ese worldviews are anything but clear.

Hours after the attacks, two of America's own fundamentalist
ministers, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were quick to fit the
tragic events into their own concrete narrative for God's relationship
to humankind. Unable, or unwilling, to understand the apocalyptic
moment as anything but the wrath of God, they blamed the feminists,
homosexuals and civil libertarians of New York City for having brought
this terrible but heavenly decree on themselves.

In a less strident but equally fundamentalist impulse, many American
patriots interpreted the attacks as the beginning of a war against our
nation's sacred values. This was to be seen as a war against
capitalism and a free society. As American flags were raised in
defiance of our Middle Eastern antagonists, just as many American
freedoms were sacrificed to the new war on terrorism. Our nationalism
overshadowed our national values, but our collective story was saved
from deconstruction.

Meanwhile, free-market capitalism's stalwarts, who had already
suffered the collapse of the dot.com bubble and the faith-challenging
reality of an economic recession, were also reeling from the attack on
their most visible symbol of global trade. With its dependence on
perpetual expansion, the story of global capitalism was not helped by
this sure sign of resistance. Might the world not really be ready to
embrace the World Trade Organisation's gifts? With a utopian future of
global economic prosperity as central to its basic premise as any
fundamentalist vision of a perfect past era in harmony with God,
believers in the capitalist narrative responded the only way they
could. They sought a war to defend their story.

The most injurious rupture, of course, was to the narrative we use to
feel safe and protected in an increasingly global society. The attacks
on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, pinpointed, devastating, and
worst of all perfectly executed, challenged the notion that we were
the world's singularly invincible nation. The people we appointed to
protect us had proved their inability to do so. President Bush's quick
rise to an over 90 percent popularity rating shows just how much we
needed to believe in his ability to provide us with the omnipotent
fatherly protection that his rhetoric commanded. But like a child
realising that his parents can't save him from the bully at school,
Americans were forced to consider that our leaders, our weapo