Illustration © 2002 Frank Miller

The Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon hit the United States in a vulnerable spot -- right in the fantasies. Hit particularly hard was the religion of safety, the idea that having eliminated 90 percent of the dangers of life it ought to be possible to eliminate the other ten. Paradoxes abound. The safety obsession results not in a feeling of security but an irrational fear of minuscule risks. In a population as large as ours, even terrorism on this scale doesn't greatly increase the danger to any given individual, but it destroys the illusion. You have to wonder how much blood and treasure is going to be expended trying to recapture what was illusory to begin with. Paradoxically, al Qaeda's great successes (the barracks in Saudi Arabia, the U.S.S. Cole, Sept. 11) all exploited our assumption that no one would dare attack us.

The second casualty was the belief that the whole world saw us as we saw ourselves; as the heroes of history. The national reaction was -- how does one put this politely? -- not exactly a display of the spirit of the Blitz. A wave of these-colors-don't-run jingoism, however distasteful, would have at least been understandable. Instead, the whole country seemed to melt into a puddle of warm, sticky goo. America was like a child whose mother told him he couldn't live in the house anymore -- hurt, confused and insecure. You would have thought the flag was a talisman against evil. You wanted to ask people why, if they thought they had no enemies, they were paying $330 billion a year on defense. (On the other hand, when the Usurper announced the formation of his Office of Homeland Security, the first question in my mind was, "So what is the Department of Defense for now?"). A nation taught by media culture that the only place to keep your heart is on your sleeve was faced with a situation that demanded stoicism and acceptance of risk, and didn't know where to find them. The Ray Charles version of "America the Beautiful" became a ballad of national self-pity. The point is not that America deserved to be bombed because it bombs others. The point is that any country that dishes out the ordnance as freely as ours should have been better prepared to take it if that was what fate decreed.

Fortunately, among our many blessings we can count a wide margin for error. Though difficult, the problems presented by terrorism are simple, which, given the state of our leadership, is all to the good. (In other news, the president reiterated his respect for Islam and desire for good relations with the Arab world, and expressed the hope that he might one day have a chance to eat at this "Allahu Snackbar" they're always talking about.) The terrorists are gambling that they can strike the United States without the United States effectively striking back, and the United States has to demonstrate that this is an error. Unlike the war against fascism or the Cold War, terrorism presents no substantive ideological challenge. It's like getting bitten by a rat out of the dustbin of history. There is no dissent worth mentioning because nobody is in favor of having buildings dropped on top of them. Appeasement is out of the question because you can't appease an enemy that neither identifies itself nor makes demands. The politics of oil dictate that finesse, relatively speaking, must be the order of the day. The main concern at the beginning was whether the enemy could sustain the offensive, and so far they haven't been able to. Put it this way: If Andrew Golota came up to you once a day and gave you a punch in the nuts, you'd have a very serious problem. If he does it once a year, you still have a problem, but it's not going to change your life.

So speaketh the armchair general. You're here to read about comics. God knows why. This was an event that belonged to the camera and the camcorder. In order to represent something on paper an artist has to be able to comprehend it, and the destruction was incomprehensible. All a camera has to do is expose the film. Watching the collision from across the country (and never have I been so glad to live in a city without landmarks), I was reminded of the Challenger explosion: First you looked for some reason to think it wasn't as bad as it looked, and then you realized it was exactly as bad as it looked. The initial collision brought to mind a couple of lines from an E.E. Cummings poem about a suicide: "A finger pulls a trigger/A bird flies into a mirror." But the tapes said it better.

I have before me a copy of the Sept. 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker that illustrates the point beautifully. First we have a suite of photos of the towers as they were before the attack, which remind us once again how thoroughly they ruined the proportions of the Manhattan skyline. While I want to emphasize that this has no bearing on the calamity whatsoever, and is in no way a consolation, I note for the record that the World Trade Center was the second biggest mistake New York City ever made (number one being the destruction of Penn Station). Then we have a half a dozen photos that tell you more about the horror and chaos of that day in Manhattan than all the comics under discussion here, and for that matter all the verbiage that surrounds them in the magazine. Where the cartoonist in his depiction of the police and firemen attempts to convey his own gratitude and admiration -- not an unworthy goal but doomed to cliché -- the photographs show what inspires that admiration: skilled people in extremis, falling back on their training and experience to cope with an overwhelming situation.*

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