Why, it's an Ian Fleming fantasy! It's a Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy plot, except that it seems to be rather...extended.

Any second now 007 will parachute into Afghanistan, meeting up with Fritz Leiber of the CIA, meet an Afghan freedom fighter, meet and indulge in a little cultural exchange with a harem girl named Navel Maneuvers, and get interrogated by Bin Ladin, who inadvertently rattles on about his fiendish plans....

I grew up in the sixties. The paperback racks were crowded with criminal masterminds, running secret organizations, out to cripple the West.

How ironic that every morning I wake up to more news about a secret organization out to cripple the West, run by a criminal mastermind....

Frightened? Paranoid? Sure, at first. Yet lately, it's like being caught up in the set of a James Bond movie...

Or maybe Matt Helm. Or possibly IN LIKE FLINT.

What next? Will he try to render radioactive Fort Knox's gold a la Goldfinger? Make a garden of death a la Ernst Stravo Blofield in YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE?

This is great!

Yeah, I know, I have a warped sense of values...

...And I would probably feel different if I worked in a mailroom. I have a feeling "going postal" will have a whole new meaning, after 9-11.

Old pulp magazines like the SPIDER used to have horrible disasters, where entire skyscrapers would be shattered. I thought, while reading them, how overblown and fantastic!

Now...it's just...history.

The most grandiose scheme from a Grant Stockbridge or an Ian Fleming is now just the daily news.

I have a sneaking suspicion that when we do catch Bin Ladin (HAH!! Surrounded by three hundred commandoes sworn to kill him rather than let him be captured? Never happen.) and bring him to justice (HAH! again!) that...

....I'll miss him, in an odd sort of way.

I always had a sneaking suspicion that World War II veterens, as much as they hated Hitler and Nazism, and the sacrifices of the war effort...in a way kind of missed it. Oh, they'd never admit it, but they missed it, all right. There's nothing like someone out to kill you...to make you feel alive.

We're all living in a cheap paperback thriller, a spy b-movie, full of unlikely plots and incredible disasters and escapes.

The villain is a little two-dimensional, a bit of a cliche, but we'll take what we can get...

...And every morning we wake to a new chapter, almost a new cliffhanger, of this extended thriller.

PS. This is not to make fun or mock the thousands who lost their lives, or the very real tragedies that have taken place. This doesn't mean I'm not taking this all seriously. This is to talk about the peculiarities of me---that even in this most horrible of time---a small part of me is a little thrilled to be living through all this.