IT’S A MEDUSA moment. In New York we live in a state of dazed ambient anxiety relieved only by improvised avoidance therapy. People here have so many competing jitters that we no longer dare look at them. We have enough trouble rocking without turning to stone.

The imminence of war with Iraq is the last turn of the screw. A few blocks down from my apartment, sinister alien toadstools are sprouting on First Avenue. The satellite dishes around the United Nations proliferate along with our angst. My fax machine hums with fun invitations such as the International Crisis Group’s “Axis of Evil” panel with General Wesley Clark, after which I can turn in early with The Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston’s new non-fiction scarefest about smallpox as a biological weapon.

The rollout of AOL 8.0 offers my daughter’s Instant Messaging a sender’s choice of unsettling sound-effects. The perky tinkerbell trill that used to announce a pop-up message has been replaced by a repertoire of drum rolls, screaming cats, gunshots, crashing cymbals, car horns, chattering teeth, the portentous opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ Start Me Up and my son’s favourite, a short burst of mad, evil laughter that sounds like the Ho Ho Ho of a demented Santa. I have come to think of these sounds as the music of our times .

The season of angst has produced a rash of bloviating foreign policy panels and financial seminars. A sleek new investment boutique hosted a conference for all the heavies at a Wall Street hotel. The question was formally posed at the wrap-up dinner: “What’s the next Big Idea?” To which one of the CEOs present replied: “Aren’t we trying to recover from the last Big Idea?” Big ideas are the last thing on any mogul’s mind. What they want is another bottle of wine and a contingent of lap dancers to drink it with.

Even before war talk brought a chill to the incipient recovery, business types felt bummed out by the after-effects of the corporate malfeasance carnival. They have come to feel that no amount of house cleaning will do. New York State’s rapier-chinned Attorney-General, Eliot Spitzer, one of the few Democrats to defy last week’s debacle at the polls, has become the Eliot Ness of Wall Street. Buoyed by his election victory and the vacuum at the SEC, he has rededicated himself to the proposition that nothing is politically sexier than a manacled CEO. Spitzer is getting that hungry Bobby Kennedy look. He arrives with an entourage now. He makes everybody nervous.

CEOs miss being the Big Picture Boys they were before the bubble burst. They have to sweat the small stuff. They have to sit through all those demeaning managerial process meetings instead of Gulfstreaming off to Davos to think outside the box. There was a nostalgic detail in the tick-tock of the last days of Vivendi’s CEO, Jean-Marie Messier. On the day he received an insistent e-mail from his chief financial officer freaking out about a $12.7 billion loss (“the problem isn’t our businesses, it’s us, or more exactly, you”) he was tied up in New York conferring with Robert Redford about a film project for the Sundance film festival.

Everything sucks so badly on so many levels that AT (avoidance therapy) is one antidote of choice. Like Winona Ryder, Americans prefer to go shopping. Or read shelter magazines. Or talk about hair. A big topic is the coming world domination of the chin-length dirty-blonde haircut with split ends that flick distractedly upwards, as seen on Emily Watson in her movie Punch-Drunk Love and now in a more sexily wrecked version on Brittany Murphy’s cool, slutty character in the Eminem hit 8 Mile. For those who wish to contemplate something marginally more violent than bombs on Baghdad there’s the MTV box office phenomenon Jackass: The Movie. “Sharks snapping at crotches, electrodes attached to testicles, and someone snorting wasabi sauce up his nose,” reads the enticing summary in the New York Post.

Routed Democrats have gone into AT in a big way. The sight, back on CNN, of the anally retentive Mississippi Republican senator Trent Lott’s helmet hair and the knowledge that it will soon be displayed above the caption “Senate Majority Leader” is one déjà vu too many.

The post-election spinning of mortified Democrats shares a premise with all victims of public humiliation: if only people knew! If only people heard my side of the story! They cling to the tenacious old lie of tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, when in most cases the less aphoristic reality is this: to understand all is not to give a shit. Democrats refuse to face the fact that more Americans voted Republican because they wanted to.

Or else they’re identifying with the other side, like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Even Robert De Niro, a Democrat like most of his Hollywood brethren, suddenly broke his usual mordant reserve at a dinner party this week to declare: “Gotta take Saddam out and figure it out afterwards! Saddam is history and the world will have America to thank for it!”

IS AMERICA going to shoot even further to the right? A student of these matters at Princeton gave me his considered judgment: “You. Have. No. Idea. By the end of the year there will be a hyper conveyor belt in place to move every possible wingnut cause like greased lightning through the judiciary. Abortion? You better live on one of the coasts. Environment? I’d invest in gas mask futures — and it has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, let alone Saddam Hussein. Ever try to breathe in Houston?” The only consolation for liberal Dems is that the voters will now get what they asked for.

tina.brown@thetimes.co.uk