ROY EDROSO

I hate to keep harping on Jim Lileks, here and at my own site, but I can't help it. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist is in so many ways the perfect poster boy for the warbloggers--a well-spoken, suburban pop culture nerd who, when roused by liberals, becomes a truculent and incoherent jingo--that I feel a journalistic duty to stay on his case. With luck, and a few more mood swings, Lileks may turn out to be my GI Joe, or Gibson Girl--a character that becomes a symbol for the age that yielded him or her up, and his or her observer's fortune.

As noted previously, Lileks, always a bit cranky, has been especially highly strung since September 11. Like the dotty old ladies who periodically claim that Tuesday terrorists will burn down the malls, Lileks, though hundreds of miles from any attack site, always sees himself in the direct line of Al Qaeda's fire. He has hunted the Taliban in his dreams, and fantasized himself infected by chemical weapons and his daughter butchered by Bin Laden. Last week he casually announced that New York would certainly be nuked by unnamed foreign adversaries, and then used the opportunity to bitch about European columnists not as gung-ho as he about the War on Whatchamacallit.

A few days ago Lileks watched that 9/11 TV thing (on HDTV with surround sound, one supposes) and commented on the sound of the falling bodies at the World Trade Center: "Who, having seen the bodies hit, could ever sleep again without hearing the sound? How many good men are going to eat the barrel in six years just to make the sound stop?"

That second sentence is classic Lileks--Xbox-addicted fanboy turns into Robert Mitchum, talks of eating the barrel! (Hands shaking, the rummy croaks, "I was a good man once--did my part for the war, beat up Ted Rall--then I saw that TV show..." Runs his hands through his hair, screams: "I can't get it out of my head!") But the first sentence is, for us true fans, even more interesting: It fetches the image of Lileks, bedded down for the night, haunted by a self-generated serenade of watermelons striking concrete at high speed.

The resulting sleeplessness has had an effect, it seems. In a more recent web entry, Lileks states the following:

"It's been snowing for eleven hours - and the skies just lit up with a flash of lightning. Followed by, predictably, thunder. In a snowstorm. The flash gave me a sudden spasm of duckencoveritis before I realized it is highly unlikely anyone will nuke Minneapolis..."

One pauses to wonder, does anyone else in Minneapolis over the age of five mistake thunderstorms for nuclear explosions? But then he goes on:

"I know, I know: don't give them any ideas. But in a way it's unnerving, because it makes you realize how many cities people wouldn't really miss. Omaha. Minneapolis. Des Moines. Hell, Milwaukee. We're the Old World now; as much as we pride ourselves on our high hip factor here in Minneapolis - yes, really, we do - we're monochrome Monacos, and the world can do without us. New York, LA, Miami, Phoenix - that's where the energy is, for ill or for good..."

Having lasciviously fantasized the heat-death of New York, Lileks now reroutes his train of thought for an even more satisfyingly maudlin conclusion: They attacked New York, but it's us they'd never miss!

Here's how I see this case: Lileks wasn't at the World Trade Center. He wasn't anywhere near it. But he has quite strenuously projected himself into it. We're all being pushed to do that, it seems, by the steady drumbeat of Never Forget, Everything Has Changed; Lileks, an imaginative fellow, has gone the whole hog, at least emotionally. And Mr. Roused-by-Attack American is a role that suits him.

But, since he's intelligent as well as imaginative, I think Lileks must notice at times that his play-acting conflicts with reality: That his previous Satan, Bin Laden, keeps getting replaced by new Satans, that Europe no longer approves our every sortie, etc.

So he must devote ever greater mental resources to sustenance of his fantasy. What a strain that must put on him! Will this good man last six years, or will he eat the barrel ahead of schedule?

I'll be watching with interest. Sweet dreams, Jim.