America's steely resolve to speak up for humanity

Well, yes of course I can remember in excruciating detail everything else that was going on, and everything else I should have been doing, on the morning of 11 September past. But this recollection is of little more interest to me, or to you, than its commonplace ancestor, the old tale about what the teller was up to when Mr Kennedy met his bullet in Dallas in 1963.

Who cares what the average emotional reaction was? It is no more than a reflection of the fact that everything is now on TV, and that as a result everyone can "be a part of it".

"All changed, changed utterly", as Yeats once put it, about a country, incidentally, that has been slower to change - never mind the "utterly" - than almost any other. On that day, I personally didn't "change" a bit. I had a slightly harder time of it than some, for reasons I don't need to bore you with, but nothing vital to complain about.

I already hated and despised the Islamic absolutists and regarded them as personal enemies, and I do recall feeling that now the period of "under-reaction" to this threat would come to an end.

But did my surroundings change? Not much. I was trapped on another coast and had to drive a long way and stay for days in an unfamiliar city, and had to look at the sky and see only military planes, but the astonishing thing was the atmosphere of normality.

When I finally got to Washington and New York I was impressed by the way that unimaginable things, like street-corner shrines to "the missing", had become an accepted part of the scenery.

My younger daughter, from whose side I had been anxiously absent for a while, believes (and may be right) that she saw the plane diving towards the Pentagon from her school playground.

Is she "traumatised"? Not at all, or not in any intelligible sense. I knew somebody who was on that very plane. Am I devastated? No. I sometimes see her husband. Is he addicted to "healing" classes? Not a bit of it.

My friend and editor Graydon Carter was quoted, a little while after the aggression, as saying that irony and frivolity and the whole world of "that's entertainment" would be overlaid by a new seriousness. For a nanosecond, I thought he might be right. (He now wishes he'd never said it, but I still wish he had been right.) Others said that Americans would now treat each other with more respect and care, regardless of "race" or ethnicity.

The race and ethnicity point feels to me as if it has some unprovable truth to it, but it's still been the worst year in memory for Americans robbing their fellows in the name of sanctified greed.

The largest everyday change has been in the amount of utter stupidity inflicted upon law-abiding people at the country's airports, but few people take this seriously because even if it doesn't make us more safe, at least it doesn't (unless, like me, you think of official idiocy as potentially lethal) make us measurably less so.

The largest political change is this, and it may turn out to have historic implications. The party of "small government" has embarked upon a gigantic enterprise of enlarging the state. This is not just the enormous increase in all forms of military spending, but the creation of a huge internal system of surveillance and security.

If there is one thing I shall never forget from this time last year, it is meeting the friends I had in the government bureaucracy and seeing them quite pale and wasted with shock: they had known no more of what was going on, and sometimes less, than an ordinary newspaper reader or TV addict.

That humiliation is supposed to be repaid in spades. Never again the official admission of total ignorance, or do I mean innocence?

I must say that I think this is being absurdly overdone: when the state refuses to publish even the names of its detainees I always suspect that this is because it has lost them, not because it thinks that publishing the names would be too dangerous. And there are other dangers, to things such as the Bill of Rights, which this practice is designed to forget or to dismiss.

But when Mr Bush justified his spending increases on the ground that massive government spending was good for the economy, I distinctly heard an ideological shift as well as a pragmatic one. The other change is also so weighty that it will take some time to sink in. American society is not as wanting in self-criticism as many observers believe.

People have an open mind and often a queasy conscience where foreign policy is concerned, or the enviable wealth of their society. I must have read three dozen well-meaning columns in the past three days on the need to listen to something called " European" misgivings about, say, current moves in Iraq.

But beneath this curiosity and politeness - insufficiently credited elsewhere - is an absolutely tungstenhard determination.

Many of my neighbours might simply say that last year's atrocities were attacks "upon America", and be content to leave it at that. In the past, voters have followed presidents for no better reason, and with not much more rhetorical elaboration. They have also deserted presidents who they later suspected were exploiting such rhetoric.

But this time they believe, in their way, that these were also attacks upon civilisation and liberty and humanity and decency, mounted by a repellent foe with whom there can be no compromise. And this they affirm in their own hearts and minds, without the need for any official reinforcement.

That's why I would just as soon not have written for any "anniversary", because this slight but tectonic shift deserves to be called not 9/11 but 24/7.

? Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.