The shock and anxious fear evoked by 9/11 are deep and acute, because it unmasked an abiding delusion of American life: that we are somehow exempt from the vulnerability that defines life for the rest of the world. The ideological assumption of U.S. exceptionalism—not unlike the Davidic-temple claims of the Old Testament— assumed and assured a privileged, entitled future. It was a future guaranteed by military monopoly and economic preeminence, but such monopoly and preeminence are in the service of an implicit theological claim of "goodness" and "chosenness."12
