I have every faith that a year from now or five years from now, we will start to see subtle fiction and great films chronicling and making sense of these terrifying, flabbergasting times we are now living through.

In the short run, though, we have instant pop cultural attempts to respond.

Like the NBC TV show West Wing, which rushed to produce, in record time, a dull, preachy, social-studies-pageant episode.

And from CBS, the opposite problem - CBS is finding that its new show about the CIA, The Agency, is too prescient, too topical. The premiere episode had a reference to terrorist bomb and bin Laden -- that show was pulled. And then it had an episode about an anthrax epidemic. Also pulled.

But outside the nervous frenzy of the executive suites of networks and studios, some entertainers are simply trying to entertain.

On a web site called gotlaughs.com, for instance, there's a very silly and very funny animated music video, in which a Colin Powell character sings a familiar tune as missiles fall on terrorist hideouts. It reminded me of Bugs Bunny's World War II cartoons.

Last weekend, there were big pop music benefit concerts in Washington, Nashville, and Manhattan. And the watershed event, no question, was the five-and-a-half hour long Concert for New York City, broadcast live on VH-1, the middle-aged music channel.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but near the end of the show, after the great moments -- like thousands of uniformed New York cops and firefighters rocking out to The Who -- and the inevitable lame moments -- like Janet Jackson, live from Pittsburgh -- I experienced an epiphany.

Paul McCartney closed the show, singing a couple of his songs, then two perfect Beatles songs, Yesterday and Let It Be. And then he sang a brand new song that he'd composed. Eric Clapton joined in with a guitar solo. "I'll fight for the right to freedom." It was a stunning moment.

Clapton and McCartney, two rock gods, living 1960s avatars, earnestly belting out what is, in effect, a hawkish, pro-war anthem….the kind of song no hipster would have been caught dead playing or singing any time during the last 35 years.

The police and firefighters at Madison Square Garden sang along. So did the tens of thousands of civilians in the audience. And so did I, mentally, at home. It was clear at that moment that the 60s are now officially, absolutely over.

It was also scary -- not the sentiments expressed, not old rock-and-rollers feeling patriotic -- what was scary was this final certification that we really have entered a new age, and a life and death struggle for a way of life.

Rock musicians are no longer wearing Uncle Sam hats and stars-and-stripes shirts with contempt or irony. If Jimi Hendrix were alive and playing his Star-Spangled Banner today, right now, I'm betting it wouldn't seem a perverse or ambivalent act.

It would just seem….American.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.