NEW YORK, 11 November — Little streaks of white jet-smoke in the sky over Washington speak of the new security mood in the United States. The air force has intensified its vigil over skies that once were immune from the problems that beset ordinary mortals in the rest of the world.

But it would take more than one air force, even America’s, to provide any sense of aerial comfort to New York, whose skies are a mass of red commercial dots as craft of every kind descends on the airports that thrive with the world’s attention. This is the city that the world visits every day and every night.

Sept. 11 is too traumatic to disappear from the consciousness so quickly; maybe it never will. But there is evidence that the depression is lifting. The vigor is back in the neon, and chatter is back on the sudden intimacy-wavelength that connects strangers on the streets.

Reminiscence dominates the content of print media, even as television descends to boredom with its repetitive formula of green squiggles purporting to be still life from Afghanistan and analysis that now shrieks in order to be heard above the drone.

Print has become once again the most powerful means of communication, employing as it does the brain above the camera. Magazines like the venerable New Yorker and the newborn Talk are at their best. Talk is edited by Tina Brown; Hillary Clinton helped make the first issue about two years ago a bestseller by discussing her husband’s infidelities.

The latest issue has a piece by Chelsea Clinton, who, like her father, is now studying at Oxford. She was in Manhattan on Sept. 11, staying with a friend. She called her mother the moment the sky exploded and the earth trembled. An assistant to her mother picked up the phone, and then the line went dead. Like the rest of the world Chelsea was hypnotized by the television screen.

Then she heard the deafening rumble of the first tower and the only image she could think of was Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall... Humpty Dumpty had a big fall... She went out. People were flying through the avenues like debris through a storm, shouting "Fire!" and "Bomb!"

She writes: "We were all crying. We all thought we were literally going to have fire rain down on us... For a brief moment I truly thought I was going to die. Once we stopped running, I started praying. I prayed for my country and my city..."

The Clintons are tough. Bill Clinton has chosen this week to remind America that Americans too once used terror to serve their interests. Against Red Indians, who they wiped out; and against the Blacks, who they enslaved. The right-wing is predictably outraged by Clinton’s "insensitivity".

But Clinton has the attention of an America in an introspective mood. The search for something, anything, even perhaps an answer, is on and the book shops are flooded with Islam, Afghanistan and conflict. For the conservatives so far, war is the only response. The right-wing leadership, which is in charge, knows that this is hopelessly inadequate but will not admit it readily. It is in disarray.

The news from the White House, provided over lunch by an old friend who has one ear parked inside, is that the vice president, Dick Cheney, is, to use power parlance, "dead meat". He made a fatal mistake on Sept. 11. He used the opportunity provided by a vacuum to usurp the president’s power, albeit for only a few hours.

Cheney probably became a victim of his own reputation. When he and George W. Bush were elected, he was applauded as the heavyweight who would provide the ballast for a lightweight administration. The joke was that Bush was only a heartbeat away from the presidency. After the towers collapsed and the Pentagon fell, Bush disappeared from the radar screen on the advice of his rattled secret service (the CIA is paying a price today for that rattle, incidentally).

Cheney sent out word that he was in charge. He did an Al Haig. When Ronald Reagan was shot in an attempted assassination his secretary of state Haig similarly "took charge". Haig was eased out. Lese majeste can be fatal, even in a democracy. Today, power in Washington has four faces, in descending order of importance. Bush is of course at the top, very much so. Donald Rumsfeld, defense secretary is second. Then Colin Powell, newly-assertive in a job he was initially uncomfortable with. And Condoleezza Rice whose personal equation with the president continues to thrive.

Perhaps the finest magazine cover I have seen is that of the New Yorker of Sept. 24. It is black, but not stark black. Not until you stare at the black does the silhouette of the twin towers begin to emerge, black against black. It is stark, simple, and has the beauty of a definitive statement. Inside John Updike is in fine fettle; his writing is descriptive, his art devoid of the need for artifice.

"Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our smallness. From the viewpoint of a 10th floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights, where I happened to be visiting some kin, the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers had the false intimacy of television, on a day of perfect reception."

For some reason I imagine Updike hammering these words out on a battered Olympia typewriter, perhaps because I first read him in the late Sixties. In 2001 he saw history outside the duplicate image as well. "And then, within an hour, as my wife and I watched from the Brooklyn building’s roof, the south tower dropped from the screen of our viewing; it fell straight down like an elevator, with a tinkling shiver and a groan of concussion distinct across the mile of air."

Life is obstinate.

"The next morning, I went back to the open vantage from which we had watched the tower so dreadfully slip from sight. The fresh sun shone on the eastward facades, a few boats tentatively moved in the river, the ruins were still sending out smoke, but New York looked glorious."

The most revealing stories from Afghanistan are those that describe the war for survival, conducted each day by a hungry, condemned people in a world where electricity is a dream. The most evocative that I have come across is the account of a French reporter, Michel Peyrard, who works for Paris Match. He slipped across the Pakistan border and went to Jalalabad wearing a tent top, head-to-toe burqa as disguise.

The thought of hard-boiled journalists searching for stories in a burqa is faintly ludicrous, but a journalist is never too far away from the thin line that divides his demands from desperation. The Taleban in charge of the jail where Peyrard was kept for 25 days was 24 years old. Peyrard calls him a megalomaniac, but all jailers are like that, aren’t they? You’ve seen the movies too, haven’t you? When one prisoner escaped, the jailer picked up his three nephews, aged 10, 13 and 19. He tortured the eldest, including with mock execution: a bullet went past his head hitting the wall behind. Nothing very new there. Peyrard’s arrest was more illuminating. He was paraded through the marketplace as a spy. A few people threw desultory stones at him, but most ignored him. That begins to tell a tale.

Peyrard made friends with his jailers, and they once took him out for a spin through the town on the excuse that he needed to go to a hospital. In return he had offered them lunch. More information here. The relationship was relaxed.

The jailers were also hungry for a good meal. And they had not stolen their prisoner’s money, otherwise our journalist could not have made the offer. This excursion came to an abrupt end when they saw a group of militants on the street. Rather than risk being stopped and questioned they went back to jail. The government therefore is a mix of the ideologically committed and the salaried.

The most revealing quote comes from one of the guards, who is young and who is sick of the Taleban regime. Why? He wants to hear music, he says. He has not heard music ever since the Taleban have taken over. But when Peyrard shows him an American propaganda leaflet dropped from safe skies (the skies, as one skeptical journalist in Washington said, have been saved from mullahs) the young Afghan explodes. What are the Americans doing here? he asks. What do they know about our customs? B52s have this terrible tendency of arousing nationalism.

When embassies negotiate interviews on behalf of their prime ministers they should probably haggle over display as well. The Washington Post did interview Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, but the interview was done by a reporter, Alan Sipress, rather than the editor, as had been promised. The interview appeared on Page 26. A story on the social impact of the economic plunge in Argentina got double column space on page one, but the leader of the world’s sixth nuclear power was shoved off inside on a day that, frankly, was not bursting with news.

Beside the Vajpayee interview, and given more space than the interview itself, was a story from the Post bureau in Delhi on POTO, the prevention of terrorism ordinance. I suppose they could have held over the POTO story, but they had probably declared Nov. 8 India Day at the Washington Post. Since there is so much competition in these matters, the Pakistanis have gone to the New York Times.

The New York Times published the interview with President Pervez Musharraf yesterday morning, on page one.

The American media is cool with all leaders, including Bush. The president of the United States gave an address to the nation on Thursday evening. NBC passed the televised address to its news subsidiaries, MSNBC and CNBC. CBS simply passed up the honor, as did public television. Fox wanted to put it on prime time, using what it called Level 1 intervention to break into money-making serials

But they saw an advance copy of the text and decided that the president wasn’t making news. They junked the story. ABC was the only channel that carried the telecast, because it did not have a money spinner slotted at that hour.

Story of the month: The CIA wants to hire someone who knows Arabic. And Pushtu. A bit late, but nevertheless... On the other hand, why don’t they just subcontract spying on the Arab and Asian world to the British? They would do it better, and at discount rates.