The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

In the weeks after 9/11, novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that closed with these words, "The mortal citizens of a planet are praying right now that we will bear in mind ... that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred." She was promptly vilified by Rush Limbaugh and a slew of other right-wing commentators. Shortly afterward, the Los Angeles Times received a letter, among many others, from a collection agency owner who called Kingsolver's op-ed "nothing less than another act of terror."

This is just one of many episodes that Susan Faludi recounts in her new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. In this scathing critique of the media's response to 9/11, Faludi turns her critical eye to how, in the wake of the powerlessness many Americans felt on 9/11, a myth was spun -- one that stretches back to the time of America's first English settlers.

Faludi notes that the fixation on feminism began just days after 9/11 -- perhaps best encapsulated by the Houston Chronicle headline, "No Place for Feminist Victims in Post 9-11 America"; a seemingly out of place assertion that speaks volumes about the American fixation on a clear-cut vision of victim and hero, otherwise known as female and male. Indeed, while the bulk of the World Trade Center victims were male, it is the pictures of the woman being comforted by a fireman that we saw in the newspapers. And it was, as New York Magazine put it in a headline, the stay-at-home widows -- preferably pregnant at the time of the attacks, those "Perfect Virgins of Grief" that America's attention turned to.

As Faludi sees it, after 9/11, "We reacted to trauma ... not by interrogating it but by cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood." When search dogs at the site of 9/11 could not find any living humans to rescue, they became so demoralized that their handlers took turns hiding for each other's animals in order to simulate a "live find." It's a striking parallel to the American media's attempt to rewrite 9/11 as a moment of valor and glory, conveniently skipping over the sadness, the loss, the humbling gravity of a world in which America could be so vilified by those in other parts of the world.

Enter Faludi's concise and tirelessly reported critique. Drawing on hundreds of years of documentation and media narrative, Faludi's Terror Dream gives us insight into the revisionist myth that has ruled American catastrophe since its inception. From a 1678 sermon lamenting that men have become too effeminate to properly defend America, to the fear that feminism has effeminized a 21st century population, Faludi's narrative is a powerful wake up call.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri: What didn't make sense to you about our reaction to 9/11?

Susan Faludi: Immediately after 9/11, there was this desperate hunt for heroes in the media and the declaration that there would be scores of heroes to come of this. This was in contradiction to the reality of the nature of the catastrophe, which left very little room for anybody to rescue anyone. They estimate that there were about 19 people who survived in the World Trade Center who were at the fire line or above. 95 percent of the people who died were utterly unreachable.

People below the fire line for the most part unless they were infirm, walked out on their own two feet. Yet there was this rescue drama of early American male heroes, in this case firefighters, carrying damsels in distress down the stairs in our fevered imagination. Certainly on the planes there was no one to rescue. In the absence of that we invented hero and victim designations and we assigned them by sex. So the firefighter, in particular, the firefighters who died, were declared the heroes and the victims became the 9/11 widows.