I wasn’t originally going to write the obvious post about the odd relationship between 8/29 and 9/11. The whole thing is just too negative, and I couldn’t compose anything that didn’t seem like a rant. But Keith Olbermann’s stinging rebuke of the President last night unlocked something for me. After 9/11, the nation put its collective will into the hands of the President and asked him to lead. His leadership consisted of stoking the fear to absurd levels of paranoia – in essence, the demand was that the American people turn into a bunch of cowards. And in a massive display of national unity, the people complied.

There was a certain unavoidable weakness in the American psyche that was exploited here. The overwhelming sense of privilege and power meant that the country was ill equipped to deal with the newfound sense of vulnerability. People had not been toughened by much previous trauma. I remember thinking of a sheltered suburban adolescent who is robbed and beaten a few blocks from home. The trauma of the event is magnified because of the shattered belief that such things could not happen here, to me. Such things do happen, but to other people, elsewhere. With no experience coping with such a tragedy, the national psyche was in disarray – it was less that a bad thing happened than a sudden realization that bad things can in fact happen to us.

But while one would expect the nation to be thrown for a loop by 9/11, one would not expect it to still be reeling five years later. Being cowardly does not come naturally to most Americans; it goes against the mythos. The idea of living in perpetual fear and radically altering the entire culture based on that fear runs against the grain of the American sense of identity. Americans, in short, are no longer acting like Americans.

This is, I think, deeply humiliating to those who realize it, and even to those who don’t realize it consciously. So when I read Spencer Ackerman this morning, I thought he captured it perfectly:

I think I understand a psychological motive for Bush hatred now: By using September 11 to aggregate power for himself, and to make his opponents--you, me, and every other liberal who needed to feel like we could trust our leaders after we were attacked--feel disloyal to their country, he prevented us from healing. Maybe that's why that sometimes, being an American can feel like being the walking dead.

The walking dead. Someone has cynically poked at prodded at the wound in the national psyche in order to exploit it, so it hasn’t healed. This has left the country in a sort of fog, a zombie-like state. The nation has been sapped of its will.

Ironically, if this is true, then it makes me feel much better about how New Orleans has been treated. There has been such a remarkable failure of national will that the temptation is to believe that the whole country is just circling the drain (the whole decline-and-fall-of-empire narrative). But if the failure of will involved in writing a whole city off is not an inexorable trend, but rather a temporary and artificially induced state, then there is actual hope. Maybe the country has not gone to pot, maybe we’re just too damn tired because of the lack of healing. Then there would be no need to surrender to fatalism.

Maybe the Katrina debacle also played a useful role in beginning to rouse the nation from its "walking dead" state. It could be that the sense of humiliation has risen to the surface in the shocked "is this what we as a nation have become?" reaction to the FEMA disaster. (Michael Brown resigned in disgrace a year ago today. It did not start a trend.) Maybe that is part of why more Americans are fighting back so vigorously to defend the honor that goes along with honest dissent.

It could be that I'm too optimistic. But the notion that there is even a partial solution to this national malaise is attractive. It would mean that there is an option other than simply giving up (we're pretty tired down here.)

It would also mean that the upcoming elections matter an awful lot. A nation can only act “out of character” for so long before that becomes the nation's actual character.