Work makes a comeback

By Julian Delasantellis

In the dark morning of September 11, 2001, Americans turned not to their proud paratroopers, their pompous prelates, certainly not to their peripatetic president, for solace and security, but to their pundits - who else was there, for hours upon hours, delivering commercial-free wisdom from the box in viewers' living rooms, seeking to explain the unexplainable?

A common refrain from the punditocracy was that, from that moment on, "nothing would ever be the same again". In ways unimaginable at that instant, American life would change, would be rendered unrecognizable from what was existent before. In much the same fashion that Pearl Harbor changed the careless youth of the summer of 1941 into the legionnaires of the great effort to obliterate fascism that was World War II, so it would be here, albeit no one really knew just how.