Instead, life is returning to normal, retreating back into its illusions. Ads are back on CNN, obscene in their banality. The stock market has re-opened, and the business of America is once again business. Hours after our lives were reduced to rubble, even while he was telling the press how the man who he had honored for years of service was presumed dead under tons of smoking debris, our dear mayor Giuliani, like someone's Jewish grandmother, was also advising that we should all go out for a nice dinner and buy ourselves something to take our mind off the pain. The other day, he pointed out so gallantly that now tourists might actually be able to get tickets to "The Producers." Ferris Bueller, the quintessential cocky '80s kid, Gordon Gecko Jr., defeats a giant New York-smashing dinosaur and then sings and dances and fucks Carrie from "Sex and the City" live on stage for you.

Consume, consume, consume. Consume for the good of the nation. It's the patriotic thing to do. Don't you assholes realize that this way of thinking is what landed us in this shit to begin with? (Well, that, and an 18th-century asshole named Wahabbi.) It's your fucking sport futility vehicle's gas mileage that makes us dependent on foreign oil, boys and girls. And do you think our gallant Commander-in-Chief's Texas oil buddies are going to advocate we look for alternative energy sources? And since when have the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P 500, more barometers of Walls Street's contentment with the latest crop of Columbian cocaine and Midwestern hookers than anything else, been equated with national security?

It's sad, really. It's a lost opportunity. I thought we were finally waking up. Last week, our generation was whining that we need a cause, idolizing the Steven Spielberg version of "The Greatest Generation," wishing we had some sort of purpose to our lives. Well, someone fucking handed one to us on a silver platter, and we took one bite and sent it back to the kitchen. We went back to working off our middle-class guilt by spending 15-hour days in an office, worrying about rent and never having enough money to have kids of our own and getting tickets to see Ferris Bueller, Live and In Person!

We at Corporate Mofo used to joke about revolution, about bringing the whole thing down, as if the suits who work in the office towers were some sort of lower life form whose refusal to go to college at Reed or Bard or Oberlin, majoring in Creative Writing with a minor in Feminist Basket Weaving, somehow invalidated our entire worldview. Well, someone blew them up for real, and, you know what? It sucks.

But, no matter how much we may wish it, things will never be, can not ever be, the same again.

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