Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The kernel of this idea began with an analysis of Ruskin's “Law of Ruins” and the Twin Towers in Don DeLillo's oeuvre, published in the Don DeLillo Society Newsletter. This work spawned an article on “nostalgia for the future” in alternate history and near future fiction in the anthology, Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism. While much different, this article nonetheless bears the genetic code of its primogenitors and deserves acknowledgment. I would like to specifically thank John Duvall, Brooks Hefner, Sean Grattan, Jason Dodge, and the anonymous readers at LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. Notes It is true that most of these interventions did not so much directly promote liberal democracy as they did undermine communism. Suffice it to say here that the cognitive dissonance Americans felt regarding these operations was more often than not rooted in the fundamental logic of liberation and expansion. For critiques of Fukuyama's narrative, see Cohen; Pease; Huehls; and Engelhardt. While Noble's two-world metaphor is not coterminous with Agamben's messianic/eschaton, for our purposes they identify the same thing: the coming into being of an exceptional state/state of being. I consciously limit myself to this site. The Pentagon, as a military location, and United 93, as a site of heroism, do not fit into the cultural victimization narratives promoted over the past dozen years. Similarly, they don't carry the symbolic weight of the American liberal economic power as the WTC towers do. Appadurai describes this process at work in the association with minorities of Muslim populations in the West (and in India) that become associated with a larger (more threatening) global Muslim majority. This is true not only of Bush's Homeland Security State that revivifies the domestic as the target of purification, but also Obama's presidency, which similarly attempts to reestablish the promise of liberal democracy at home. Obama's 2008 presidential campaign attempted to suture together “three grand themes” that organize American “positionality”: “the American dream, the perfectible Union, the land of promise” (Pease 209). The positionality this inscribes is a domestic project that promises to restore America's lost exceptionalism for those left out of the expansive liberal democratic project of the preceding generations. The mantra “Yes We Can” is a nostalgic return to the constitutional promise of a nation created by and for the people, and drops the pretenses of internationalism altogether. And this nostalgia is not limited to the political sphere; it has been recorded across a swath of American cultural productions. Scholars like David Simpson, Kristiaan Versluys, and Richard Gray have all considered the various ways in which Americans made sense of the attacks by returning to some sense of a stable past within the domestic sphere. Amir Eshel similarly notes, “Facing a recent, traumatic past or imminent destruction, [places like post-9/11 New York] struggle with the sense of a world deprived of a future” (3). See DeRosa. The passage also exposes the confluence of art and terrorism that Don DeLillo identified in both Mao II and Falling Man. Additional informationNotes on contributorsAaron DeRosaAaron DeRosa is an Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. His work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly and Studies in the Novel, and his current manuscript traces Cold War resonances after 9/11.