And now a word from Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping on this Tuesday, September 11 2007:

9/11 Is On Tuesday This Year

9/11 has won American Idol. 9/11 is the second coming of Elvis, and the 9/11 is the delicious End of The World.

In other words, 9/11 is a drag queen standing on the dark off-ramp, and his fiery pose mutates into something completely new every few seconds. The politicians all line up for a chance to make a media bite with him, but he gets away and cuts a new swath of amazing death. He is the Bimbo of Horror.

It’s really unbelievable how much we love 9/11 – It’s gone on so long. It’s been six years ago now – but it’s obvious that 9/11 is not satisfied with our slavishness. There is a fervent American hope that 9/11 will happen again, reappear, turn all our heads at once, we’ll shout the Allelujah Chorus of pissing-in-our-pants fear. When a water main blows up a New York Street, or a Minneapolis bridge comes down – we rush forward with our bouquet of flowers, our love ballad, our hours and hours of coverage. Ray Kelley from the New York Police Department tosses and turns, dreaming that the explosive super-star will return to The Apple on his watch. 9/11 – what a woman!

The sexual love for 9/11 is wild, an international flood, the bombers are still scrambling over the sky, as if the pilots really believe that they will spray seeds on the desert, and grow the towers back, and there they will be, two breath-taking phalluses of world trade, standing mysteriously in the middle of the Arabian Nights. But that is impossible, children. Just impossible. Listen to me — We’re still so confused. America! The young men are going West, going so far West that the young men find themselves going East, following the instructions of the American Dream to just spin, to burst into a million flavors, to go where no man has gone before, to pierce that old horizon again and again with laser-guided predator drones with names like Bambi that come down on Afgani weddings and children’s field-trips with the conviction that 9/11 is now reborn…

Why is it that the words “Democracy” and “America” and “Christ-centered” are only verifiable when they leave behind evidence in the form of Collateral Damage? The anonymous on-lookers screaming around the edges of a bomb-crater are the only honest champions of our great words of freedom. They must face the camera and tell us what they and they alone know for sure: that 9/11 is still alive, spreading, an unappeased vengeance that seethes forward under an invisible stealth cloak. The Collateral Damage fills the screen with momentary human interest stories, “content,” blackened faces and the real sigh of unmistakable tragedy and there is still time to ask these witnesses about what happened and how do you feel and why all the blood — but 9/11 has moved on, posing now as “Clean Elections,” for instance, or “Free Trade.” But then occasionally an American official staggers out of the smoking debris, a killer with dead eyes and a sophisticated computer – strung out, staring in his mug shot. He believes the jets hit the towers a few moments ago and he is in deeply in love.

Reverend Billy, New York