Time to Ask: Who Are We?

President Bush concentrated in recent speeches on answering a question key to his war on global terrorism: Who is the enemy? But events and institutions conspire now to force Bush and all Americans to address a different question: Who are we?

Are we a nation in which the rule of law prevails even in times of emergency? Or has the coming of a new millennium, new technologies and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, altered the underlying values and norms of American society in ways we have not had time to understand, much less codify?

Such broad questions peek out of the ris-

ing challenges from Congress, the courts,

the media and others to Bush's insistence

on the need for greater secrecy and far-reaching presidential powers to counter wartime dangers.

The Supreme Court is not likely to address those societal questions directly when it decides in the near future on the imprisonment, without access to the courts, of Jose Padilla, an American citizen as well as an al Qaeda suspect. And newspaper exposs on secret CIA prisons abroad and warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency at home don't pose those big thoughts upfront. But the undercurrent of a historic identity check runs through those and other recent events.

The sense of a restoring of balance could be glimpsed even in the case of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, which in its own squalid way suggests the ending of a particularly self-indulgent moment in Washington history.

Eras flash by with startling velocity in today's hyper-connected, hyper-informed global society. The first five-year slice of the 21st century came to an end last weekend as Abramoff was striking a bargain with prosecutors to plead guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy charges. Coincidence? Or a wave of excess cresting and starting to recede? Here's why I think it is the latter:

A millennium mentality -- a psychological bubble in which people convince themselves that things are suddenly and irrevocably different, that old rules and laws don't apply to this particular moment/decade/generation -- dominated and helped corrupt the years on both sides of the changing of the century. Think of it as the too-many-zeroes syndrome.

That attitudinal matrix -- Germans call it zeitgeist -- spread across and out of the U.S. stock market and then hung on longer in global politics and business, especially after Sept. 11 and the U.S. response suggested that the world had spun onto a different, far more threatening axis.

Americans demanded that President Bush change the world and the nation, with Congress forcing an ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security on the administration and passing the USA Patriot Act in a whatever-it-takes rush. Bush and Vice President Cheney, it must be said, were eager to go in that direction anyway -- and have stayed on it longer than many in Congress, the media or the courts seem able or willing to sustain in the absence of new attacks at home.