Cartoon Horror

I can't let the third anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks pass by without a comment. After three years, I still can't get over how the September 11, 2001 attacks were carried out. If you had told me before 9/11/01 that some day commandos would hijack jet airliners and use them as guided missiles by deliberately flying them into buildings in a suicide mission, I would have thought you'd been reading too many comic books. Because what I just described is exactly the kind of spectacular plot one would find in a comic book where the villain is always named Dr. Doom or Dr. Sinister or Dr. Evil, and he's planning to take over the world. And Captain Marvel hopes to save us from him. Certainly nothing you could imagine happening in real life. But it did, and maybe that's partly why Osama bin Laden - the supervillain of the story - orchestrated it that way. . . because it was the kind of attack that had been precedented only in the most vivid of imaginations.

Larry King would agree. When he first turned on CNN and saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center's South Tower live, he thought he was watching a trailer for a new action movie - and action movies are nothing more then live-action comic books. But then King saw the "Breaking News" graphic at the bottom of the TV screen, and he went numb.

The only difference between the comic books and reality, of course, is that on 9/11 we had no superhero who could hold up the buildings and extinguish the fires by himself - and save even more lives. :-(