november 2007 - day 1

Imagine it’s a nice sunny morning in the fall of 2007. You’re sipping coffee out in one of the red states, watching the Today show. All of a sudden Katie Couric stops talking and looks surprised. An instant later the TV screen goes blank and stays blank. Then, static. You flip the remote. More stations also filled with static. Then you find one with an infomercial. Get big beautiful abs in five seconds. Nothing wrong there. Finally you locate CNN, where an ashen faced Daryn Kagan tells you that something bad is happening in New York. Details as soon as they’re available. Your mind flips back to what you were doing on 9/11 when you heard the news about the twin towers. You wander to the window and look outside. The birds are chirping in the autumnal foliage. The sky overhead is a dazzling deep blue. You hear the words “two nuclear bombs.” When you get back to the TV set, Aaron Brown is sitting in the anchor chair, looking especially solemn as he introduces a piece of video just in from Ashburn, Virginia, 40 miles west of Washington D.C. A local sportscaster is interviewing LaVar Arrington about the football game scheduled for this Sunday. How’s the knee feeling, LaVar? Just fine, he says. Behind him the blue sky turns a kind of X-ray white. LaVar turns to see a mushroom cloud forming in the distance. A male voice, probably the cameraman’s, says, “Jesus fucking Christ.” No one bothers to bleep the word -- a sign of the new times that are just now dawning.

By 10 a.m. the talking heads are beginning to provide the grisly details: two nuclear bombs of unknown origin were detonated within five minutes of each other on Wall Street in New York and near the White House in Washington DC. In New York nothing remains of the financial district. In the nation’s capital, the Capitol has been incinerated. The White House has vanished. The Washington Monument is lying in great chunks across the mall. The Pentagon has survived, but most people in it have been heavily irradiated and are expected to die within days. The highways leading out of Washington into Maryland and Virginia are clogged with abandoned cars. People are streaming out of the city and dying along the roads. Every store within five miles of the city is being looted. The police can’t control the mounting chaos so the National Guard has been dispatched to the scene. Both the President and the Vice-President were in the city at the time of the explosion. Both are presumed dead. The Speaker of the House and the Secretary of State and all the others in the line of succession are presumed dead. 95% of all Congressmen and women are dead. The Supreme Court is dead. The Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the State Department, and all other federal institutions have been destroyed, and the people who used to run them are dead. The country, for the moment at least, has no government, though the vast number of Americans sitting around their TV sets in the American heartland are assured that someone is in charge, sitting in a lead-lined bunker somewhere, someone we’ve never heard of who will soon step forward to lead us to wherever it is that we’re going.