Courage and manliness had gone completely postmodern. They depended on art direction and set design. As long as you could convince people you had them, you did. The Democratic party needed to cowboy up a little, or else that hickory-smoked hunk of manhood known as W. would ride off with a permanent Republican majority into several decades’ worth of sunsets. Seven years later, of course, the buckaroo from Crawford has ridden himself off a cliff and taken the country with him. The smoke-’em-out, dead-or-alive rhetoric is now a desiccated skeleton in the distant sand. The unity and resilience demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 has been transformed by a floundering political party and a useless national media into the cheapest kind of cardboard macho. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t maintain its attractions.