My personal reaction in the week after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked was paralysis. As I looked around in my town and my campus, it looked like most everyone else felt more or less the same. It was as if no one could bring themselves to breathe.

I think we're breathing again, by which I mean we're engaged in basic life activity, but I doubt many people's days pass without a momentary gasp. Here in agricultural California, where 70% of the population has never been east of the Rockies, the attacks are distant and less real, but if anything this makes them harder to face. But we're going to work, going to class, watering our lawns, and the energy situation is back in the newspapers.

It must have been evidence like this that led GM to release its new TV spot this week. Less than two weeks after the attack, as a truck drives down a winding two-lane road through yellow grassy hillocks, a voice-over affirms, "The American Dream - nobody can take that away."

This isn't very surprising, since auto manufacturers are probably the most shameless propagandists in American culture. They freely associate cars with freedom, with baseball, with apple pie, with power, success, military might; and all of this with America. It's an appeal to manifest destiny - the doctrine that white European settlers have been granted this continent and a warrant to seize it and keep whoever they'd like out. That dogma is central to calling the country "America" rather than the United States: speaking that way, we implicitly claim more or less an entire hemisphere, and conceal political, cultural, geographic, and historical distinctions between North and South, Latin and Anglo, and erase national boundaries. (We may use this word because our country doesn't really have a name, like "Canada" or "Mexico," but our motivation for using it doesn't limit its meaning.)

Certainly that's not what GM means by the American Dream. GM's version of it is presented directly in this ad: driving a truck on an otherwise empty road through a beautiful and simple landscape. How could anyone take that away from us?

For starters, they could be driving on our road, or littering it, or putting up convenience stores every half-mile on it, or living under a bridge on it. But this isn't what GM intends us to think. They want us to think that the the American Dream is threatened by invasion, not corruption. That lone truck on a road built for an absolute individual is GM's picture of freedom, and in GM's opinion this is the target of terrorism.

Well, these are difficult times, trauamatic times for America. We want to respond to the attacks with some kind of serious and determined action, but it's hard to figure out what kind of response to make. Besides, for most of us, the attack and the attackers are a strangely remote harm from an indeterminate direction.

Helpfully, GM explains what we can do to respond to terrorism: buy new trucks. And in patriotic fervor, GM is even willing to make its own sacrifice for the good of the nation: 0.0% financing for six months.

It's all part of GM's plan to "Keep America Rolling." Or else to keep rolling America. One of those.