ithin a few hours of the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, every sector of American society began to reason out what the impact on our national life might be. It was a natural reaction, and it added up to the most astonishing burst of predictive energy most of us have ever witnessed. Scientists have calculated that the collapse of the World Trade Center released a force equivalent to one-twentieth of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. But there is no calculating the energy that has been expended in imagining what the future now might bring. Analysts with suitable tools, like economists and serious historians, tried to use those tools to picture the near- and long-term consequences. Everyone else took a wild guess.

In the first few days after the attack, cultural prognosticators announced the death of irony and the end of cynicism. The sitcom would be reborn, regaining its rightful dominance over reality TV, whose fortunes would wane in the wake of a televised reality more overpowering than anyone had ever imagined. Disaster movies were over. Hollywood needed the dawn of a new Doris Day.

One way to measure the immensity of what had just happened was to consider the immediate irrelevance of the icons of a moment ago, like Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez, who were trapped in their instant like flies in amber or Mariah Carey in "Glitter." Lucy and Ricky and Little Ricky Ricardo would do well to consider moving for a time from East 68th Street to Connecticut.

Some of these predictions were based on fact. Cookbook sales seem to have gone up, as did video rentals, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's explosive return to big-screen domination, in the role of a veteran firefighter, was indeed postponed. A sudden sensitivity to the psychic wounds inflicted by that disastrous morning was movingly evident everywhere. Radio stations reconsidered their hard rock playlists, excising a cultural rage that suddenly looked calculated.

These gestures were made in the spirit of patriotic unity, and they were made as ingenuously as the entertainment industry could make them. For a moment, all the disharmonies, all the inherent dissensions in our culture ・all the things that actually make it a culture ・were stilled in a nearly unanimous expression of grief, respect and outrage.

But America cannot live in the unanimity of that moment, nor should it expect to, no matter how attractive it looks. Everyone craved safety and consolation in strong doses after the attack, and the predictors of our cultural future suggested that in the months ahead we would need as much good-humored, inoffensive escapism as we could find.

But those predictions are themselves an artifact of the moment, the expression of a desire that is cousin to the fear we all felt and continue to feel. Irony is unchanged by the terrorist attack, for it is still a modality that America barely understands. Cynicism runs exactly skin deep, as always. The only difference in the entertainment offered to America after Sept. 11 will probably be the expectation that it is good for us.

Behind all these cultural predictions lies the assumption that what we really need to do is avert our eyes from what we have already watched in horror, that we need, somehow, to prevent our innocence from being further impaired by the smoke and ash and death that rained down on this country that day. That is a false, not to say a vain, assumption. The hard work of making cultural sense of those hours still lies ahead of us, for years to come, and it will not be done in a spirit of escapism or unanimity.

What we need most is the work of artists who do not flinch and who resent, in spirit, the tarps the city has thrown up around the disaster site in Lower Manhattan. That work, whatever form it takes, may not offer the consolation we feel we need now, but then it is not the job of artists to console us. Their job, however unseemly it may feel, will inevitably be to fracture this momentary mood, to lead us beyond what is merely safe and consoling.