by Robert Reno

THERE WERE TIMES in recent weeks when sober Americans might have felt they were being whipped into a state of hysteria more appropriate to a Nuremberg rally than for a long, messy war on the illusive enemy of terrorism.

This took the form of an unseemly obsession that if we don't keep chanting how great America is, how great New York is, how great Rudy Giuliani is and how masterfully George W. Bush has performed in his hour of crisis, we will cease to believe it. After all, what did our enemies expect? And what did Americans expect? That the congenitally combative Giuliani would collapse in a quivering heap, that New Yorkers would abandon their city, give up their rent-stabilized leases and home equity, that America would weary of the prospect of a war on terrorism as interminable as the one in Vietnam and that Bush, sober all these years, would lock himself in the Oval Office with a jug of Jim Beam? What sort of people do they imagine we are?

Anyway, the White House has adopted a policy of keeping America "on message" - of making sure every word the president utters is "coherent" and measured. This is a policy his speechwriters have carried out brilliantly. But there is a point at which patriotic one-liners repeated endlessly begin to wander over the line that separates the coherent from the banal. Someone must tell Bush his overuse of the term "evildoers" begins to sound like the chorus of a porch full of censorious old biddies in rocking chairs passing judgment on the virtue of passing floozies.

Meanwhile, Bush adviser Karl Rove met with Hollywood executives to enlist them in a World War II-style propaganda offensive. What will come of this is anybody's guess. Will gratuitous sex on the silver screen be cleverly used to send a message that Americans are as virile as ever, or will we be treated to a thriller in which anthrax wipes out Anaheim? Can Hollywood possibly re-create the Mrs. Miniver era by substituting Tony Blair for Winston Churchill and Madonna for Greer Garson? More likely, it will result in a puerile output of gratuitous rubbish, cheaply made to show even heavily Democratic Hollywood has climbed onto the Bush bandwagon.

It's all enough to give you the creeps, like somebody has a clammy hand on our backbones to keep us from going wobbly. A White House spokesman said, "The administration will share with studio executives the themes we're communicating at home and abroad of patriotism, tolerance and courage." He almost makes it sound like these are virtues decent Americans can't naturally feel without a shove from Hollywood.

And speaking of anthrax, the FBI is floating theories that it may have been spread by a single domestic terrorist - a sort of Timothy McVeigh with a PhD in biology and a self-imagined sense of patriotism as perverse as McVeigh's notion that he was making America safe for its David Koreshes. If so, this would put him in a class with such corn- fed, domestically produced evildoers as Theodore Kaczynski or the drooling fanatics who bomb abortion clinics.

Copyright © 2001, Newsday, Inc.

###