I just had to read a chunk of the 9/11 Commission Report for my transnational literature seminar, "Literature of 9/11."

We’re supposed to be writing less dismissive, more imminent responses to the readings. Last week was The Emperor’s Children, by Claire Messud. Next week is more of the 9/11 Report. What I wrote last night, after also reading the assigned Arundhati Roy article, "The Algebra of Infinite Justice":

I found the 9/11 Commission Report much easier to read as a comic book. Is it because I saw the day like most people did as picture, on the television and in news magazines? The comic, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, was done by two old illustrators and is available online at Slate. Its speech boxes are mostly pulled from the book. It reads like a graphic novel. Stan Lee says on the cover: "Never before have I seen a nonfiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation."

Who is reading this Report, which sounds often like David McCullough history writing. Too bad the figures are not older, like Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, some of McCullough’s usual characters. The narrative, based on the CIA and FBI’s corporate histories, provided in interviews and depositions and files, looks a lot like bin Laden does in the Graphic Adaptation: too phony, too much like the single villain, like it is the plot line of a Cold War serial. Where is Captain America?

Amazon.com describes the Graphic Adaptation as putting "at every American’s fingertips the most defining event of the century." Arundhati Roy writes in late September 2001 that 9/11 is a "monstrous calling card for a world gone horribly wrong." She does not say it is the defining event of the century. Instead she talks about the last two decades, from the previous century, and about America’s wars.

"The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank."

And the 500,000 Iraqi children dead from US sanctions and Madeleine Albright thinking it was "a very hard choice" but that "we think it is worth it."

In the Report there are strange metaphors provided by Sandy Berger and for some reason I imagine him in an office near the Capitol, or maybe in suburban Virginia, comparing counter-terrorism to muddy windshields for Lee Hamilton. There is the fear that this is set to script a national melodrama movie like "Pearl Harbor," which it will, thanks to Oliver Stone, with Nicholas Cage and "World Trade Center."

The Report’s readability reveals what it is trying to sell: the government providing the story, trying to prove it, laying some blame and defending itself.