THE TERROR DREAM: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Susan Faludi
Metropolitan Books
Current Events
ISBN: 9780805086928

Although it’s been a little more than six years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, in this comparatively brief span it seems the events of that awful day have been examined from every imaginable perspective. Yet it has taken that length of time to produce a work of cultural criticism as cogent and unsparing as Pulitzer Prize winner Susan Faludi’s THE TERROR DREAM, a passionate attack on this country’s retreat from the painful reality of that day into a national mythology of female subservience and male protection.

In books like her National Book Critics Circle award-winning BACKLASH, Faludi has shown she isn’t afraid to tackle controversial subject matter, marshalling reams of evidence forcefully to support a provocative thesis. That observation is no less true here. Taking as her theme the biological metaphor that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” Faludi argues that “the ways that we act, say, in response to a crisis can recapitulate in quick time the centuries-long evolution of our character as a society and of the mythologies we live by.”

In crisp prose, supported by some 40 pages of notes, Faludi meticulously documents the working of the political and social forces served by a querulous media willing to allow anecdote to supplant evidence, all operating in consort to reinforce a pernicious cultural myth. Whether it was canonizing the (male) firefighters and police officers who lost their lives on 9/11, or demeaning the (female) critics --- like Kristen Breitweiser and her “Jersey Girls” --- of our government’s preparedness to deter the terror attack, what Faludi calls the “cultural smoke machine” bent its efforts toward reinforcing the myth of female vulnerability and male strength that has been a recurring theme throughout our history. By the time of the 2004 presidential campaign, perpetually anxious, pro-defense “Security Moms” had supplanted their liberal “Soccer Mom” elder sisters, and voters were treated to the faintly comical spectacle of President Bush and Senator Kerry competing for votes on the basis of which one was more enamored of guns and hunting.

As Faludi describes it, “That machine operated in the service of myth, not reality. Its mission was to restore the image of an America invulnerable to attack, to conjure a dreamscape populated by John Wayne protectors guarding little captive Debbies, a reverie in which women were needed to play the helpless and dependent foil…”

The effort reached its apotheosis in the riveting tale of Jessica Lynch, the American soldier whose capture in March 2003 and “rescue” from an Iraqi hospital seized America’s attention in the heady early days of the Iraq war. The breathless initial accounts of Lynch’s courage as she valiantly battled her attackers quickly were supplanted by what Faludi describes as the more palatable narrative of a “helpless white girl snatched from the jaws of evil by heroic soldiers.” Coolly dissecting press reports of these events, Faludi demonstrates how facts were manipulated in the service of this powerfully deceptive narrative.

Part Two of Faludi’s book, while denser and less engaging than Part One, traces the “terror dream” through three centuries of American history, from its origins in the Puritans’ first encounters with America’s Indian population and culminating with the subjugation of that native population as the country expanded westward across the frontier. She painstakingly reviews numerous examples of the female “captivity narratives” that have played a prominent, if subtle, role in defining gender relationships in our society, dwelling at length on the way one of those narratives was transformed into the John Wayne film The Searchers, a story that has influenced directors from Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese.

In the end, THE TERROR DREAM is more descriptive than prescriptive. “By September 12,” Faludi writes, “our culture was already reworking a national tragedy into a national fantasy of virtuous might and triumph. …But rather than make us any safer, it misled us into danger, damaging the very security the myth was supposed to bolster.” In the face of the powerful forces of history and culture that have shaped our response to 9/11, one can be forgiven a degree of skepticism at Faludi’s expressed hope that we can achieve “a national identity grounded not on virile illusion but on the talents and vitality of all of us equally, men and women both.” But if we’re to take even the first halting steps toward that goal, THE TERROR DREAM can serve us as a valuable resource and guide.

   --- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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