If it came to a decision by a court, I think a judge would rule that lawyer Larry Mussenden is correct when he says Bermuda law does not support the Police randomly stopping motorists in the hope some of them might be among the 7,000 who haven’t paid their fines.

The principle that the Police ought to have some reasonable basis for stopping or searching people is so basic and so universal in democracies that it must enter consciousness at about the same time the tooth fairy is unmasked.

But if Mr. Mussenden expects today’s public to rise up in his support, he’s going to be disappointed. And to a large extent, he can thank Osama bin Laden and his attack on the Twin Towers for that.

I heard an amusing New York story not long ago. One of the candidates in the primary campaign for the City’s new mayor, one of those razor-sharp politicians New York breeds, was out with his entourage in the West Village, wearing a $5,000 suit, shaking hands and kissing babies.

A person of my acquaintance ... concerned intellectual leftwinger is probably the right label ... grabbed him by the arm and led him to a homeless person lying in a nearby doorway, obviously not in the peak of health. My friend felt the point — what are you going to do about this kind of thing, you heartless capitalist swine? — was so obvious it made itself, so he was content simply to gesture towards the pitiful sight.

But the mayoral hopeful saw it from a different angle. Apologising profusely for this blot on the New York landscape, he called a cop and had the bum removed.

The disparate ways in which my leftist friend and the New York politician read the significance of the homeless person seem to me to symbolise what the Twin Towers attack has done to popular consciousness.

September 11 was, among other things, the catalyst for kicking what was left of ‘60s liberalism pretty much off the field of moral battle.

Remember the days immediately after the Twin Towers came down?

A lot of people did what liberals have been doing since President Eisenhower was in the White House. They said it was very naughty of Mr. bin Laden to have done it and all that, but he couldn’t really be blamed because arrogant America had been asking for it.

Eric Foner, last year’s president of the American Historical Society and author of a text that is required reading in many high school and college classrooms, said: “I’m not sure which is more frightening, the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” I’ll bet he regrets saying that.

Andrew Sullivan, who with fellow transplanted-Brit Christopher Hitchens has become one of what the New York Observer calls “the most forceful, eloquent and influential voices in the American debate over the September 11 attacks and their meaning”, summed it up this way in an article in the Wall Street Journal, published on October 10:

“Of course the initial response of left-wing intellectuals to September 11 was one jerking of the collective knee. This was America’s fault. From Susan Sontag to Michael Moore, from Noam Chomsky to Edward Said, there was no question that, however awful the attack on the World Trade Center, it was vital to keep attention fixed on the real culprit: the United States. Of the massacre, a Rutgers professor summed up the consensus by informing her students that we should be aware that, whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of US foreign policy over the past many decades.”

Many of those jerky knees were in the academic community, whose present leading lights would have been starting their careers during the Vietnam era, and who apparently have never bothered to re-examine the structure of their morality since.

Ordinary people were listening with growing impatience. What little they had came to a dramatic symbolic halt in December, when the hapless president and publisher of the Sacramento Bee stood up to deliver the commencement speech at California State University. Ms Janis Besler Heaphy didn’t question the war, or the increase in domestic security. She simply questioned whether American values were being overlooked in the response of the law enforcement authorities to September 11. She was booed and heckled right off the stage.

The significance of her audience’s reaction — in California, for heaven’s sake — was crystal clear.

Most Americans (I’m not sure how it could be measured, or by whom, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a majority not just in America, but worldwide) saw Osama bin Laden’s attack on American as evil, pure and simple, and they didn’t want a lot of agonised gazing at navels. They wanted Mr. bin Laden’s head served up on a platter, quickly.

That is not to say that in this reaction, any disrespect to American values and the tenets of democracy was intended, or that those values will be admired and subscribed to any the less in the future. It’s just that now isn’t the time to be fixating on them.

Timing is important where causes celebre are concerned, and a civil liberty issue over whether the Police really do have the right to stop people in Bermuda in a sort of random fashion is about 35 years out of time. In the days of the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers, when all Policemen, soldiers and members of the government were fascist pig oppressors... OK, an energetic young lawyer could have made something of it.

But that was then, this is now, and a wide gulf has opened up between.

Communities like this one are fed up with crime and criminals, fed up with drugs, fed up with violence, and fed up with people who don’t take their responsibilities seriously. Failing to pay a fine is certainly a far cry from murdering 3,000 people, but all crime shares common ground, and the impatience that has been generated since September 11 is soaking into people’s feelings about crime generally.

Do Bermudians mind the inconvenience of being held up for a few minutes if the process results in bad guys getting caught? Probably not a lot.

Does it bother them that the Police might technically be going farther than they ought? Sorry, Mr. Mussenden. Not enough to make much of a fuss about it.