Once in a generation, an incident in the local news crystallizes the mood of the current age — the zeitgeist, the “ideas in the air,” the stuff that everyone’s doing except me because I don’t get off work until 10:30, and by the time I get through the traffic from all the road work along my commute, everybody’s in bed. But you don’t want to hear about my problems. You want to hear about an incident that defines our generation, and that happened right nearby in Piscataway.

I quote now from a recent story in the Associated Press.

“Reports of a suspicious package at Rutgers University’s Busch Campus Center on Sunday disrupted Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader’s campaign speech there, officials said.

“About 800 people in the building, including about 500 attending a rally for New Jersey Green Party candidates, were evacuated shortly after 3 p.m. when a tiny ‘fart bomb’ went off in the back of the room, according to a university new release.

“The two-inch-by-two-inch mylar package ruptured, making a small popping noise, but it was not loud enough to disrupt Nader, who was fielding questions from students after giving a 90-minute speech inside the student center’s large multipurpose room.

“No one was injured, and there was no damage to the busy student center, according to university spokeswoman Pam Blake. She said three other tiny mylar packages, with the words ‘fart bomb’ printed on them, were found unruptured elsewhere along the perimeter of the room.”

No, no one was injured by the package that went ‘pop’ and had a little bathroom joke written on it. In fact, 10 years ago, the whole thing would have been referred to as — what did we used to call those things? — a joke. But everything gets treated seriously now because terrorism is the latest and greatest fad from world culture.

Naturally this has been brought into high relief by events in the Middle East. It’s all quite logical, really: The Palestinians attack Israeli troops with rocks and bullets, somebody blows up a U.S. ship off the coast of Yemen, and voila, “fart bomb.”

The next thing you know, little nonexistent bombs are turning up all over northern New Jersey. A bomb call came from synagogue in Englewood last Yom Kippur, for example, and a bomb scare at the federal building in Newark came a couple of days after that. Terrorism has been taken up by the American mainstream.

The good news is that, as usual, when we adopt something for popular consumption, we dumb it down and empty it of all content. The bomb in Newark turned out to be a couple of batteries and a can of Lysol, and the primary threat to the Englewood synagogue boiled down to some poor Israeli guy who just wanted to pray at temple, but for some reason dressed up for it in army-type fatigues.

For that matter, the bombs in Piscataway were harmless, and the actual statement of “fart bomb” was …

What was it exactly? Some obscure reference to the side effects of a vegetarian diet? That with some ingenuity, one prankster can strike a blow against the oppressive armies of … uh… the Green Party?

There was no statement. It wasn’t even witty. It was to world terrorism what the TV show Home Improvement was to Shakespeare.

Empty terrorism — that is the tenor of the times, our collective proclivity, the nisus of a nation at leisure, the stuff that people do while I’m stuck in traffic because a lane on the Hutchinson River Parkway has been blocked off again. And you know, half the time when that lane is blocked off, the road workers aren’t even using it for anything. What the hell is it with those guys?

I ought to blow up one of their trucks.