'Hey, Mr. Taliban! Tally me banana.” This delightfully flip epistle, written on a piece of cardboard and taped to the window of an ancient plumber’s van moving through a New York City still reeling from unfathomable devastation downtown and anthrax scares in its offices and mailrooms, was as comforting a notion as any in the past month. It said that New Yorkers continued to be, well, New Yorkers. So did the return of vintage New York Post HEADLINES—KABULSEYE! and TALI-BAM! were recent standouts. Here, by the way, is one indication of the city’s patriotic Zeitgeist: in the days immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center, sidewalk hawkers were gouging customers looking to buy American flags; a little more than a month later, those same vendors were displaying signs announcing that flag prices had been slashed.

Everywhere you look, things are returning to normal in an abnormal way. Arrogance is still with us: shortly after the attacks a wellknown mogul reportedly made two separate requests to the secretary of transportation for special dispensation to land his private jet at one of the closed New rk airports. To the secretary’s great credit, he refused both requests. Greed remains with us, too: nine days after the attack, a wealthy Texan and his wife, thinking that $4 billion was not enough of a fortune and having previously bought stock on leverage, were forced by a margin call to sell $2 billion worth of the family’s shares in a company whose stock is popular in children’s portfolios, thereby helping to drive the corporation’s value down by 8 percent. Ego: a magazine publicist called around to the morning shows looking to book the publication’s editor, who was eager to tell the world about visiting Ground Zero. (This was some two weeks after the attacks.) The editor made it on to one of the shows and proclaimed the search for survivors “poignant and sad.” Stupidity: another fool editor went so far as to proclaim an end of “the Age of Irony.”

Vanity Fair’s staff members, like other workers in Midtown New York—or in other cities around the country, for that matter—are noticeably twitchy over what comes next.

It didn’t help that the same lawmakers who urged Americans to return to the quotidian bolted the House at the first hint of danger. Forget the message that sent to Americans—imagine what it did for the enemy. And deep down we know that the conflict we’re in is really all about freedom: about the right for a 120-pound woman to drive a 45-pound child to a soccer match in an 8,000-pound S.U.V. that gets 12 miles to the gallon.

In a fit of patriotic fervor, I rooted around in my basement at home and found a lovely old cotton-and-linen flag on a pole that I had bought years before at a flea market, and lashed it to the railing of my stoop. It was nice to come home to every night. About a week after I had put it up, I was strolling down my street and noticed it missing. My flag had been stolen—no doubt by someone also caught up in a patriotic fever, if a light-fingered one. Two days later, and after a particularly trying afternoon at the office, I discovered my garbage cans had been stolen as well. Again, it was another sign that New York might be getting back to its old self.