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Posted on 11/08/2001 9:55:17 AM PST by wirepaladin

"You don't want the news. It will make you cry."

My three-year-old son looks up at me, his brilliant pleading smile a reminder that what he says "I want" is code for "Please". Danny is one of those rare prodigies that no one expected - he's three, he's reading, and he knows what happened so long ago, the Eleventh of September. Each time they show the crater where the World Trade Center once reigned, he whispers "They crashed into the Pentagon, too". Ah, this is a wondrous troubled child in this wondrous troubled time. No, out of deference to innocence lost, there will be no news in this house, no more news for a long time. For how do you explain the unexplainable to a three year old who knows what happened the Eleventh of September? His camoflage-colored eyes peer into mine, the greens and grays melting to a pool of hopeful brown. "No news." He determinedly plops a tape into the VCR, turns it on, and takes my hand: "You watch with me, Mommy". Yes, for a blessed moment, I resolve I won't torment you with things you aren't supposed to understand.

I settle back for my date with sweet banality - surely some sort of furry monster or tubby alien will beckon me to boredom and bring respite from bad news. But not so...

Look up in the sky -
It's a bird
It's a plane
It's Superman

The saviour of Metropolis flies before us in all his technicolor Pre-Pearl Harbor splendor, a paeon to America in red, white and blue. Fresh with innocence and filled with fear, the first Superman cartoons were among Max Fleischer's finest; they reverberate with the hope and uncertianity of the age. But still, the skyline is too familiar - who has not thought that New York is Gotham is really Metropolis? That pang of recognition buds and blooms as I see before me a younger, bright New York rising like the alabaster city, gleaming.

How odd, I though; the madman threatens New York. Just like now. The madman has a deadly ray, and burns down a bridge just because - just because he is evil. Cars plummet into the river, the radio man's voice cries out terror.
This wasn't supposed to happen, this was supposed to be fantasy.
Yet here you are, you bastard madman Bin Laden.

I glance at my son, not sure what he sees; should I turn this off too, and save him from yet more questions? But his face show only a steely cast of anticipation. He is looking for a Hero, someone to stop the madman. So am I.

I turn back to the small screen to find that Lois Lane has stirred up the hornet's nest, and she has for some reason shown up at the madman's castle - how like the press even now. I'm performing isigesis on a mythos written long before my time, but it fits so perfectly.

Then my heart stops as the madman trains his deadly weapon on the Empire State Building. The ray strikes, and in beautiful technicolor the building sways and crumbles. The newsmen and green-glass banker's lamps crash to the floors and desks pitch back and forth but look - up in the sky -

Oh how I wish you had been here, Superman; I wish you had been real. To fly through the air and catch the building just as it fell to earth, snatching it up as if it were a vase to be plucked from the shattering blow.

My eyes well with tears.

I speak to my son, to myself: "If Superman were still alive, he would have caught the building, and saved the people." My son looks at me, puzzled - he knows Superman is just a story. I look at me, puzzled, too - I've just spoken about Superman as if he were a real person, now dead to me. For some poigniant reason, he suddenly is real to me, and dead. We turn back to the story, and I must find a way to be an adult again soon...

Superman is pelted by the madman's ray. He appears to be dying, beat, spent. Oh Superman, he's killed you, that madman has killed you.

But in that instant, he turns to the sky, to the killing ray, to the madman with a look of pure victory - and he is suddenly familiar. The face is unmistakable. How I could have not known him?

That look on his face as he raised the flag above the smoking slag of a burned out Metropolis. The same look of the men who unfurled the colors upon the wreckage of the Pentagon. My husband as he drove to the blood donation sight. It was the crater in the Pennsylvania field, the rescue worker at Ground Zero, Billy Graham at the National Cathedral; it was the face of the woman who gave birth to her dead husband's child. Superman, I did not know you were real - until now.

It is he who will protect the innocent. It is he who will save the people. It is he who will raise the skyscraper. It is he, it is we who will defend Truth, Justice, and the American Way. We are rising to save us even now.

Superman, reborn to me, leaps to life from the rubble, soaring through the clouds to attack the madman. I turn to my son, now with joy. "Superman will save the city. We will protect the people. We will stop the madman." Danny's face alights with hope, and I hold his hand as we wait.

Truth. Justice. The American Way.

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