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I HAVE TO GET OUT OF THE HOUSE, away from the TV. It’s Thursday night, two days after Holy War D-Day in America, only this time the letter means ‘destruction’ or ‘disaster’ or just ‘dammit, dammit, dammit!’ I need a walk in the cool September air which has signaled autumn’s arrival on the cul-de-sac where I live near Huntington, West Virginia.

I shuffle down the dark lane. On my way back, I stop and stare up into the starry sky. The cherry-red lights of a solitary plane pass high over town. It’s the first plane I’ve heard churning the air since all American airports were shuttered on Tuesday afternoon after this blitzkreig arrived from on high.

The plane passes -- a military transport? A private pilot violating the ban? I recall another unusual silence. In TV’s wall-to-wall coverage of the catastrophe there have been no commercial interruptions on the main networks day or night, not a one.

American skies as quiet as they were in the 19th century. The TV no longer selling anything. Thousands of blown-apart bodies in rubble in Manhattan, people that I may know. The President unable to return to his White House.

A self-appointed jihad generalissimo with a weak chin and the soulful eyes of a young Cat Stevens has reached a long arm out of the Afghan mountains. Has flicked people out of the sky, flung them out the 70-story windows of collapsing skyscrapers. Buried them in smoking sepulchres. Knifed them in the heart right after the honey peanuts were served by a smiling stewardess with nice legs. Knifed her.

OSAMA BIN LADEN HAS ROCKED my world and your world. Has changed the world with his bloody, holy warrior hands and a dutiful crew of human bombadeers, who by now must have discovered that the deal offered by the man sometimes called ‘The Director’ -- paradise for mass murder on a Titanic scale -- was false advertising. And please, sir, could you send someone to get us out of these hell realms, or join us here soon and tell us what to do next?

Or maybe the Director has changed nothing with the startling action adventure he has pulled off for an aghast, horrified and impressed -- you have to admit it -- global audience. Not a thing.

PAGE 2: 'You know what day Tuesday was, don't you?'

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