Mourning has broken: how Bush privatized September 11.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin

President Bush did not say much publicly last month, on the second anniversary of September 11. He stood with his staff on the White House's sunny South Lawn as a chaplain conducted a private memorial service for those killed, but the president did not address the small crowd. He clenched his wife's hand during a moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., two years to the minute since the first hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center. Then he attended a short service at prim, yellow St. John's Episcopal Church, a block from the White House; on his way out of church he passed some reporters and gave them a few brief comments (99 words total) on the solemnity of the day. Then he went back inside his White House offices; that was all.

The President's muted remembrance could not have been more different from the way he, and the rest of the country, had commemorated the attacks the year before. On September 11, 2002, the president had taken a day-long tour around the Northeast, stopping for ceremonies at each disaster site: In the morning he visited Ground Zero, then the Pentagon, then a windy field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, before delivering a televised address to the nation in the evening from Ellis Island. I was a newspaper reporter in Philadelphia at the time, and I spent my morning on a similar, though much smaller-scale, tour of a half-dozen suburban towns, all of which had trundled out their cub scouts, police officers, and municipal flags for local commemorations. In the tiny mill town of Phoenixville, citizens had three options for memorial ceremonies: the county's, the Catholic church's, or the town's, which I visited, where the mayor read a solemn speech in front of the town's two dozen police officers, each in his dressiest uniform. The need to memorialize, even in this small, out-of-the-way community, was urgent and universal.

That same urgency was no longer evident on the second anniversary, in Phoenixville or in Washington. Nor was there any noticeable clamor for more full-throated commemorations. "Practically nobody has may particular use for the second anniversary," wrote Christopher Hitchens, in Slate, putting into words what many people were too embarrassed to admit. Two years after the event, the memorials already seem to have started to slip into the same obscure, dutifully patriotic realm that contains Labor Day and Memorial Day ceremonies.

That is due in part to the simple passage of time--priorities shift, memories fade, and we forget. But one year just isn't that much time. And we haven't simply seen a decline in the number, prominence, or popularity of the memorials: Their substance--what is being commemorated--has changed, too. On Ellis Island in 2002, Bush spoke of the attacks having brought the nation "to grieve together, to stand together, to serve each other and our country." Media remembrances depicted heroic firefighters, neighbors helping neighbors, and the defiant words of the president spoken atop the smoldering mound at Ground Zero.

Last month, there was little talk of unity and...