It’s an amazing thing when a person can perpetuate an old lie and start a new one, and in a sentence of only 28 words, to boot. Ann Coulter hits the bigtime.

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A terrifying thought just occurred to me: If the rule that “Things happen in threes” applies, and with John Ritter and Johnny Cash both dying yesterday…and with the score to Star Wars Episode III as yet uncomposed…somebody better check on this guy, and make sure he’s healthy. Get him a check-up, raid his kitchen for foods too high in fat, you know the drill!

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I don’t normally bother with Internet personality quizzes, but the Are You a Neocon? quiz, linked by The Modulator (which sounds like a supervillain the X-Men might face), was a pretty interesting one, with actual nuanced questions. One problem I had is that, on at least three of the questions, there were two answers that I could honestly say represented my views, and there’s one question that doesn’t have any answers that I felt truly represented my views. Anyhow, I’m sure it will come as little surprise that the quiz pegged me as a Liberal (the other possibilities being an Isolationist, a Realist, or a Neoconservative). What interests me is that in most of the questions I specifically did not choose the responses that seemed most clearly “liberal” to me – – i.e., the “We’re a bunch of imperialistic bullies and it’s no wonder they hate us” responses. And still, the quiz marked me as “Liberal”.

Gregory Harris also took the quiz, and somehow he got scored a “Realist”. Must be the three martinis he had for lunch. (I wonder if he’s getting tired about my martini jokes lately?)

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The Breakfast of Champions, according to Warren Ellis. Explains a lot….

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From News of the Weird I note this fascinating item:

Three teenagers with paintball guns terrorized kids on a playground until they fired into the wrong group of kids, one of whom returned fire with a real gun, wounding two paintballers (Pittsburgh).

It looks like the old grade-school admonishment, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye”, should now be changed to “It’s all fun and games until someone gets shot.”

Also via the same site, any of my readers who sire male children in the future might want to avoid a certain middle name. I’ve never put much stock in the idea that a person’s name steers the course of their life or determines their eventual personality, but this is just scary.

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The World Trade Center, 6-1-00; The World Trade Center, 9-15-01.

The Pentagon, 9-7-01; The Pentagon, 9-12-01.

These Space Imaging photos, actually taken from space, are part of two series of photographic chronologies of the attacks and the cleanup efforts. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to post any images directly related to the attacks today, but this is a perspective I had not seen before and I thought it bore sharing.

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(I’ve had this story in my archives since March 11, 2002 – – the six-month anniversary of the event that inspired it. I’m reposting it today, on the second anniversary of 11 September 2001, because I have new readers who certainly have not seen it before; maybe they’ve noticed the title, listed in the “Notable Dispatches” section of my sidebar, but never clicked through, not realizing what that story was. This remains my only attempt to address the horrors of that day through my own art, fiction. I don’t recall exactly how long it was after 11 September that I wrote this, but it was soon enough that I wrote it thinking that six thousand had died that day. The story was submitted to a single market and was rejected; I never sent it out again.)

There is never any rest for me, the Ferryman of the Dead.

I pole my barge across the black waters and up to the pier. So many wait this time, many more than usual. I wonder what has happened, what event has sent me this many. “Come aboard,” I say. “I will take your coin for passage.” One by one they file past me, each handing to me the coin that they never knew they had. It is the coin which determines where they shall be taken to rest, its metal shaped and determined by life. The coins of these dead are gold, every one of them purest gold. Six thousand come aboard my barge, and each has passage for the farthest and greatest of destinations. In that moment I know that something truly dark has happened; the gold coins are always forged in moments of darkness. I am the Ferryman. I can give them no answers to what lies behind their haunted, questioning eyes. I can only take them on this, the last of all journeys.

When they are all aboard I take up the pole and push away from the pier. The barge always feels the same, no matter how many stand upon its decks. Whether six or six thousand, it is all the same to me. I guide us out onto the River Styx. Some of the people look worried, but there is no need for fear. This river can do them no harm. They are already dead.

This is to be a long journey, I know – it always is, to this destination. As I guide the barge through the black waters, I look on the faces of those who have come to me. As different as these people all look, they all have the same expressions of shock, disbelief, and withering sadness. Here is a man of business, talking into a cell phone. He is trying to call someone, anyone, who will tell him that it’s all a dream, that it didn’t happen, that he didn’t die in a blast of fire, smoke, glass and steel. There is a mother who is explaining to her daughter that they won’t be going to Disneyland after all. And there, a group of firemen stand together, realizing that soon they will meet all their brothers-in-arms who have gone into the infernos before them. So many now – colleagues once in business and now colleagues in death, people who have never before met but now have the gravest thing in common. As the current takes hold, I look back at the pier. There are more gathering there. There are always more. They will wait. Time does not exist for the dead.

“Please,” a young man says as he turns to me, “I have to go home to my daughters.”

“You are going home now,” I reply. “To the home where all eventually return.” Two black rocks slide past on either side, the rocks that mark the passage of the circling Styx.

“This can’t be,” a woman cries out. “My mother needs me.”

“She will be with you soon enough.”

“When?” Her voice pleads, and yet there is no solace that is mine to give.

“I cannot say,” I reply. “The Ferryman has no hand in Fate.”

The tears come then, tears from the six thousand that run over the gunwales and into the river which has been fed by tears for centuries. All tears are born in the River Styx.

“Where will you take us?” someone asks.

“To the place you are promised,” I answer. I recall the words of a poet: Will there be beds for all who seek? Yea, beds for all who come.

One our left we approach the Hills of the Damned, an endless stretch of shattered lands which reach away into the blackness. The waters echo with the cries of all those who have been taken to the Hills for the agony they have brought on the living. I consider the bag of six thousand gold coins, and I realize that I will have to journey to the Hills this day. There will be a person, perhaps more, who will pay me with a coin of black tin; but not on this journey. As the hills recede behind us, the unending cries of the damned become fainter and fainter until they are drowned out by the lapping of the waters upon the sides of the boat and the marker stones that we pass. The six thousand fall silent, each realizing that it is not a dream. I would offer solace, but as ever I cannot. I am the Ferryman.

We come around a particularly dark bend, and before us lies a very wide expanse of water, as if the Styx has become an ocean – which in some sense it probably has. And beyond that expanse are the thousands of twinkling lights that I have come to know so well. One man, a fireman, sees them too. “What is that?” he asks.

“It is the City of Dead Works,” I reply. The lights of the city glow on the horizon, and every one of the six thousand turns toward them as the Styx impels us onward. As we come ever closer to the city, the glittering lights reflect off the black water.

“I don’t understand,” someone else says. “The City of Dead Works?”

“Aye,” I reply. “Behold!”

From behind us, golden light: the Sun of the Dead is rising as it always does when the dead come near the City. Above us the firmament is turning purple, then blue; soon the light of the Sun will illuminate the City of Dead Works. As the sky lightens, the true scope of that city becomes plain: it stretches away into the land, farther than any eye could see. Not even the highest-soaring raven, cavorting in the breezes and zephyrs of the dead, could take it all in. It is bigger by far than any one city ever built by the hand of men, because it encompasses some part of all of them. Perhaps it is bigger than all of the cities ever built. Now the sun’s first rays come up behind us, and the first buildings can be seen down by the water.

“That one looks Egyptian,” a woman says.

“The Great Library of Alexandria,” I tell her. “Once the greatest repository of learning the world had ever seen, now only a memory to the living and a reality only to the dead.”

A man points to a building high upon a rock. I nod.

“The Temple of Solomon,” I say.

“There are ships in the harbor,” says another. Thus for him I name the ships: Arizona, Indianapolis, Lusitania, Bismarck, Wilhelm Gustloff, Cap Arcona. And many, many others. I scan over the impossibly vast city and spot Dresden, as it was; and beside it the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And how many smaller villages, tucked into the hills beyond the City? None can say. The Sun of the Dead shines upon those hills now, and the great stone statues in the likeness of Siddhartha Gautama.

“I don’t understand,” a young man says. “Why this City? Why here?”

I only shake my head as we continue to float by the City. I do not point out the fairly small, nondescript office building that sits near the water. It is not a particularly remarkable building; nor was it, really, until the fuse was lit. The six thousand almost don’t recognize it.

Almost.

Not one word is uttered as we slide past the Alfred Murrah Federal Building. Then we turn away from the City of Dead Works, and head again down the waters of the Styx toward distant hills and the place where these people will join their brethren.

“Who lives in that city?” It is a priest in a fireman’s coat.

“No one lives there,” I tell him. “The City of Dead Works is not for people. It is for the buildings and the ships. It is for the books and the music, the sculptures and the paintings which are gone forever. It is for everything destroyed by craven people in the name of foolish wars, for everything judged forfeit in the face of transitory desires.”

The Styx takes us into the Golden Hills. Soon we will be there, and the six thousand will go where they belong. And then the Styx will complete its circle, taking me back to the pier where more dead await.

“We will be there soon,” I say. “Soon we will be at the Elysian Fields, where all heroes go – for that is what you all are. It is what you have bought with your lives, with the shaping of your coins into gold.” No one replies. We near the last bend now, and before us lie the Elysian Fields, where peace reigns and where heroes dwell; where all is light and voices are always raised in song. The Sun of the Dead shines warmly on Elysium.

But they do not see it. They, the six thousand, all gaze back behind us upon the City of Dead Works. It will soon be behind us forever as we round the last bend of the River Styx into Elysium. I know they all need one last look upon that City, and I do not grudge them that. For myself, I do not look back; the eyes of the Ferryman are ever forward. But I know. I know that the City of Dead Works is different now. I know that it has changed. I know that the people who come with me now to Elysium, the dead around me, look back on the two soaring towers of steel that now rise above the City where there had been no towers before.

I know these things.

I am the Ferryman of the Dead.

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A few months after I wrote “The City of Dead Works”, I chanced upon a story by James Morrow called “Apologue”. This is the 9-11-01 story that I wish I had thought to write. Read it here. It’s very short, and deeply moving – – a sublime illustration about how the fantastic can help in moments of terrible pain.

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The first major historical event of my lifetime was probably the resignation of President Nixon. I was just shy of three years old when that happened, and I have utterly no memory of it. In fact, I have no memory of President Ford, either. The first historical figure of whom I have any distinct memory is President Carter. Thus, the first five years of history through which I lived does not exist for me as memory. They’re just pages in the history books, no less so because I lived through them than they are for my daughter who did not.

And for her, 9-11-01 will be the same way. I’ll be able to describe to her the incredible sadness of that day; I’ll be able to tell her where I was when I heard the news begin to unfold; I’ll be able to relate how the news got worse and worse and worse. I’ll be able to tell her how, for three days afterward, the skies were clear and unbroken by jet-plane contrails as air traffic was halted. I’ll be able to tell her about Buffalo firemen standing in every intersection, taking donations for their brethren in NYC. All that and more, I’ll be able to tell her. But it will never be as real for her as it was and is for me. For her, it will be like the Kennedy assassination or Nixon resignation are for me, and how Pearl Harbor was for my parents (Dad was two, Mom was four months).

We tell ourselves that we must never forget, that we must keep the pain real, that we must never allow those terrible moments to recede into history like everything else. But we fool ourselves if we think we can. September 11, 2001 is already receding into history, faster than we realize. And I believe that this is as it should be.

There have been so many horrible days in our nation’s history, days when the darkness seemed ready to overwhelm us and threaten the very fabric of our nation. Each time, America has moved on, incorporating the bad days into the tapestry of its history. There will come a time when September 11, 2001 will be just another seminal event in history, more known than remembered. And it won’t be a hundred years from now. It’s already starting.

I’ve seen some complaints, online and off, that we aren’t doing enough to mark the occasion. Perhaps it’s unseemly to many that NBC should air reruns of its Thursday night lineup on such a momentous day, and in truth, it does seem odd to me that not a single prime-time special is devoted to the 9-11-01 anniversary, even though I don’t believe that all three networks should devote their entire schedules to it. If this year’s observance is less-than-satisfying, I’m still one who found last year’s “All 9-11, all the time” approach, even in the days preceding the actual date, to be simply too much. I suppose that I no longer wish to partake in public mourning; and it does not strike me as particularly healthy to try each year to recapture or regenerate the anger and shock and desperation of that day.

For myself, I plan to do much as I did last year. I’ll read some American poetry, listen to some American music, and perhaps watch an American movie or an American television show. It just seems right to me to take a bit of time to reflect on American cultural artifacts tomorrow, since it was not just America but American culture that was attacked two years ago. That is how I choose to remember and honor those who died: by reminding myself that America is still here, that our contributions to the world and our species are real, and that they will last far, far longer than Osama Bin Laden’s hatred ever possibly can – – even if he crashes a thousand planes into our thousand tallest buildings.

There is more sanctity – – true sanctity, that which celebrates beauty in the face of a harsh world and an unforgiving universe – – in a Gene Kelly dance number, in a Frank Lloyd Wright building, in a Lerner-and-Loewe song, in the taste of a grilled hot dog, in the crack of a baseball bat, in the spiral of a perfectly-thrown football, and in a Robert Heinlein short story than there are in the hearts of a million terrorists who are prepared to immolate themselves and a thousand innocents in the name of a hating God.

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I’ve obviously been noodling around a bit with the new Blogger features, mainly concentrating on titles. Now I can title my posts, just like all the Cool Kids with their Movable Type blogs. Of course, figuring out how to get them to show up was a bit of a pain, as the “New Features” page didn’t exactly point the way to any directions, so I had to do some searching before I finally found the necessary Blogger tags to make the titles actually show on the blog itself. I also tried them with a number of different styles and font-sizes, and I’ve settled (for now) on the current appearance.

I’m also interested in the “Change Time and Date” feature, so if I have a post that I want to appear on a certain date I can do that, I think. But the explanation here is very spotty. If I do this — say, if I write a post on November 6 but change its date to November 9, will it automatically appear on November 9 when someone loads the page, or will publishing be required on the 9th to make the thing appear? This is a feature I’d like to use, but there’s no explanation anywhere that I can find as to just how it works. If anyone can answer this, let me know.

Once again, I see no compelling reason to make the switch over to Movable Type yet. Blogger has its hiccups of functionality, but as I see it, they really are working to make things better. I suspect I’ll keep using Blogger until it significantly falls off in quality. I would, though, like to move eventually to a non-Blogspot server with my own registered domain name, but that’s a way off.

Anyway, some of this new stuff looks pretty cool, and some of it I doubt I’ll use. That’s usually the way it goes, though.

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