Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11By Thomas L. Friedman, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 383 pp., $26Get Your War OnBy David Rees, Soft Skull Press, 80 pp., $11

Looking back over the last year is a little like trying to process the initial shock of all those televised images of the smoking hole in the Manhattan skyline. How can you wrap your mind around something so immense, especially when what you’re trying to grasp is an absence? What’s missing is not so much a sense of the way things were as the way they are, and how we got from there to here. The question isn’t if we’ve gotten back to normal. The question is, does anyone remember what normal used to be?

In a way, the most thought-provoking parts of Longitudes & Attitudes, the collected New York Times columns that this year won Thomas L. Friedman his third Pulitzer Prize, are the handful of pieces which predate Sept. 11, 2001. Less than three months before the World Trade Center attacks, Friedman wrote in the voice of a gloating Osama bin Laden elated by the U.S.’ unwillingness to risk military casualties abroad: “[W]e are not going to attack America’s strength at home. We are going to attack soft U.S. targets abroad through shadows.” The point isn’t to catch Friedman out for his cloudy crystal ball, but to recall how a sense of domestic security insulated even the most educated of observers (as a former chief of the Times’ Beirut and Israel bureaus, you can bet Friedman has had plenty of experience with suicidal Islamic extremists). “The World Trade Center is not the place where our intelligence agencies failed,” he wrote on Sept. 25. “It is the place where our imaginations failed.”

While this collection of columns, which is to be published on the one-year anniversary of the Trade Center attacks, inevitably records its share of repetitions and rephrasings -- Friedman makes ample use of the columnist’s bully pulpit -- it’s invaluable as a week-by-week record of the dauntingly turbulent times. Details which might have gotten lost in the shuffle are held up to the light, like the fact that members of Osama bin Laden’s family were spirited out of the country on a Saudi government jet before they’d been properly questioned. But most importantly, what Friedman provides is perspective, and not just his, or our, own. The 11 months’ worth of post-Sept. 11 columns record five separate trips to the Middle East, the first less than two months after the fact. Though Friedman can be scathing, particularly with regard to the Saudi government and Yassir Arafat (he accuses the latter of creeping “bin Ladenism”), he is on the ground in Tehran, in Riyadh, in Islamabad, recording the voices of reform-minded Arabs who hold out the hope, slim as it might be, that the U.S. might use the attacks as the impetus to improving its relations with and understanding of the Arab world. Among other things, Friedman points out the absurdity of Iran, the country with the largest reform movement in the Middle East, being labeled a part of the “axis of evil,” while the autocratic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt -- the countries that literally gave birth to most of the Sept. 11 hijackers -- get a free pass.

Not surprisingly, many of these columns overflow with anger, although the 80-page “diary” which closes the book allows Friedman time for reflections not confined to 740-word salvos. But for the most part, Friedman’s anger is righteous, not blind, although his justifiable rage at Arafat spills over into a quasi-absolution for Ariel Sharon. (It may be true that Sharon would not have been elected but for Arafat’s actions, but that hardly makes everything Sharon has done since Arafat’s responsibility.) More than once in the months following the 11th, Friedman says that we have entered World War III, but he cautions that “the real clash today is really not between civilizations, but within them -- between those Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews with a modern and progressive outlook and those with a medieval one.” How that conflict will play out is anyone’s guess, but Friedman cautions us to prepare for the long haul. Sept. 11, he writes, “is, I am convinced, one of those rare major historic events that will turn out to be even larger, even more important, than it first seemed. And we are not at the beginning of the end of understanding it or its implications.… We are still at the beginning of the beginning.”

I had initially planned to combine Friedman’s book with the trio of academic essays due to be published by Verso on Sept. 12, but it seems that if irony remains alive and well, academicism may have been dealt at least a temporarily crippling blow. To read Jean Baudrillard saying, in The Spirit of Terrorism, that “[t]he West, in the position of God… has become suicidal, and declared war on itself,” is to confront the fact that there is no event so great that it cannot be warped beyond recognition by a mind in love with its own theories. Perhaps the best antidote to the flood of rhetoric has up until now been found only on the Web, in the form of David Rees’ satirical comic strip Get Your War On, now collected in a slim volume due to be published “on the one-year anniversary of the bombing of Afghanistan.” Rees’ foul-mouthed clip-art cubicle jockeys trade agitated barbs that both reflect and lampoon the country’s impatient anxieties. Fumes one in the middle of the bombing campaign, “Can’t we just build a fucking bomb the size of the Earth and cut a hole out of the middle in the shape of the United States?” Sir, Donald Rumsfeld awaits your call.