Whistling in the Dark

Illness (always illness), start of school, handing out hundreds of computers to hundreds of students, having every person at that place believe their priorities are the only *real* priorities....

I get sick of it. Really sick of it. Don't we all?

But on the bright side, I have a cat.

Glad you asked. In and around being nastily ill and doing the whole start of school thing, I have gotten through some major writing. I've put together a nice passel (over 30,000 words) for Star Trek: The Role Playing Game. Some of that will have to be cut in redlines, but that's part of the fun. They're also sending me some additional materials to do another 4,400 words or so.

It's interesting, writing Trekstuff. It's such a huge part of pop-culture, after all. There is a tremendous stigma attached to being a Star Trek fan (Trekkies, Trekkers, whatever we are this week), but at the same time Trek is known. My sister knows who Captain Kirk, Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy are. My mother knows that Patrick Stewart was the captain on The Next Generation. It's a part of American Culture in a very real and pervasive way.

When I wrote on Sidewinder, my father was excited because he had read Bat Masterson's writing as a boy. This was familiar to him. He knew Western tropes. And that was amazingly cool. Now? I can say I've been writing about Khan, and everyone knows what I'm talking about.

Astounding.

Now, I'm plugging away at some Nobilis tastiness. It's not as long a project, and it doesn't (yet) have the cultural significance of the American West or Starfleet Command, but it stretches my mind and sense of imagination into directions the other projects don't begin to touch.

I am a very lucky man. As I've said before, I write. For money. This is a tremendous blessing.

(Now, if I could just write for enough money that I could drop the school thing...)

So, I'm writing my reaction to 9/11/2002 the day after. I guess my feelings weren't what I thought they would be, and I guess I need to say something about it all. Something I feel like wasn't represented yesterday.

On almost every channel, from Comedy Central to CBS to UPN, there was significant coverage and rememberances. Some of them were memories of courage. Some were assertations of our patriotism. All were designed to give us pause to remember, and to affirm all we have done and all we will do. There were lots of American flags and reminders of how good we have it here. Some of it was remarkably well done. Some wasn't. Local news teams talked about how we've stepped forward. People who were trapped in rubble talked about their experiences. Images of the towers with flags superimposed over them, or in silouette, were projected on all sides.

This... wasn't what I wanted. At all. I don't want to remember September 11. I want to have learned from it. I want the world to be made better by the sacrifice of it. But I never want to relive that horrible day again.

I was obsessed, in the weeks after 9/11. I watched CNN video clips of the attack over and over again, desperate to understand why. I worked with my neighbors. I did what I needed to do. And slowly I moved on, and a scab slowly formed over the horror, the fear, the outrage, the pain, the trauma of that awful, awful day. It became a part of my life, as it's done with all of us, but it was a part that I didn't have to think about all the time, every day. I could let it lie, and let the wounds heal, and reach a point when I can examine it once more without pain.

Turning Enterprise on last night, I didn't want long segments in between acts on the heroism of muslim firefighters. I didn't want images of twisted rubble and steel. But there they were. Anywhere else I turned, there they were. Ugly horrible images were counterpointed with airbrushed TV anchors looking earnestly in the camera and saying nothing worth saying. A literal orgy of patriotism and revelling in the horror was seen on all sides. I practically expected Used Car commercials to offer 9/11 savings.

I didn't want to forget it had happened. I don't want to forget it happened. When I got home, I put out a candle, and thought about my Nation and about sacrifice. If they had played a soft refrain, and put some blanket message ("...TV38 joins you and yours in remembering the September 11 attack....") I would have been fine. But this constant need to glory in destruction coupled with a hungry need to pretend we have had real resolution and closure... no. No, it was just goddamn wrong.

Weirdly enough, David Letterman did the best of anyone I saw, last night. He dispensed with all the usual jokes in the opening, did a very tame top ten list, and spent most of the episode interviewing former President Clinton, who did well as well. When talking about last year, Letterman briefly touched on what that terrible day had been like... and then talked about what his life and his city had been like since that day. And he refuted the claim that "nothing will ever be the same." New York City has been recovering, he said. Our lives have been getting back to normal. We're telling jokes about rats and urine and dirt again. The nation's hating the Yankees again. We have much work left to do, but we're getting over what's happened. And we're doing it together.

And then, after a moment of silence featuring the Statue of Liberty, the twin towers behind them -- no music, no message, just the unmarked towers rising into the air, with all the immediacy of videotape, he acknowledged and moved on.

I wish every show had done that. I wish every network had done that. I wish we didn't have to revisit horror in the name of celebrating it.

And I wish it had never, ever happened.