We ended up at Yamato, a Japanese restaurant that I’d definitely eat at again! I did wonder about the original purpose of the building, since it clearly hadn’t been a restaurant to start with. One of us spotted a plaque outside identifying it as The Westwood Building, built in 1929. Among other things, it did include a bank, which was one of my guesses.

After dinner we went looking for places we could get dessert and/or coffee after the show. The two Coffee Beans were both going to close by 9:00, but the Starbucks was open until midnight, and Diddy Riese was open until 1:00. We stopped in at Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory to get some sugar-free chocolate for Katie, and then made our way over to the theater.

The Show

Bill Cain’s play is a political thriller in which William Shakespeare is commissioned to write a play about the Gunpowder Plot to assassinate King James I and blow up Parliament. (Remember the fifth of November?) The problem: the king wants him to write the official version of the plot, which has been somewhat…embellished. Shakespeare has to deal with political pressure from the Crown, conflicts among his actors, estrangement from his daughter Judith…and the question of truth: Can he find it? If so, can he afford to write it?

It’s a compelling story — terrorism and torture are topical, and political intrigue is always in fashion — and manages to give you enough information on the background that if you don’t know much about the Gunpowder Plot, or even about Shakespeare, you can still follow what’s going on.

Some familiarity with Shakespeare helps, though. The Globe is rehearsing King Lear at the beginning, and it quickly becomes clear that The True History of the Gunpowder Plot will eventually become Macbeth. References to Shakespeare’s legacy are scattered throughout the play. There’s also a great comedic moment at one point that is only funny if you know about the Porter scene in MacBeth, but it doesn’t interrupt the flow if you don’t know it.

(Some recognizable faces in this production: Harry Groener, the Mayor of Sunnydale from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Connor Trinneer, Trip from Star Trek: Enterprise. Coincidentally, Groener was also in the last play I saw, Putting it Together at South Coast Repertory.)

After the show we walked down to Diddy Riese, but the line was long enough it looked like it might take an hour just to get ice cream. By which time coffee wouldn’t be an option, unless they had some there. So we ducked over to Starbucks for a half hour or so, then drove home.

Last week I was surprised to hear that the FBI was on the verge of indicting a suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. I’d pretty much written it off as an unsolved case. Unfortunately, the fact that Ivins committed suicide means the case will never go to trial. Having the attorney general sign off on it doesn’t quite have the same sense of closure — or certainty — that a trial would. Unless the FBI releases seriously solid evidence (and I’m sure a lot of the evidence is probably classified, especially given the current administration’s affair with secrecy), there will always be a bit of doubt: did he kill himself because he’d been caught, or because he didn’t want to go through being scapegoated?

This is long. It’s also on a sensitive subject. If you’re not interested in this line of discussion, feel free to just ignore this thread.

I started out thinking, sometime around Thursday or Friday: How would President Luthor react to the WTC destruction? But then I thought—the DCU is dealing with an interstellar war. Buildings in the DCU are routinely destroyed. A major American city was wiped off the face of the Earth (Coast City, during Reign of the Supermen), killing several million people in one attack. The Capitol building was destroyed during a Deathstroke the Terminator storyline. Going global, Cheshire and Vandal Savage recently nuked Qurac (a fictional middle-eastern nation, during an earlier Deathstroke story) and Montevideo (the real capital of Uruguay, during DC 1 Million), and Australia had most of their cities razed to the ground a few years ago in the Invasion! series.

For the real world, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, murdering thousands of people, have stunned the world and irrevocably changed America. We’ve lost our sense of security. Our economy has been massively disrupted. Many are screaming for vengeance, others are lashing out at anyone who even looks middle eastern, our President has declared a long, drawn-out war on terrorism that could easily last years or even span decades, Congress is debating what freedoms should be taken away to make it easier to catch terrorists (the Senate has already decided to allow email surveillance without a warrant)—we’re talking major changes in the social, economic, and political landscape of the country.

Ordinarily, art and entertainment adjust easily to society. Anything that takes place in a different time period or completely alternate universe has no problem, of course, but the vast majority of material that is supposed to take place in the “real world” or a mirror of it—everything from sitcoms to the X-Files—has two choices: ignore the change and risk becoming irrelevant, or adjust to it. Now I’m not saying every show or comic book should have a character who knew someone who was there. But comics tend to be based in something that is near enough the “real world” in which people have the same attitudes as they do in reality, despite the alien invasions and super villains.

In order for the political and social climate of the DC Universe to match our own, its population will need to react to the events of September 11 in the same way that we have in the real world. But think about it: there are two reasons why we’re so devastated by this attack. 1. We thought we were invulnerable to outside attacks of this kind. When the cold war ended we stopped worrying about nuclear armageddon. We haven’t had such a massive attack on our soil in almost 60 years, and even that (Pearl Harbor) was a military target and during wartime (not to mention around half the number of casualties). If I remember correctly, we haven’t been invaded since the War of 1812! (Unless you count the Civil War, but we were invading ourselves then.) This kind of attack is not only unprecedented against us, but for the vast majority of our population, it came out of nowhere. 2. The sheer scale still boggles the mind. Four passenger airplanes hijacked within an hour of each other and turned into weapons, destroying two of the tallest buildings in the world (weren’t the towers something like #5 and #6?), killing several thousand people and throwing our largest city into chaos.

Stack either of those against just the destruction of Coast City, and try to explain why that didn’t change our nation’s outlook, but this did. It’s going to be tough, unless they go the route they did with the election—ignore what happened in the real world, maybe explain that the WTC was a casualty of OWAW, and keep things as they are.

Maybe this line of thought is trivial. It probably is. Many people aren’t here to think about it, and many people are grieving for someone they have lost. For the rest of us, it’s far more important to help out with rescue efforts by donating effort, money, or blood. It’s definitely more important to worry about how we’ll respond, and how that response can avoid harming innocent bystanders (or, more likely, hit as few bystanders as possible) and deter future terrorists instead of creating permanent enemies. It’s also more important to decide which freedoms we’re willing to sacrifice to prevent terrorism, and which we refuse to give up (hint: write your congresspeople, ASAP!)

But amidst all the sadness, all the anger, all the frustration, we still have to go about our business from day to day. We still have to do the laundry, buy the groceries, go to work or to school. We still want to spend time with family and friends, and as we start to recover from the shock, we’ll still want to watch TV, go to the movies, and read comics. Many parts of our lives will be altered, but they should not be destroyed… and I don’t think it’s too early to start thinking about how this tragedy is going to alter them.

Originally posted September 17, 2001 on the Ride the Lightning mailing list.

In other words, they say we should take the fight to the flu abroad so we don’t have to fight it at home. Why does that sound familiar?

Among the outcry is a resolution sponsored by Ohio Senator Bob Ney (a Republican, for the record) stating that “the actions of terrorists will never cause the date of any presidential election to be postponed” and “no single individual or agency should be given the authority to postpone the date of a presidential election.” There are about 60 supporters of the resolution, and another 190 representatives have slapped Homeland Security with a clue stick.

Thank you, Senator Ney.

Postponing elections is not something that should be done in a free society. The essence of democracy is that it is government with the explicit consent of the governed. Take away that consent — as in take away the ability to choose different leaders — and you no longer have democracy.