The theaters are full of movies where some popular diversion captures the spirit of a nation in troubled times. Historians like to point to, say, a horse named Seabiscuit becoming a symbol of hope during the Great Depression. More directly, the US Olympic hockey team’s 1980 victory over the USSR vented some Cold War stresses. HBO tried to say that the 2001 World Series, played in New York only months after 9/11 rallied the world around the Yankees. Of course, I don’t remember it that way. I remember jumping up and down when Luis Gonzalez’s bloop fell in, thanking all sorts of deities and taunting my Yankees fan friends the next day. But maybe I’m a communist. By all accounts, America’s...