Thinker's roundtable: What did America learn in 2001?

Kevin Starr, California state librarian

2001 will be remembered with the intensity with which we remember certain key dates in the development of the republic - 1776, independence; 1789, the Constitution; 1861-65, Civil War; 1863, Emancipation; 1917, World War I; 1941, Pearl Harbor; 1945, the atom bomb. The day bonded us inextricably to the world order, challenging the deep American sense of ourselves as a continental nation, almost like an island.

Father Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest in New York and editor-in-chief of First Things

The raison d'être of American influence - political, diplomatic, military - is now redefined in terms of the contest with terrorism, which, willy nilly, is a conflict of civilizations. The implications of this are as major as the reconfigurations of world politics around the two World Wars and the cold war of the 20th century.

One of the least-remarked, and probably most important, things that happened is that the yellow ribbons disappeared and were replaced by flags. Nobody declared that you were supposed to get rid of your yellow ribbons, or not bring them out. Since the Iran hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter, that has been the automatic, reflexive action of millions of Americans at any time of national catastrophe. This time they didn't.

Where did they go? I think the yellow ribbons were at least somewhat associated with victimization, the victimhood mind-set, self-pity, sort of a sentimental response. And the flag obviously represents something like national unity and resolve. And people just intuitively knew that the nation was under attack, and this was no time for getting all weepy with yellow ribbons.

My hunch is most Americans are going to go on living their lives as they always have, and that is: riddled with deep ambiguity. There's going to be a lot of vice and greed and selfishness and all the other things that we know about the sinful human condition - that's not going to change. But as a generalization, has Sept. 11 and its aftermath been indicative of a revival of public virtue and the very idea of virtue itself? Yes, I think one would have to say that has been the case, and it's a very encouraging development.

Dick Cavett, comedian and talk-show host.

This is the year I wondered where dandruff went. I don't see dandruff any more, not on myself or on others.

More seriously, maybe there should be an abbreviation like B.C. - how about B.T., before the trade towers? The nation's history was sort of stopped at that point and started up again in a whole other way.

A few days after the attacks, Mr. Cavett faced the awkward challenge of talking to a Broadway audience as 'The Rocky Horror Show' reopened.

I started off with no reference to it as I'm doing this monologue, and then I said, 'Well, we've all been through a lot' - and I've never heard such a silence. It sucked the room downward. First of all, there's nobody talking. But below that silence is a deeper level, almost like a vacuum. And I thought, 'What have I done?' And I edged myself back to talk a little more about it and then said, 'We need a couple of hours of fun.' The applause nearly knocked me over. The show went on and did OK. There was that feeling, 'I can't laugh, it's in bad taste; I wish someone would make me laugh.'

Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University in New Jersey and genome-mapping molecular biologist

Sept. 11 should alert us to what globalization really means. It means Coca-Cola in every refrigerator. But it also means that we have to be sensitive to what is going on in the rest of the world - in a way that we can sometimes, in our power and arrogance, not be paying attention to.

Ronald Steel, international relations expert at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris

Only in the South had Americans been defeated in war, occupied, their crops and cities razed. The South has a tragic sense of history which the rest of the country has always denied and replaced with ideas of infinite hope, opportunity, wealth, that there's nowhere we can't go, nothing we can't do, and nobody can stop us.

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