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From the Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash-an unflinching dissection of the mind of America after 9/11
In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling "security moms," swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the "rescue" of a female soldier cast as a "helpless little girl"?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite "barbarians" on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.
Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about us-and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew.
In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling "security moms," swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the "rescue" of a female soldier cast as a "helpless little girl"?
The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite "barbarians" on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.
Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about us-and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew.
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Reviews
"Susan Faludi, as always, is simply stunning. With heroic acuity, she digs through the mythological debris of the Bush era to recover the dark fairytale--shades of white savagery on the early Frontier--that founds the vengeance fantasy we call the 'war on terrorism.'"
Mike Davis, author of Ecology of Fear
"No system has more completely failed us since 9/11 than the print and television media. The American public is too misinformed even to think of elementary oversight of its government. In painstaking and documented detail, Susan Faludi demonstrates that this was not just a matter of neglect but a failure of intent--the Sean Hannitys, Diane Sawyers, and network anchors misled us in service of an ideological agenda. Her chapter on Jessica Lynch is a tour de force of how the military-journalistic complex works. You cannot find a more eye-opening book to read."
Chalmers Johnson, author of the Blowback Trilogy
"An important contribution to our understanding of the cultural and political reaction to 9/11, which shows how deeply ingrained beliefs about masculinity, femininity and sanctified violence have shaped our national identity, and our ways of responding to crisis."
Richard Slotkin, author of Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Centur