There are a number of things to be thankful for in the wake of last month's shocking terrorist massacre in New York and Washington. Imposing as the death count was — dwarfing that of even Pearl Harbor, for example — it could have been far worse. Had that fourth plane not crashed in the Pennsylvanian countryside due to the self-sacrificing acts of several passengers, had the third smashed into the center of the Pentagon instead of glancing into its outer edges, or had the World Trade Center been hit only an hour or so later, when filled to capacity, casualty figures could well have been in the tens of thousands.

Then, too, we all know that a different sort of assault, involving chemical or biological weapons, might have killed hundreds of thousands or even millions. Of course, we are by no means out of the woods yet. According to Italian intelligence officials, the attacks of September 11 were part of a long series of planned Islamist terrorist attacks on the great cities of the West. Genoa, Italy, during the Summer conference of "G-7" nations, apparently narrowly escaped disaster due to the astronomically high levels of security taken there (which precautions were, incidentally, sneered at by left-leaning newspapers from Rome to Los Angeles); and London has been confirmed almost certainly as a target. Last month's victims were surely the first of many more to come in the ongoing war between western civilization and its enemies.

But they may not have died in vain. While America's mainstream media organs often get big stories wrong, the clichés we have all been hearing since September 11 about America's "national awakening" actually have a ring of truth to them. I'm not talking merely about the ubiquitous flag-buying and flag-waving, which, while encouraging, may indicate little more than a passing enthusiasm.

No, there really is something new under the American sun, a cultural transformation so swift that many people may have missed it. The best way to describe it is by noting what is suddenly absent. What happened, for example, to the "anti-globalization" radicals, who just several months ago dominated world headlines after the violent protests which rocked the Genoa conference? Now that Osama bin Laden has revealed the inevitably horrifying consequences of such virulent anti-American hatred, many of his "anti-globalization" fellow-travelers in this country seem to have burrowed themselves into a hole in shame and embarrassment. "Was it one of us?" asked one such anti-American extremist after the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11 at www.urban75.com, a site frequented by anti-globalization activists. That he felt compelled to ask the question speaks volumes about his movement's sudden loss of respectability and reputation. Good riddance.

Here in Manhattan, usually a hotbed of political radicalism, left-wingers who despise the American way of life have been confined to the margins due the proximity of the carnage. Good old radical Berkeley, as my colleague David Orland has reported, is far enough from the smoking rubble to have avoided a reckoning with political reality, but the same can obviously not be said for my own Manhattan neighborhood near Washington Square, only 20 blocks uptown from ground zero. While I noticed a few self-published, blame-America "editorials" posted on the ground in the first week after the attacks alongside the shrine to the victims at Union Square, they were soon washed away by rain and do not appear to have been replaced. A flyer advertising a march for "peace and justice" I noticed in a pizza parlor in the notoriously bohemian Greenwich Village area last weekend ("war is not the answer") had been almost totally ignored. Not a single customer, I noticed, had ripped off the directions to the march printed on pull-off slips at the bottom of the flyer. This was not surprising, since the march was supposed to have taken place in lower Manhattan on Saturday September 29th, and I don't recall seeing a single protester anywhere all day.

And where are the feminists hiding? Well, okay, they haven't disappeared entirely. But most of them have shut up temporarily about the evils of patriarchy after our nation saw no less than 300 rescue workers, police officers, and firefighters — nearly all of them men — die after rushing into the blazing inferno of the World Trade Center to save the lives of thousands of their fellow citizens. It turns out there are differences between the sexes, and not all of them are always notched in women's favor. Men dominate the heroic professions — soldiering, policing, the fire and rescue brigades — not because of a social conspiracy, but because very few women are strong and durable enough to meet the stringent physical requirements of the job.

Valor, chivalry and self-sacrifice are suddenly "in" again, along with big, burly man's men. Visit any fire station in greater New York, and you will be overwhelmed by the spectacle of candles, movingly written tributes, and enormous bouquets of flowers piled as much as ten feet high. Firefighters, culturally invisible just several weeks ago, are suddenly the toast of the town, enjoying perks (free meals, VIP treatment, benefit concerts and the like) usually reserved for celebrities, politicians and fashion magazine editors.

Those trendy intellectuals stupid enough to protest the new patriotic values, meanwhile, have finally received the ridicule they so long deserved. No less than two acclaimed feminist writers have made fools of themselves by taking surreally embarrassing family squabbles public. Writing in the New York and Washington, DC-based The Nation, Katha Pollitt proudly confesses to refusing to buy her daughter an American flag so that she could pay homage to the victims of September 11. The stars and stripes, you see, represent for Ms. Pollitt only "jingoism, vengeance and war." Still, Pollitt is a reasonable anti-American extremist who, in the egalitarian give-and-take of new age mothering, is willing to compromise. Finally, she tells her daughter "that she can buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that's hers, but the living room is off-limits." Don't you wish your mother was this "generous"?

On the Left Coast, meanwhile, the pretentious new age novelist Barbara Kingsolver, in an editorial published in the San Francisco Chronicle, reached even lower depths of ignominy. After narrating a Pollitt-esque argument with her daughter over her school's recommendation that she wear red, white, and blue to demonstrate solidarity with the victims of the September 11 attacks, Kingsolver lets forth a tirade against patriotism that can scarcely be believed. Citing the one confirmed post-September 11 incident of a fatal anti-Arab "revenge" attack against a poor Sikh man who wore a turban (I believe this mindless murder took place in Phoenix, Arizona — although Kingsolver, oddly, claims it was in "a city near [San Francisco]" to scare her readers), and the supposedly "bullying" tactics of unnamed talk radio hosts trying to upend criticism of our President, Kingsolver declares that the American flag now stands for "intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia." In Kingsolver's twisted radical feminist worldview, there is no difference between waving the flag and killing innocent people. We can only be thankful that her daughter apparently doesn't always listen to this moral idiocy. And after seeing Kingsolver's embarrassing tantrum in the San Francisco Chronicle, one imagines that many people will think twice before buying more of her novels.

Even the urban bohemian lifestyle left — in New York at least — has been chastened. On the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, I walked over to the intersection of Christopher Street and Manhattan's Westside highway, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered to cheer on the rescue workers, firemen, and support personnel who were heading downtown to the disaster scene. The most remarkable thing about this scene was its location: Christopher Street is well-known as a lesbian-gay hub in the city, the sort of place where police officers are not usually welcome. But on this day at least, all the lifestyle liberals were cheering unabashedly for the men in blue. Many even waved patriotic signs that would not have seemed out of place in small-town America. "We are stronger now," one man's placard proclaimed. A young female patriot strove for Churchillian eloquence, her hand-painted pennant admonishing the terrorists that "The dust will settle. A nation has arisen."

In these difficult times, we should all try to remember that wars always galvanize mankind's best instincts along with his worst. Like a broom clearing a closet of dust and cobwebs that have been building up for years, the mental clarity attained when evil declares war on good helps to wipe out decades of loose thinking and moral confusion. Radical feminism, multiculturalism, all the bunk and junk of political correctness that has been taking over our schools, universities, and workplaces — all this has been exposed at last as pernicious fantasy, as the paranoid ramblings of a comfortable society with too much time on its hands.

Suddenly we remember what is really important: protecting the precious lives of our families, friends and countrymen. Sure, we can still laugh at ourselves, still have fun, still hope and dream and fall in love. But we will now cherish the opportunity to do all this, reminded as never before about what is truly important.