Six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bill Maher of ABC's "Politically Incorrect" found himself in a little trouble. After insisting that we should not call the 19 hijackers "cowards," Maher then said that is was "we [who] have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly."

While dismay and anger over Maher's remarks are understandable, surprise isn't. After all, "Politically Incorrect" is the kind of show where off-the-cuff and ill-informed comments are marketed as entertainment. The show's express purpose is to disregard the sensibilities of both the audience and the larger culture. We're paying Maher to say the first thing that comes to his mind, the more offensive the better. Why should we expect him to think before he speaks?

Maher's problems are a microcosm of the entertainment industry's as a whole. If, as we hear, September 11 was the day "everything changed," and if, as the president told us, "night went down on a different world," then the rules about what is and isn't "grist for the entertainment mill" probably also changed on September 11. Some things simply are neither funny nor entertaining after you have watched thousands of people die. Some subjects and even genres we once found diverting now hit a little too close to home.

That's why, in the days following the attacks, three movies about terrorism, Collateral Damage, Big Trouble, and Bad Company, saw their releases delayed indefinitely. And movies set in New York, such as Spiderman, are digitally removing shots of the World Trade Center.

But if we've learned anything in the past month, we won't be content with asking whether the entertainment industry can do business as usual after September 11. If that's all it were, the adjustment would be relatively simple. Hollywood would follow the advice of folks like Robert Thompson, a professor of Media at Syracuse University. He expects more romantic comedies — what he calls a "sorbet" to "cleanse our palate" from the shocking images we have watched. He also anticipates more patriotic and escapist fare and, like Roger Rosenblatt of Time magazine, thinks that irony is, at least for the time being, out.

The real issue is whether we can continue to watch the same things and whether Hollywood can give us what we need. On September 11, scales dropped from our eyes. Much of what we professed to be true was proven to be wrong. The shibboleths and self-deceptions we used to both justify and comfort ourselves don't ring true anymore. They seemed empty and shallow. And so does much of what we watch.

It could hardly do otherwise. As Martin Kaplan of the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California recently pointed out, for nearly two generations, our entertainment, like the rest of the culture, has been in thrall to a worldview generally called postmodernism. In this worldview, Kaplan noted, "nothing really matters," "nothing has meaning, reality or truth," and "everything is socially constructed."

The result, both in life and art, was an indifference to questions of truth, as well as considerations of right and wrong. Belief in moral absolutes were deemed a sign of mental rigidity, at best, and, at worst, a form of intolerance. A calculated ironic sense, with an attendant inability to commit to anything or anyone but yourself, became the defining characteristic of American life. We devoted a disproportionate amount of time and energy to trivial pursuits and, instead of pursuing knowledge, were content with information, as long as it entertained us.

This worldview was sustainable in a culture where nothing bad ever happened, or at least was limited to someone else "out there." Then four planes killed more than 5,000 Americans and, as Kaplan put it, we remembered that "there is reality," "there is truth," and "there are things worth fighting and dying for." Just as we could no longer seriously argue that there's no such thing as right and wrong or "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," it became difficult to watch film or television shows that insisted that these, or their equivalent, were true.

Just as our beliefs need adjusting in light of September 11, so does our entertainment. We need different kinds of shows for the "different world" that we are living in. In a world were life has meaning and isn't merely "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing," we need shows where characters aspire to something beyond meeting their basic biological and emotional needs. If there are things worth living and dying for, and if we're counting on people to back up that belief with their lives, is it too much to ask that some of these things be depicted onscreen?

In a world where we watched 323 of New York's bravest die because they ran into a building others were desperately trying to escape, shows where our strivings are only about ourselves seem, well, obscene. Postmodernism, and the shows it inspires, is incapable of depicting aspirations other than the shrunken ones we've grown accustomed to seeing onscreen because a worldview that says "nothing really matters" provides no basis for these kinds of aspirations.

Stated differently, postmodernism can't give us the stories we need. And, it's unrealistic to expect stories that are almost entirely about the self — self-fulfillment, self-acceptance and self-preservation — to inspire selfless acts. For this you need the kind of story that Daniel Taylor wrote about in The Healing Power of Stories: stories that can help us overcome "the temptation to put [our] personal advantage above the common good." We don't need any additional reinforcement to "me-firstism" or appeals to our "needs and rights." Now we need stories that nourish and engage our moral imagination, the kind of story that scarcely gets told anymore, at least on screen: a heroic story.

Taylor specifically had "a story from long ago about wizards and hobbits" in mind. And, as fate would have it, we're gonna get that story around Christmas, if director Peter Jackson keeps his promise to adhere closely to Tolkein's vision in his adaptation of Lord of The Rings. A very different, but also heroic, story is the one being told in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers," based on historian Stephen Ambrose's book about the ordinary men who parachuted into France on D-Day and helped defeat the Nazis. But these are exceptions that prove the rule. And, it's significant that both of these shows are adaptations of literary works.

Can Hollywood come up with stories like these? Only if it believes there is a standard against which our actions can be measured. Before writers can imagine a hero, they have to imagine a moral universe where heroism is a virtue, a universe with moral absolutes.

And this requires learning the same lesson that our entire culture needs to rake away from the events of September 11: We were wrong. It requires considering the possibility that the moral traditions we discarded, especially the Christian one, were not only right about truth, reality and meaning, but that they might even have had something to say about the way we live our lives.

This is a daunting task. It's much easier to order up some romantic comedies and make some more Steven Seagal movies. (Haven't the American people suffered enough?) While this might be enough for the entertainment industry, it shouldn't be enough for us. We know better now.