps only at the price of a very new, and unsettling, definition of normal.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.