" (223). American exceptionalism framed our response to terror in the simplistic, emotionally satisfying context of good vs. evil, where Americans are righteous crusaders for the ideals of democracy, freedom and the capitalist way, and radical Islamists are "a barbaric and unholy evil a malevolence that must be destroyed for the nation to cleans itself" (224). In Ivie's examination of the topic, we can see two elements of a powerful ideology that has become the dominant cultural response to terror in America. First, there is the extreme patriotic response that is the symbolic ritual that celebrates our American exceptionalism. And second, we see how what Ivie calls the "rhetoric of evil" reduces terrorists to simplistic caricatures of pure evil. By demonizing terrorists, we give ourselves permission to dismiss their perspective completely. This leads to what Ivie terms "redemptive war" on terrorism that holds that America can regain its security and prosperity by cleansing the earth of terrorists and terrorism, and replacing them with freedom and democracy. Extreme patriotism, and the cathartic "redemption" of capturing and killing terrorists has been a common cultural ritual since 9/11, and Boston College students can be seen repeating this cultural right when they celebrated in the mod on April 19th.
If this is our response to terrorist acts, how can America, as Ivie asks in Democracy and America's War on Terror, "disentangle itself from this self-perpetuating, self-defeating, dangerously escalating cycle of violence" (138)? According to Jason Ingram, in his book Hegemony and Globalism, dominant ideologies establish "blinders" that make us view certain behaviors as acceptable and others as incompatible with who we are. In Ingram's view, in order to "navigate cultural differences" we have to strive to find what he terms "margins of overlap" (14).
