The banner on the Scholastic News featurette helpfully informs us of the significance of the terrorist attacks of five years ago: “9/11/2001: The Day That Changed America.” The phrase “9/11 changed everything” turns up about 78,000 times on Google and nearly as many times in your average Dick Cheney speech.

Five years on, the media gear up for an orgy of Special Reports, Heartwarming Features, and Television Events commemorating the anniversary — advertised, you’ve noticed, between spots for the other Television Event of the month, the start of the new season of programming. Clearly the television business hasn’t changed. What has, and how?

I was taking a political science seminar that semester from a well-known professor who had already written a book, Jihad vs. McWorld, whose title at least sounded somewhat prophetic. Our seminar met a couple of days after the attacks. I guess he felt he should say something wise; he started the class by telling us that “everything has changed, of course.” The one specific prediction I remember him making was that the missile defense system was no longer a live proposition. This seems like a foolish thing to have said (and a bad prediction, it turns out), but I don’t hold it against him — at the time nobody really knew what to say.

Graydon Carter, Roger Rosenblatt, and others predicted the end of irony, an even dumber prediction than foreseeing the end of a high-tech Pentagon boondoggle. Irony grows like mushrooms on the moist, reeking shit of human perfidy. It is nurtured by official lies, hypocrisy, self-deception, and vanity, among other constants of human existence. In these troubled times (178,000 Google instances), in fact, we need irony more than ever. Thank God for Jon Stewart.

Some expected a new national unity to follow the attacks, a setting aside of differences in the name of a newfound purpose. There was a great deal of unity in the immediate aftermath. We were all shaken and horrified, we all ached for the victims and their families, we all (or nearly all) felt anger at those responsible. Even in those early days, of course, the Bush administration was considering an invasion of Iraq and trotting out its “with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric, but the country was nearly united behind Bush, giving him approval ratings in the 80 to 90 percent range. Unity is not always a virtue and is sometimes even frightening. Thankfully, this unity did not survive the polarizing policies and politics of the Rove/Cheney administration.

What about the newfound national purpose? Mainstream pundits supporting both political parties say our new purpose is the War on Terrorism. This is a transparent fiction, but most people continue steadfastly to believe it — both the commentariat and the majority of the electorate. Everyone has their reasons.

Elite commentators and think-tankers within the political mainstream seem to like the War on Terrorism because it gives them a way to order the world. We used to have the Cold War, then things got a little messy during the ’90s and some people lost their heads predicting the End of History, but now we have some version or other of a Clash of Civilizations, a Noble Cause by which to organize our politics and direct our sentiments.

Some writers, like Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan (each in his own way, of course), seem quite excited at the prospect, as if a real War gives them some kind of bravery by association. Others, on the liberal end of the spectrum, have to make up for their lack of sufficient bloodlust early in the game by demagoguing on issues like the Dubai ports deal whenever they can. But everybody agrees on the basic outline, and none dares question the central pieties: that Islamic terrorism is an “existential” threat to America and the West, that terrorism as such can be eradicated, and that this War must remain the foremost issue on the public mind until it is concluded.

Among the general public, the War on Terror was at first a war of revenge, arising from a complex of fear and loathing as the country was forced to pay attention to Osama bin Laden, jihad, the Taliban, Kabul, Baghdad, and other far-away and ominous things. As James Carroll wrote in the Boston Globe last year, the stated reasons for invading Afghanistan and Iraq (capturing bin Laden, finding the WMDs) didn’t really matter to most Americans — the country simply wanted blood. What has changed since 9/11? Two wars and perhaps soon a third (against Iran) for dark reasons we can’t admit even to ourselves.

As the immediate passions of 9/11 have cooled, though, and as the quagmire in Iraq becomes more apparent (the one in Afghanistan, too, when anyone pays attention), support for the War on Terror is as much a matter of cognitive dissonance as anything else — see, for example, the large numbers of Americans who cling to the belief that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11. (Sixty-four percent believe there was a strong Saddam Hussein/al Qaeda link, according to a recent Harris poll.) It’s convenient for the Republicans to keep this and similar beliefs alive (even as Bush has had to officially deny it), but maintaining the belief has become a psychological necessity for many. The invention of new analysis-blurring categories like “Islamofascism” serves both political and psychological ends.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had largely the desired effect — creating terror. As a result, the U.S. has seen a rise in militarism and an increase in the nationalism that accompanies war. One of the striking things about the current situation, though, is the distribution of our national terror. I lived in D.C. at the time of the attacks and saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon across the Potomac from my neighborhood. I now live in New York. But in my own experience, people in D.C. and New York are fairly unconcerned about the risk to themselves of another terrorist attack. I myself have made my peace with the odds and decided simply not to live in fear, and I think many others have done the same.

When I visit other parts of the country, though, I’m surprised that people generally are fearful of another attack. People living in places Mohammed Atta never heard of consider terrorism a real threat to themselves and their families, and their fear-based responses — militarism and nationalism, even xenophobia — shape the political climate to the dismay of those of us who actually live in places that are likely to be targeted.

All this leads me to suspect that a large part of the long-term response to 9/11 is not exactly a response to 9/11 itself. Rather, the event has become a symbol or psychological stand-in for anything that is truly frightening. What is frightening is then marked off as unequivocally evil by the same childishly appealing logic Bush used to separate the evildoers from those who love freedom. Thus, the economic insecurity and apprehension about social change that have continued or accelerated in this new century become transferred to an event that, for most Americans, was no more real than electrons on a cathode ray tube.

9/11 becomes a comforting mechanism for defending oneself from the ambiguities of modern life — a touchstone of kitsch when one needs to cry, a noble cause when ones needs to separate oneself from one’s enemies. This mechanism also helps explain the fanatical devotion to Bush among his core, socially conservative supporters. Bush becomes as clearly identified with Right as 9/11 is with Evil — and Bush is the strong man, the needed authority figure to defend us from everything 9/11 represents, from unknown jihadis to abortionists and homosexuals and the middle-schoolers who have oral sex on MySpace.

What has changed since 9/11 is that America, collectively, has responded by taking yet another giant step away from reality. We show few signs of turning back.