"Underachievers Overachieve!" was an early favorite which I sort of liked (based mostly on its simplicity and balance) but it wasn't really accurate.

"Buncha Lazy-Ass Kids Bring Down Civilization," wasn't accurate either -- besides being also just a little too bombastic or backdoor self-aggrandizing for my tastes. And "lazy-ass" was just our teachers' and classmates' assessment of us, and what headline writer is gonna take the word of 12-year-old kids or the people who are paid to but unable to teach them?

And frankly, in the aftermath, I'd like to see, instead of the usual romantic mythologizing, just a little more truth -- like, for example, how we aren't (weren't, if you're reading this) really just a buncha lazy good-for-nothing fuck-up underachievers -- but rather how we really are highly-trained and skilled actors and technicians who were explicitly brought up to APPEAR to be lazy good-for-nothing fuck-up underachievers ON THE OUTSIDE, while actually being brilliant, masterful high-achievers ON THE INSIDE (and mad about how no one has found an appropriate cookie name to call us for being this way).

Then there were all those headlines we came up with that began with "Ingenious Plot...," but these were shouted down before they got off the ground... because the actual plot was so simple and obvious, and most of us felt, for obviously self-centered reasons, that the emphasis should be placed much more on the act of pulling it off, and on the courage and fortitude and just all-around coolness of the people -- the troops on the ground -- who actually did pull it off.

Headlines that began with "Unknown Assailants..." were also put down early and often cause we knew they'd catch us -- provided there was both a they and an us left to apprehend and be apprehended, respectively.

"Our Children Are Killing Us!" Yes. That was everybody's favorite. It was like "Why Do They Hate Us?" after 9/11. That sense of mass paranoia implied by any use of the word "us" as the last word in a sentence followed by any sentence-terminating punctuation other than a period!!

That's what prompted me to lean forward and naively ask our driver, "Is there a way we can, like, put a flow control or something on this... operation?" He was actually a friend of our parents. A member of the 5th generation of our sleeper cell -- the children of the generation that grew disillusioned and rebelled; the children who'd counter-revolted back to ultra-orthodoxy, but were still denied, and who now had to watch in silence as their own children carried out the final purpose of a hundred wasted years of empty generational waiting. And all that was left for them now was to assist these children in only the most ancillary way, like by driving cars full of them to their target sites -- laughing giggling 12-year olds who couldn't care less about cause and purpose, and asked stupid questions like if a damper could be put on this world-shattering operation, now that the go had been given, and people and events were in motion.

So when he simply laughed at my question I tried to explain. "Because," I said, "if this goes all the way, and we wipe everybody out, and there aren't any newspapers or people left, and no one knows what we've done and how cool it was, well, that's no big deal -- but, I mean, wouldn't it be much much cooler just to leave enough people so there ARE still newspapers and people to read them -- so they can wake up in the morning all over the world and have to read about how "Our Children Are Killing Us!!!!"

I mean, just to see the expressions on their faces in a fast-cut video on MTV, would maybe be even cooler than what the world would be like totally without a single last one of them or us left in it whatsoever.

To be continued....

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