9/11

Did the ghastly plume of smoke and detritus from the World TradeCenter towers obscure anything beyond lower Manhattan in the aftermathof Sept. 11, 2001? Susan Faludi, in The Terror Dream, assertsthat it did, and while prevailing winds at the time trailed iteast over Brooklyn, Faludi wafts it north toward colonial NewEngland and west toward the historical frontier, and tracks itsmedia-saturated shadow forward from that day through the pasthandful of years.How does a culture react to trauma is the question, and Faludi'sanswer is that ours engaged in mythmaking on a scale that matchesthe monumentalism of the towers themselves. She does not mentionJoseph Campbell and his The Hero With a Thousand Faces, or RobertBly and his Iron John, or Carl Jung and his theories, but hersis a work of cultural interpretation on the order of theirs. Quitepossibly, the author would shudder at comparison with such company,for Faludi focuses largely on gender issues writ into societalthemes (a post-attack rejection of female equality is one of theflux points she examines) and her feminist views are in no significantway aligned with the above in content. But in approach, in theshared belief that stories and archetypes can both morph and retainan essence, that they can be self-perpetuating, that they arewidespread and serve a purpose, that they can skew perception,cloud it, that they are in fact both the emperor's new and oldclothes -- in that they share much."The entire edifice of American security had failed to providea shield," Faludi observes in the introduction to The Terror Dream,and in "the all the disparate nightmares of men and women after9/11, what accompanied the sundering of our myth of indomitabilitywas not just rage but shock at that revelation, and, with theshock, fear, ignominy, shame." The media spit out mantras like"Everything has changed" and spoke of "the death of irony," anenvironment in which a "cacophony of chanted verities induceda kind of cultural hypnosis."The mystery, suggests Faludi, is that the United States, "thelast remaining superpower, a nation attacked precisely becauseof its imperial preeminence, responded by fixating on its weaknessand ineffectuality." To state what is a sweeping and nuanced argumentby her loosely and reductively here, it is that after 9/11 wehave been re-enacting a 1950s Western, John Wayne-style, "cocooningourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood"while trying to evade the terrifying knowledge of our own vulnerability."We dreamed ourselves into a penny-dreadful plot that had littleto do with the actual world in which we must live" is Faludi'sassessment. "The suddenness of the attacks and the finality ofthe towers' collapse and the planes' obliteration left us withlittle in the way of ongoing chronicle or ennobling narrative.So a narrative was created and populated with pasteboard protagonistswhose exploits would exist almost entirely in the realm of Americanarchetype and American fantasy." Concomitantly, "no official moralleadership emerged to challenge Americans to think constructivelyabout our place in the world, to redefine civic commitment andpublic responsibility."