Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2002 > Half-Year After The Attacks Edition

Half-Year After The Attacks Edition

Gale-force winds during the weekend blasted the landscape this weekend. They torn down signs and trees throughout the countryside. The winds torn down an already-dead tree in back of my sister's house; fortunately it did little damage.

caitlin clarke page

I have been rebuilding the text behind each of the pages of the Caitlin Clarke Page. I haven't posted the new pages yet, and since the changes are internal, you wouldn't notice much of a difference, anyway.

I am working on the changes you will notice: image galleries for Once A Hero, The Kid Brother, and the 'Juvenile' episode of Law & Order. Once again, the video capture toy Snappy plays its part.

dragonslayer dvd

A handful of Ms. Clarke's more recent works have come out on DVD. What really needs to come out on DVD is the film that put Ms. Clarke in the hearts of all her fans: Dragonslayer.

With the revival of fantasy films due to the success of The Lord of the Rings, and with the cheesier films of the genre (Krull, The Sword and The Sorcerer—Limburger-style cheesier) are already out on DVD, you would think Paramount would be rushing to release Dragonslayer.

Paramount is taking its time on a Dragonslayer DVD, however; the release date (it is read) has been pushed to 2003 to include value-added material. It would be interesting this material will come from if not from the producer/director team of Barwood and Robbins. In any case, it will be a hard wait.

opinion

It has been six months since the Muslim attack on New York and the Pentagon.

• The wreckage of the New York attack is now cleared, and a large temporary luminaria has been set up at the site, visible for miles in the evenings.
• The hole in the Pentagon is now sealed, and interior rebuilding is in progress.
• We're still in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is still free. And, although the Taliban are vanquished, the conditions in Afghanistan that allowed them to rise are still there, and will stay there without outside help.

There are similar realms of anarchy like Afghanistan. Somalia—outside the northern Somaliland Republic, based in Hageisa and independent for over ten years now—is such a place. Any one of these leftovers from Europe's colonial era and the Cold War has the makings to become another Afghanistan and to continue the War on Terror for many years to come.

Here are my impressions on all of this.

◊ Six months of the War on Terror (and the anthrax terror) has had a nasty effect on Washington. It has made the Democrats weak-handed, the Republicans venom-tongued, and all of them peevish. The lobbyists are peevish, too, because their customary access to congressmen has been restricted. Nobody is going to thank any of them for their efforts on the war, as the Republicans' hallowed balanced budgets are about to disappear, and so will the tax cuts.

◊ Washington itself resembles a high-security base, and the citizenry—especially students in school tours that bring in mucho dinero—wisely stay away. The city is so desperate to make up for lost revenue that they would even grant a boxing license to Mike Tyson if he would fight there.

◊ The attacks have not changed the journalists, the academicians and their lot one bit. And why should they? The chatterers are not normal folks like you or I. We are not their kind of people, as one of their kind (Steward Alsop, I believe) once remarked. The chatterers are not happy that policemen, firemen, paramedics and other such people—whom before the attacks they regarded as brutish oafs—gain praise and honor for their heroism while the chatterers are ignored. The attacks have altered the social environment, and the chatterers are sputtering and choking in the alien air. Don't weep over them, though; I'm sure they will adapt.