For several months, Americans have been backtracking on the jokes we've made about ourselves. We're not longer a belching, sweating, loose-jointed, no-necked, illiterate bunch of oxen. Now our television advertisements tell us we're a solemn, sacred people, who are built tough, like various commercial models of trucks.

But how we long to be belching and illiterate again. Why can't we just put a positive spin on our old self-image as big goofy people? We can, and we do, in the Weekly World News.

As anyone knows who reads the WWN (I once analyzed several issues for a journalism school project, which helps explain why I'm grateful to be working anywhere), the newspaper is a surrealistic sidebar to reality – a circus of ghosts, freak accidents and friendly genetic mutations, read each week by some 400,000 people, many of whom celebrate wedding anniversaries by exchanging livestock. The stories may not be factually correct, but they accurately reflect some dusty, used clothing rack in the nation's psyche.

And I have in my possession the last few issues from before Sept. 11. So allow me to remind you what life was like at that point:

Last May, as everyone knows, the world's fattest man disappeared. Buster Simcus somehow managed to lift up all 4,028 pounds of himself and go out shopping. He hasn't been heard from since.

In the meantime, in the wake of recent experiments in genetics, the WWN had more than its usual number of stories about strange breeding accidents. A woman gave birth to a frog, babies in the mountains of North Carolina could fly and scientists in Dublin, Ireland, got drunk one evening and cloned everything. Also, apropos of nothing, Rosie O'Donnell's face was shrinking – at an alarming rate! Though her head stayed the same size, her face was getting smaller, a possible symptom of the "shrinking face syndrome."

And Bat Boy was having a bad time. Bat Boy, of course, is half boy and half bat; a big-eyed, sharp-toothed, pointy-eared, strangely endearing creature who was discovered by scientists in a cave in West Virginia in June 1992. He was run over by an exterminator's truck last July, then sprayed with insecticide by the panicked driver. That landed the poor little guy in a Chicago hospital. But he escaped, with law enforcement officials close at his heals.

In sum, our world was sort of a sad freak show, and there was something particularly American about the world's fattest man: the biggest, most well-fed and best intentioned of people, yet handicapped by his own vast bounty.

But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the world wasn't a sad freak show anymore. It was a hopeful, revitalized, triumphant freak show – a freak show with a note of rebirth, when a pair of Siamese twins known as "the spider girls" got pregnant. And are strange breeding accidents really so bad, now that we've discovered a half boy-half panda with an IQ of 207? Yes, there's hope for us all, particularly since the world's oldest monkey eats junk food, drinks martinis and chain smokes.

Meanwhile, the Marines have a new secret weapon: Why, it's Bat Boy! You see, his animal agility, bat-like senses and ability to see in the dark make him the perfect individual to hunt down terrorists in their caves. So he is being groomed for Special Forces.

And the world's fattest man? That's the best news of all. He's actually been going around the country this whole time committing good deeds. And on Feb. 3, a blimp is going to lower him through a skylight at the New Orleans Superdome, during halftime at the championship game.

I think the Weekly World News has it right: The best this country can do is put a positive slant on all the things that make us a little laughable. Let's face it, we're not some serious, dignified Ken Burns documentary. We're a land of female wrestlers and two-headed sheep, and that's probably the source of our strength. And we've triumphed – like the world's fattest man. He turned out all right, too, didn't he? He's not dead. He's filled with kindness. And he's going to the Super Bowl.