What then?

So, here’s the score:

Thousands dead. Since some 50,000 people worked at the World Trade Center, set the floor at 10,000 and start climbing. Combine the workers, defense employees, firemen and plane passengers and our floor begins to sound like wishful thinking.

All 220 floors of the trade centers – as well as many buildings around them – gone. The Pentagon is now a square. Five commercial jets reduced to scrap metal. Movement or migration slowed or shut down. Business down to a crawl.

Now would be a great time to short airline stocks.

And it all adds up to … what, exactly?

Shock. The grating but unmistakable recognition of metaphysical lines being etched in the sand – thus Arafat’s desperate quivering lower-lipped denunciation of the atrocities in order to be with America rather than against her.

Fear. Relatives stretching already strained fiber optics networks by desperately phoning and re-dialing loved ones: Are you OK? Did you see it? Do you want us to come out there? What can we do? Businesses closing for lack of customers. Fighter jets patrolling the skies. The president being secretly shuffled from one location to the next until the coast was deemed clear.

Anger. The Devil may have all the best tunes but mass murder isn’t one of them – at least not on American soil. When even so balanced and cerebral a commentator as Virginia Postrel confesses to wanting to take out large swaths of the Middle East, a threshold has been reached. It turns out that Americans are not about to curl into a fetal position. They are mad as hell and they will not be bribed, pacified or distracted.

War. As the president made clear in his brief address on Tuesday night, retribution for the bombings will not stop with the deaths of the terrorist parties. Blame, he insisted, will be affixed to any government who “harbors” (or has harbored or has assisted or some variation on the theme) these monsters. As part of his marathon coverage, Glen Reynolds wrote:

George Bush is now the most powerful man in the world – people always say that about presidents, of course, but usually it’s only notionally true. Now, if he wants to nuke Baghdad, there is nobody to say him nay – and damned few who would want to. [D]o the people behind this assault realize what this means?

The better question: Do any of us realize what this means?

No. Not yet anyway. Beyond a certain point, events take on a life of their own and people become actors in a predetermined play: We have been attacked and so we must act. The blood of the dead cries out and American’s religious intuitions are still finely tuned enough to hear, and to be shamed by it if they do nothing.

So the most powerful man in the world will marshal the resources of the world’s most powerful government, with the full cooperation of the American people. Those responsible will be found and destroyed. And if anyone (or any group or any government) gets between the United States and the responsible parties, the destruction wrought will make Sherman’s march look like a walk in the park.

Hopefully, the fear of retribution will lead other nations to get out of the way or to hand the heads of the guilty over on a platter – perhaps literally. If so, it would be yet more verification of Machiavelli’s insight that it is better to be feared than loved.

But yesterday, as I wandered around my small, somber, Dutch, northwest Washington town and talked to people, and today, in Canada, at Mass and in an ad hoc prayer meeting, the other, darker possibility was on the edge of all our brains. What if it snowballs? What if a state has the audacity to stand up to the United States, “the great Satan,” and other likeminded tribes join in? What then?

Again, no one knows yet. But we wonder, and tremble.

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Jeremy Lott is the senior editor of Spintech Magazine.