There's nothing more imperialistic than trashing other cultures, even if you're not so ballsy as to name the runners-up, bronzes and Certificate of Participation recipients in the league of nations. That's why past, current and probably future presidential candidate, former Massachusetts governor and Olympics hostess Mitt Romney is our Imperialist of the Week.

Everyone's favorite flip-flopping Mormon has a new book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which says President Obama is a foreign-policy pyro, providing "kindling" for anti-American fires burning around the world. Obama should talk more about "America's values" and shun "the self-loathing of Western intellectuals," which is to blame for the explosion of baby mamas and implosion of John Adams' name-recognition (pre-Paul Giamatti), Romney says.

Mitt may be the greatest denigrator of The Non-American Way since P.J. O'Rourke's brilliantly offensive "Foreigners of the World" study for National Lampoon. And there's nothing more American than putting other people in their place. But why stop at A(Me)rica Against the World?

Some religions are better than others too. Southern Baptists are better than (in descending order) Pentecostals, Assemblies of God, Presbyterian Church in America, Free Methodists, Anglicans, Practicing Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Lutherans-Missouri Synod, Sufi Muslims, African Methodist Episcopalians, American Baptists, Buddhists, Confucians, Hindus, Presbyterian Church USA, Conservative Jews, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Unitarians, Reform Jews, Animists, United Methodists, United Church of Christ, Shiites, Sunnis, Wahhabis, and Episcopalians. If you belong to a mainline, George Costanza's "Opposite" religion is better than yours, because at least he believes what he's peddling.

Mitt may not agree with my rankings, but he can't argue with the premise. Some cultural mores are better than others - people who walk single file when passing, call women by their first names, use puns for mating purposes, spurn micro-enterprise, pronounce curses on snow, judge libertarians as attention-whore hedonists, elevate taco-shell bowls above Jimmy Carter, and tell kids to stop plagiarizing their parents' taste in music.

That's my right as an American, dammit - to tell you what's what and possibly to draw pictures illustrating the demerits of your views. Show Mitt your appreciation by purchasing his latter-day golden plates of truth.

Clearly some writers hit upon these themes more explicitly than others. Stephen King's Under the Dome, which I haven't read yet, was recently described in Esquire as a novel perfectly positioned as the personal and somehow unique vision of an author who is the ultimate harbiter of "post-9/11 fearfulness." I love King to morbid death, but is he really the guy we need to go to for another booze-swilling look inward? King doesn't lack for vocabulary, but he's not exactly Faulkner, and his philosophic musings are the least interesting facet of his books.

Philip Roth's The Plot Against America was described as casting post-September 11 era in a chilling new light, notably through a Jewish lens, and though I suppose a novel with a titular plot against America might include some post 9/11 inferences, I question the need for all our literature to be stained in some way, explicit or no, with the ash of that day.

It's not that I'm a denier, a relativist, or obstructionist. I understand 9/11 has deep national consequences and I also understand that when the twins fell down, our deep Western liberal guilt rose up like Poseidon from the sea. I'm not saying our novelists who have tapped into and utilized September 11 and after as subtext, thematic forces, or verbose recreations of the day in full are full of crap. But really, can't we finally leave behind the punditry and pedantic soulful corrections via the verbose pens of Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Safran Foer?

American authors in particular seem incapable of moving past what essayist Richard Gray called "the preliminary stages of trauma" resulting from the 9/11 attacks. I agree wholeheartedly. The patient was admitted and has since been released, but like Page Six our post-9/11 novels seem to proliferate in tabloidian fashion, as if we as a nation are incapable of registering anything other than shock at the realization that something bad happened to us, and by setting it into bone china of the author's mother's growing up in New Jersey, has somehow made a salient point about how our culture now can't afford to look backward except to see the flames and falling bodies, and the deep psychic impact those flames and bodies had upon the American landscape.

I guess I'm just tired of viewing the world in its every facet with the unstated but ever-present reminder of terror's toll, of jingoistic effusions in misguided attempts to thwart the flow of extremism, and how to get from teenage sexual anxiety, to planes hitting buildings, to waterboarding terror suspects in just 600 pages.

We may be Americans, but we're not dumb. It's time to move on, time to say something new worth saying. If you reference 9/11, it had better be to make an Islamic fart joke or to talk about how it reflects God's love of the color fuschia or describe the fractal nature of terror and how it fits into the mathematics of fear--a treatise on the numbers of nihilism.