NYT Sunday Book Review
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THE TERROR DREAM
Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America.
By Susan Faludi.
351 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $26.
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Macho Security State
By JOHN LEONARD
October 14, 2007
Susan Faludi, a relentless reporter, an unapologetic feminist and a
brilliant scourge, begins her CAT scan of our traumatized psyche with a
demurral: "The Terror Dream," she says, is about only "one facet" of the
American response to the hijacker bombings of Sept. 11: the cover story and
screenplay promptly confabulated by our government ministers and news media
heavies, a "security myth" and a "national fantasy" starring John Wayne and
Dirty Harry as the Last of the Mohicans. But after escorting us briskly from
witch hunts in Puritan New England to regime change and Manifest Destiny on
the Great Plains and lynching bees in the Old South, from hostage-taking by
Barbary pirates to sleeper cells in the cold war all the way up to a
patriarchal White House and a quagmired Iraq, she concludes with a curse:
"There are consequences to living in a dream." We've sleepwalked into
hallucination, regression and psychosis.
As in her best-selling "Backlash" (1991), which roughed up Robert Bly and
Allan Bloom while debunking news media myths about "the man shortage" and
"the infertility epidemic," as well as her underappreciated "Stiffed"
(1999), which construed the baffled manhood of laid-off Navy shipyard
workers and McDonnell Douglas engineers, Citadel cadets and Charleston drag
queens, porn stars and Promise Keepers, so in "The Terror Dream" a skeptical
Faludi reads everything, second-guesses everybody, watches too much
talking-head TV and emerges from the archives and the pulp id like an
exorcist and a Penthesilea. Sept. 11 may have been as infamous a day as
Pearl Harbor, but "the summons to actual sacrifice never came," she writes.
"No draft ensued, no Rosie the Riveters were called to duty, no ration cards
issued, no victory gardens planted. ... What we had was a chest beater in a
borrowed flight suit, instructing us to max out our credit cards."
What we also had, after a hijacking of the meaning of the event by chicken
hawks and theocons, were the Culture Wars redux. On the one side, all of a
sudden contemptible, were grief counselors, sisterhood, "femocracy" and
anything remotely "Oprahesque," plus "girlie boys," "dot-com geeks," "Alan
Alda clones," "metrosexuals" and what Jerry Falwell called "the pagans, and
the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians," as well
as such uppity critics of American foreign policy as Susan Sontag, Katha
Pollitt, Barbara Kingsolver and Naomi Klein, all of whom were instructed to
return immediately to their assigned seats. On the other, triumphalist
shore, making a Rocky/Rambo comeback, were traditional gender roles and
rescue fantasies, traditional medieval torture and the "alpha male" and
"manly man": Duke in "The Searchers"; Rudy with his "command presence";
"Rumstud," the "babe magnet" secretary of defense; and New York City's
firefighters, "Green Berets
in red hats."
How, Faludi wonders, did smoking out Osama bin Laden in his Tora Bora
tunnel somehow morph, on the home front, into a "sexualized struggle between
depleted masculinity and overbearing womanhood"? Answering this question
takes her from ground zero to the Oval Office, the op-ed page, the Hollywood
studio, network television, '50s sci-fi, "penny-dreadful" Davy Crockett
westerns, the daydreams of James Fenimore Cooper, the nightmares of Increase
Mather, and the captivity narratives of brave and resourceful pilgrim and
pioneer women. Along the way she interviews Jessica Lynch, who was written
up first as a heroine of the war in Iraq and then as a victim, although she
was neither. (A useful bookend here might have been the Pat Tillman story,
about a young man who quit pro football to volunteer in Iraq, only to die
from friendly fire that the Pentagon lied about.) She debunks such wishful
news media thinking as the post-9/11 rush to matrimony, "patriotic
pregnancy" and a baby
boomlet that never happened (not to mention articles in this newspaper,
less factual than fanciful, about well-educated women opting out of
high-powered careers and deciding to be moms instead). She disinters the
true story of Cynthia Ann Parker, whose abduction at age 9 by Comanches in
Texas in 1836 had to be improved upon by Alan Le May's novel and John Ford's
film version of "The Searchers," since Cynthia Ann seems to have ended up
preferring her Comanche husband to her Anglo relatives. (In Le May's novel
Faludi finds the original "terror dream" — "the fear of a small helpless
child, abandoned and alone in the night ... an awareness of something
happening in some unknown dimension not of the living world." And she
reminds us of indispensable history books by Richard Slotkin ("Regeneration
Through Violence"), John Demos ("The Unredeemed Captive") and Mary Beth
Norton ("In the Devil's Snare").
What we gather from these books and Faludi's is that the script America
reverted to in the fall of 2001 was the oldest in our literary imagination,
our frontier fear that savages ("dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants")
would seize our defenseless women while our girlie men were watching Oprah.
Never mind that 9/11 had nothing to do with gender politics. If we weren't
invincible, we must have been impotent. Somehow, like Cynthia Ann's
kidnapping, "an assault on the urban workplace" (global capitalism's edifice
complex) had to be rewritten as "a threat to the domestic circle," and so we
willed ourselves "back onto a frontier where pigtailed damsels clutched rag
dolls and prayed for a male avenger to return them to the home." Think of
the entire nation as a distressed damsel. Think of Homeland Security as
Wyatt Earp. Think of hate radio and Fox News as Sergio Leone. Think of
geopolitics as a video game. Think of "Death Wish," "High Noon," original
sin, alien abduction,
demonic possession, zombies, vampires, satanic day-care child molesters and
job-stealing immigrant hordes.
There are other ways to look at 9/11, as anything from Armageddon to coup
d'état. And other ways to account for an America so fearful that we feed the
Bill of Rights to our Biggest Brother. Freud, Marx and Veblen are periscopes
and magnifying glasses for oral fixation, overproduction and forced
consumption. Through the green eyes of ecothink, nuclear winter and silent
spring season the dread. Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" also
comes to skittish mind. We are, besides, insecure and negligent in our
parenthood and our citizenship, caught between a public sphere (bear garden,
hippodrome, killing field) that feels hollow and a private sphere
(sanctuary, holding cell) that feels besieged. We are no longer safe on the
tribal streets, equally weightless in orbit or in cyberspace, tiddlywinks on
the credit grid, lost and yet still stalked, void where prohibited. To the
usual millennial heebie-jeebies, add a subprime mortgage mess and
collateralized debt obligations up
the Limpopo without a paddle.
But feminism is Faludi's compass and her lens, her furnace and her fuel.
Feminism — fierce, supple, focused, filigreed and chivalrous — has steered
her inquiries and sensitized her apprehensions of a celebrity/media culture
and national security state that honors men more as warriors, actors,
cowboys, athletes and killers than for skilled labor, company loyalty, civic
duty, steadfast fatherhood, homesteading, caretaking and community-building,
and that tells women to lie down and shut up. Feminism, like a trampoline,
has made possible this splendid provocation of a book, levitating to keep
company with Hunter Thompson's fear and loathing, Leslie Fielder's love and
death and Edmund Wilson's patriotic gore.
John Leonard, who reviews books for Harper's Magazine and television for
New York magazine, is writing a memoir.
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