ABSTRACT
The effects of the terrible attack of 9/11/2001 on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been analyzed in many ways, including as cultural trauma (Smelser 2004b, Breithaupt 2003) and as moral panic (Rothe and Muzzatti 2004, Victor 2006). It might have been expected that, with the passage of time, the natural healing process would have eroded the impact of those events on the national consciousness. However, nearly a decade after the event, there was fresh controversy over what was (inaccurately) described as a proposal to build a mosque at Ground Zero (the Associated Press, serving 1,500 newspapers and websites, began using the shorthand term on May 25, 2010, see Calderone 2010). It will be argued that this fresh controversy could lead to a moral panic only because of the ways in which 9/11 and its memorializing had been culturally construed, including bearing the marks of a cultural trauma of a particular—ritualized—form.
