udy Giuliani is being mercurial again. Nostradamus is falling off the best-seller list. CNN's ratings have dropped 70 percent from their post-attack peak. Jay Leno delivers a joke linking Osama bin Laden to Anna Nicole Smith. (Had it been funny, I'd repeat it.) Scattered among the bulletins of widespread layoffs are austere TV commercials in slo-mo black-and-white in which corporations pledge their solidarity with the American spirit.

Nothing has changed.

Then you pass by a fire station, and you see the snapshots of the dead, the flowers, the candles, the crayon drawings in which earnest young minds try to parse the irrational. This is grief served up raw, unmediated by artful "Band of Brothers" cinematography. No matter where you are in New York, a city where people like to think of themselves as being in control, the vertigo of Ground Zero still seems only a block or two away.

Everything has changed.

As we straddle this incredible moment, poised between a glimpse of Armageddon and a future only a fool would predict, there is rampant hunger for certainty ・a precious commodity far harder to track down than anti-anthrax antibiotics. In truth we don't know where we are ・or where all our enemies are. We're in limbo. The best we can do is try to differentiate between what has not changed and what has, and, most important, to figure out what hasn't changed but should. If we can't have certainty, maybe we can have clarity.

Terrorists can't alter the fundamental human equation. People are still capable of being both angels and pigs. Countless Americans have given untold millions to help families maimed by the attacks. Other Americans ignored Warren Buffett, Jack Welch, the Treasury secretary and other optimists by betting against a "patriotic rally" on Wall Street and short-selling stocks when the markets reopened in a swoon. Countless Americans raised a flag to show their love of country and their solidarity with the thousands lost on Sept. 11. Other Americans wrapped themselves in the flag to engage in patriotic one-upmanship, with some news stars (though, commendably, ABC News soon forbade this) sporting lapel effusions large enough to dwarf that of the country's commander in chief. NBC now affixes every frame of sitcom swill like "Emeril" with its promotional peacock logo outfitted in the stars and stripes ・maybe the first good argument for a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration.

But some things have changed, and they are not small. A country that during its boom became addicted to instant gratification ・and to a post-gulf-war military policy predicated on the idea of a silver bullet fired safely (and often indiscriminately) from on high ・is so far willing to let its government take its time and choose its means of battle. Of all the statements from Americans since Sept. 11, few have been more reassuring than a representative opinion voiced by Ryan Clark, a 19-year-old firefighter in Lewiston, Idaho, to a New York Times/CBS News pollster: "I would like to see quick justice, but if you jump the gun and attack the wrong person, it's not going to accomplish anything."

The country's patient mood has matched that of its president. In a matter of days, George W. Bush moved from rhetoric drawn from a Steve McQueen TV western of his adolescence, "Wanted: Dead or Alive," to an exquisitely calibrated, adult speech that drew the essential distinctions between "Islamic extremism" and Islam, between the Taliban and "Afghanistan's people," between a TV-ready war of "instant retaliation and isolated strikes" and "a lengthy campaign" whose clandestine operations may be "secret even in success."

But since that address, Mr. Bush is being given both less credit than he deserves from some quarters ・and too much from others. Liberals ・who, let's face it, assumed that the president would go off on a half- cocked, unilateral cowboy bombing spree ・must concede that he has put on the brakes. And in doing so, he stood up to a considerable chorus within his own constituency urging otherwise.

Such was the hysteria on the right after Sept. 11 that National Review's Web edition disseminated a call from the TV commentator Ann Coulter to "invade [the hijackers'] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." Presumably her targets include Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the home states of most of the 19 identified hijackers. Then came the "open letter" signed by William Bennett, Richard Perle, Gary Bauer and editors of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard threatening to brand Mr. Bush as a wimp ・guilty of "surrender in the war on international terrorism" ・if he bucked their demand to attack Iraq. Mr. Bush has to date blown off these influential armchair generals, coming down in favor of the more incremental, less unilateral strategy of an actual general, Colin Powell.

Mr. Bush has so far turned aside other wish lists from the right as well, including The Wall Street Journal editorial page's patriotic call for the president to use his high poll ratings in the aftermath of a mass murder to push divisive judicial appointments through the Senate. Mr. Bush's quick condemnation of Jerry Falwell's and Pat Robertson's effort to blame America first, notably its gays and lesbians, for the attacks not only forced the TV blowhards to a hasty retreat, but also hammered in, perhaps for years to come, how Taliban-like America's own homegrown mixture of fundamentalism and politics can be. As the president jettisoned these former allies, so he nimbly embraced a former b黎e noire, big government, to pump up the economy and airport safety ・even to the point of creating a new federal agency, the Office of Homeland Security, whose name, though presumably not its mission, has an almost Stalinist ring to it.

But the fact remains that, as far as the war goes, the Bush administration hasn't acted yet. The president's policies are a work in progress, subject to further about-faces. All sweeping judgments and bestowals of carte blanche on his leadership are laughably premature. Only in a foreshortened Hollywood scenario can an unproven leader change in an instant, with one speech, into a giant. Washington's rush to canonize Mr. Bush ・he's already been likened to Lincoln by the capital's dean, David Broder ・is gaseous complacency of the sort that got us where we are today.

This is a time for more skepticism, not less, especially from news organizations tempted to blur the line between jingoism and journalism. Until CBS News and The Associated Press blew the whistle this week, the White House's excuse for the president's elusiveness on Sept. 11 ・a phoned-in threat to Air Force One ・was widely reported as fact, not the spin it was. The administration, whose efforts to restrict civil liberties have even brought Bob Barr and Maxine Waters together in opposition, is so eager to stifle dissent in the media that its press secretary publicly denounced a smart-aleck as benign as a late-night comic ・in this case Bill Maher ・for a tasteless wisecrack.

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In this atmosphere, boosterism can drive out information, especially at a time when we prepare to bond with regimes that abuse human rights and wink at terrorists in their own midst. From our flag-decorated TV screens you would hardly know that the Taliban's internal opposition and our would-be fellow freedom fighters, the ragtag Northern Alliance, is anathema to Pakistan, our other frail new ally. Or that Pakistan and its military, with its dozens of nuclear weapons, are riddled with bin Laden sympathizers. (USA Today, which has been aggressive on this story, reports that "12,000 Pakistani parents named their newborn sons Osama last year," with 5,700 others opting for Jihad.)

Maybe it's now time to resuscitate irony from the deathbed to which it was recently consigned as well. Certainly it's an irony worth contemplating that, as the columnist Geneva Overholser has pointed out, the press largely ignored public Senate testimony a mere seven months ago in which the C.I.A. director, George Tenet, said that Mr. bin Laden's "global network" was the "most immediate and serious" terrorist threat to America.

The more we know now, the better, because knowledge is an antidote to the anxiety of change, and more change is the only certainty ahead. We can go back to watching all the late-night comedy we want, hopping on planes and rooting for Barry Bonds. But still the reality remains that another shoe will drop and that we have no idea whose, or when, or where.