FRANK RICH

One of the most persistent cultural tics of the early 21st century is Americans' reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors.

I'm always struck by the kids who turn up in New York and LA, and places in between. Chicago. Wanting to do theater, wanting to do independent film. Wanting to break into television or radio.

After 9/11, we realized that all these silly culture wars, and arguing about rock lyrics... who cares? You know, we, for some reason, remembered what our real problems are.

'Up in the Air' is not a political movie. It won't be mistaken for either a Michael Moore or Any Rand polemic on capitalism.

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

Feckless as it was for Bush to ask Americans to go shopping after 9/11, we all too enthusiastically followed his lead, whether we were wealthy, working-class or in between. We spent a decade feasting on easy money, don't-pay-as-you-go consumerism and a metastasizing celebrity culture.

As America knows, Obama turned down the lucrative career path guaranteed to the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review to pursue the missions of service and teaching instead. The potential rewards for our country, now that that early choice has led him into the White House, are enormous.

Of course most Americans don't know how A.I.G. brought the world's financial system to near-ruin or what credit-default swaps are. They may not even know what A.I.G. stands for. But Americans do make the connection between their fears about their own jobs and their broad understanding of the A.I.G. debacle.

For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC.

While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot.

Looking back at my high school years, I'm struck by how slowly history can move.

It is kind of tedious after a while, to parse politicians doing the same thing over and over again. The facts change from week to week, but the sort of masquerade doesn't.

No one is better placed or more philosophically suited than Obama to construct the new counter narrative as we go forward in our new New Deal. But many masters of the old universe, including quite possibly his chief economic adviser, can't recognize that the world has changed or should change.

History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return.

'Up in the Air' may be a glossy production sprinkled with laughter and sex, but it captures the distinctive topography of our Great Recession as vividly as a far more dour Hollywood product of 70 years ago, 'The Grapes of Wrath,' did the vastly different landscape of the Great Depression.

I grew up in Washington, D.C. But also loving the theater.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly.

Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word - depression - is next on America's list to avoid.

Nationalization would likely mean wiping out the big banks' managements and shareholders. It's because that reckoning has mostly been avoided so far that those bankers may be the Americans in the greatest denial of all.

Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans' anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed.

In that sense, when a Bush or a Gore, or whomever, goes on David Letterman, that's the news, too.

The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

When something really comes from the soul, I think it has a truth that you cannot find in politics.