![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glaurungSusan Faludi's "The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America" is a brilliant book with an annoying flaw.
Faludi opens by noting that even as late as 2007 when she finished the book, "Virtually no film, television drama, play, or novel on 9/11 had begun to plumb what the trauma meant for our national psyche. Slavishly literal reenactments of the physical attack... or unrepresentative tales of triumphal rescue at ground zero seemed all the national imagination could handle." She talks a great deal about "we" in following pages of her preface: "Nothing like this had ever happened before, so we didn't know how to assimilate the experience. And yet, in the weeks and months to follow, we kept rummaging through the past to make sense of the disaster, as if the trauma of 9/11 had stirred some distant memory, reminded us of something disturbingly familiar." And further: "allusions to Pearl Harbour provided no traction, and we soon turned our attention to another chapter in U.S. history," the Cold War, where, in the fall of 2001, with pundits invoking John Wayne and TV airing re-runs of all of Wayne's western films, "we reacted to our trauma, in other words, not by interrogating it but by cocooning it in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood."
Obviously, of course, Faludi suffers from the typical American problem of forgetting that Americans are not the only "we" in the world. But that's not really the problem here. The problem, and the flaw, is that despite her preface, Faludi isn't really writing about "we Americans" but rather, and only, about "we journalists, pundits, politicians, and other members of the Establishment." Which is the typical, self-centred and arrogant stance of most journalists, of course, but is an astonishing lapse from a feminist left-wing writer who has shown in the past that she knows better (more about why I think Faludi falls into making this mistake later). The result is a fascinating and revealing book about the mythical fantasy that the U.S. media and the U.S. establishment tried to impose on the nation's social fabric in the aftermath of 9/11, but it isn't a book about what Americans thought of 9/11 or how they reacted to it. Nor, aside from a few early and brief mentions of statistics that refute the so-called trends being claimed by various journalists, is it even a book that tries to compare the establishment's response to the attacks to the responses of ordinary people.
Many's the time since September 2001 when I have read something in the news about the U.S. and said to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morgan_dhu, "they've all gone barking mad down there." And I know many of my e-friends in the U.S., and many of the U.S.-based bloggers that I read, were having very similar responses to the parade of craziness that the establishment media and political leaders were putting on. Faludi would have written a much better book, I think, if she had gone beyond the mainstream and establishment media and looked at opinion surveys, at left-wing blogs, at all the various non-establishment voices out there, and what they had to say about 9/11 and about the establishment's campaign of myth-making.
Despite this flaw, I still found the book utterly fascinating. It's a damn good book, if you accept the limits of what it tries to do.
Faludi's first encounter with the alternate reality, the fantasy, that the establishment, collectively and unconsciously, was trying to impose on 9/11, happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when she received a call from a reporter who was doing a "reaction story," and wanted to ask her about what the attacks would mean to the country's "social fabric." She was perplexed as to why he was calling her, but the reason became clear when he said, in "a bizarrely gleeful tone: 'Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!'" In the weeks following the attacks, Faludi received more calls from other journalists doing similar stories, on "the return of the manly man" and on "the 'trend' of women 'becoming more feminine after 9/11.' By which, as she [the journalist] made clear, she meant less feminist."
The first half of the book is a brilliant and thorough analysis of the fantasy reality that was promoted, heavily, by the U.S. media and especially by the right wing media and pundits in the wake of the attacks. This fantasy was one in which American women responded to the attacks by giving up on their careers and instead deciding to get married and devote their lives to their husband and children, and in which American men gave up their sissified ways and resumed acting like John Wayne. In which American girls and young women responded by vowing to not fool around anymore and instead began to stay pure until marriage. In which the nation's leaders sought to transform themselves into reincarnations of John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. In which somehow the victims of the attacks were all women (good little home maker women, not career women), and the heroes who rescued them were all men -- this required the media to focus not on those (mostly male stockbrokers) who actually died in the towers, but rather on their widowed wives, especially those who were housewives, more especially those who were pregnant at the time of the attacks.
Throughout, Faludi once again demonstrates her awesome ability to rummage through a massive pile of news articles and, with surgical skill, extract quotes and examples that perfectly and disturbingly illustrate the overall trend she is elucidating. Also throughout, Faludi makes clear that the picture being painted by the media was of a fantasy reality, one in which one or two anecdotes of individual women deciding they were going to quit their jobs and concentrate on their kids become "proof" of a new trend of a massive female retreat from the workforce, one in which:
The problem being that while the cooperation or not of real people may have not been important to the establishment that was putting forth this fantasy, that doesn't mean it should have been unimportant to Faludi.
Anyway, I had to read the first half of the book in small doses, as every few pages there was a new tidbit that made me angry at W. and his media lapdogs all over again. I was reminded of much that I already knew, such as the fact that the entire Jessica Lynch story, as presented by the military and the Bush administration to the lapdog media, was a complete lie from beginning to end. And I learned much that I did not know before, such as the less than fully competent and heroic rescue of five other soldiers captured along with Lynch, which included America's first black female POW. Or about the fact that Lynch herself thought the real hero of her experience in Iraq was her colleague Lori Piestewa, a Hopi Indian and Lynch's buddy, who died in the crash that put Lynch in the Iraq hospital, who Lynch named her daughter after, and who was the first native American woman "ever to be killed in an American war. On foreign soil, that is."
That last comment, referring to the long history of White America's genocidal wars against Native Americans, leads us to the second section of the book. Which is where Faludi's over-identification with the establishment version of events really starts to hurt her.
Faludi draws a parallel between the Jessica Lynch story and the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by Comanche warriors in a raid on an isolated Texas fort in 1836, who was eventually (in 1860) 'rescued' from "people her countrymen viewed as rapacious non-Christian murderers," and whose 'ordeal' and eventual 'rescue,' as narrated by the White media of the time, bore no relation whatsoever to the actual truth of her experience. Via Parker, Faludi introduces us to the genre of American literature known as the Indian captivity narrative, pointing out common themes that recur again and again in the history of the genre.
On the one hand, the real histories of these captives tend to be stories in which women and children (and sometimes men) are captured due to their male relatives' cowardice, profound incompetence, or both; in which the captors treat their hostages quite humanely and without violence (rape of captives in particular was almost unheard of); and in which the captives either free themselves (though simple flight or unfeminine violence), or else discover they actually rather enjoy living among the Indians and decide to stay and marry into the tribe.
On the other hand, the "captivity narratives" that are reprinted and retold endlessly are invariably edited with each retelling to make the captives more and more helpless and feminine, the captors more and more barbaric and sexually violent, and the male relatives and rescuers more and more manly, brave, competent and heroic.
On the gripping hand, captives who failed to fit into the roles assigned to them (either because they murdered their captors and freed themselves, or because they insisted on being independent women after being freed, were either quickly shuffled off the stage, or else demonized. Women who failed to be properly feminine were also blamed for the pathology of menfolk who failed to live up to the standard of manly valour expected of them.
Faludi traces the development of the captivity narrative, from Puritan New England, to the Salem Witch trials, to revolutionary America and beyond; its permutation after the Civil War into the myth of the Black rapist, used to justify the lynchings and terrorism of the Klan; and its transference from (purportedly) factual accounts to the outright fictions of James Fenimore Cooper and later writers. At every step, she shows how the canonical captivity narrative became over time more and more fixed and rigidly traditional in the gender roles assigned to its characters... and how over time it became more and more identical to the establishment fantasy that was brought into play in the wake of 9/11.
Puritan settlers faced the very real possibility of being destroyed:
And that fear of destruction, along with its accompanying feelings of helplessness and impotence, are the emotions that the captivity narrative, as a cultural myth, seeks to prevent, or at least, cover over and hide.
The brilliant part of this is how well it all works, both within the book, and in relation to other works that Faludi probably didn't even have in mind. The cartoon in Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" that tries to explain American gun culture fits in perfectly with Faludi's observations about the Puritan's very real fear of destruction at the hands of the Indians. The "satanic abuse" scares of the 80's and early 90's were basically rehashed versions of the captivity narrative, with "satanists" (figured primarily as day care workers, whose threat to the traditional gender roles is obvious) taking the place of Indians.
Faludi helped me realize something that has always seemed not quite right to me about the thesis of Michael Bellesiles ("Arming America"): Bellesiles, along with Gary Willis ("A necessary evil") show that contrary to the NRA and popular myth, guns in colonial America were fairly rare. The only gun manufacturers existed in London or on the continent, guns tended to rust and become useless after a fairly short time, and when militias were mustered, authorities invariably complained about how poorly armed the people coming to the muster were. In the early 1800's, the US government owned and operated gun factories which were just able to fully arm the US military. It was not until the Civil War created the mass production capacity, and the end of that war created the incentive for gun manufacturers to stay in business by selling their wares to the general public, that gun ownership became ubiquitous among the American public.
The problem is that Bellesiles doesn't really have a good explanation for the American fetish for guns - the obsessive desire to have them, to the extent that early American literature obsessively and counterfactually portrays a world where all white settlers own guns and are a sharpshooters with them. He shows, clearly, that this fetish dates back to the colonial era, but he can't really explain why. The reason, I now think, was the white settlers' helplessness in the face of Indian raids. Faludi shows that this helplessness led, in the rewritten versions of captivity narratives and the original fictions spun from them, to power fantasies in which the white male hero slaughters countless Indians without breaking a sweat. Perhaps the same need for power fantasies inspired the obsession with guns.
So, that's what works in the second section of the book. What doesn't work is Faludi's complete failure to talk about why such a high proportion of women captured in Indian raids decided to live among the Indians and were reluctant to return to the White world. What doesn't work is the extremely brief and inadequate discussion she gives of the Indian point of view in all this, of why they were raiding, why they took captives, why they treated those they took as well as they did. And it wouldn't hurt if she had included discussion of the unacknowledged twin of the Indian captive story, the large numbers of settlers, men and women, especially in the Virgina Colony, who voluntarily decided to leave the colony and live among the natives. I don't recall where I read of this, but a simple tally of the number of immigrants versus the number of recorded deaths reveals a significant proportion of the settlers in Virginia were simply up and leaving the colony, presumably because they felt living among the 'savages' would be a better life for them. Little more is known since Virginia authorities seem to have regarded these people as traitors, and said as little about them in their chronicles and journals as possible,
What doesn't work is the way these absences in her discussion lead to instances of racefail like this:
Bad enough that Faludi accepts and uses, without interrogation or deconstruction, the establishment's portrayal of Al-Quaeda and Muslim extremists. Even worse that she then proceeds to equate modern terrorists and colonial era Native Americans, again without unpacking the label she places on them.
I like to think Faludi knows better than to uncritically look only at the Establishment's story without turning away to look at the stories of those who are not part of the mainstream media, the punditocracy, or the political elite. I like to think that she knows better than to portray Native Americans desperately trying to fight off genocide as "terrorists." I know that she is not one of those lapdog journalists Glen Greenwald excoriates for being far too deferential to and complicit with the ruling elite.
It's more of a gut feeling than a reasoned conclusion, and I really hate to say this, but I think Faludi has (unconsciously) allowed the Establishment to dictate to her the parameters of her argument and the limits of her investigation. I think, in essence, she did not look at alternative voices in the present or in the past because she was (unconsciously) afraid of being labelled as being "with the terrorists" if she showed too much empathy with the native American raiders, or if she dared to look outside the bubble of the media's fantasy narrative. And the book, superb as it is, is the weaker and poorer for that.
Faludi opens by noting that even as late as 2007 when she finished the book, "Virtually no film, television drama, play, or novel on 9/11 had begun to plumb what the trauma meant for our national psyche. Slavishly literal reenactments of the physical attack... or unrepresentative tales of triumphal rescue at ground zero seemed all the national imagination could handle." She talks a great deal about "we" in following pages of her preface: "Nothing like this had ever happened before, so we didn't know how to assimilate the experience. And yet, in the weeks and months to follow, we kept rummaging through the past to make sense of the disaster, as if the trauma of 9/11 had stirred some distant memory, reminded us of something disturbingly familiar." And further: "allusions to Pearl Harbour provided no traction, and we soon turned our attention to another chapter in U.S. history," the Cold War, where, in the fall of 2001, with pundits invoking John Wayne and TV airing re-runs of all of Wayne's western films, "we reacted to our trauma, in other words, not by interrogating it but by cocooning it in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom's childhood."
Obviously, of course, Faludi suffers from the typical American problem of forgetting that Americans are not the only "we" in the world. But that's not really the problem here. The problem, and the flaw, is that despite her preface, Faludi isn't really writing about "we Americans" but rather, and only, about "we journalists, pundits, politicians, and other members of the Establishment." Which is the typical, self-centred and arrogant stance of most journalists, of course, but is an astonishing lapse from a feminist left-wing writer who has shown in the past that she knows better (more about why I think Faludi falls into making this mistake later). The result is a fascinating and revealing book about the mythical fantasy that the U.S. media and the U.S. establishment tried to impose on the nation's social fabric in the aftermath of 9/11, but it isn't a book about what Americans thought of 9/11 or how they reacted to it. Nor, aside from a few early and brief mentions of statistics that refute the so-called trends being claimed by various journalists, is it even a book that tries to compare the establishment's response to the attacks to the responses of ordinary people.
Many's the time since September 2001 when I have read something in the news about the U.S. and said to
morgan_dhu, "they've all gone barking mad down there." And I know many of my e-friends in the U.S., and many of the U.S.-based bloggers that I read, were having very similar responses to the parade of craziness that the establishment media and political leaders were putting on. Faludi would have written a much better book, I think, if she had gone beyond the mainstream and establishment media and looked at opinion surveys, at left-wing blogs, at all the various non-establishment voices out there, and what they had to say about 9/11 and about the establishment's campaign of myth-making.Despite this flaw, I still found the book utterly fascinating. It's a damn good book, if you accept the limits of what it tries to do.
Faludi's first encounter with the alternate reality, the fantasy, that the establishment, collectively and unconsciously, was trying to impose on 9/11, happened on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when she received a call from a reporter who was doing a "reaction story," and wanted to ask her about what the attacks would mean to the country's "social fabric." She was perplexed as to why he was calling her, but the reason became clear when he said, in "a bizarrely gleeful tone: 'Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!'" In the weeks following the attacks, Faludi received more calls from other journalists doing similar stories, on "the return of the manly man" and on "the 'trend' of women 'becoming more feminine after 9/11.' By which, as she [the journalist] made clear, she meant less feminist."
The first half of the book is a brilliant and thorough analysis of the fantasy reality that was promoted, heavily, by the U.S. media and especially by the right wing media and pundits in the wake of the attacks. This fantasy was one in which American women responded to the attacks by giving up on their careers and instead deciding to get married and devote their lives to their husband and children, and in which American men gave up their sissified ways and resumed acting like John Wayne. In which American girls and young women responded by vowing to not fool around anymore and instead began to stay pure until marriage. In which the nation's leaders sought to transform themselves into reincarnations of John Wayne, or Clint Eastwood. In which somehow the victims of the attacks were all women (good little home maker women, not career women), and the heroes who rescued them were all men -- this required the media to focus not on those (mostly male stockbrokers) who actually died in the towers, but rather on their widowed wives, especially those who were housewives, more especially those who were pregnant at the time of the attacks.
Throughout, Faludi once again demonstrates her awesome ability to rummage through a massive pile of news articles and, with surgical skill, extract quotes and examples that perfectly and disturbingly illustrate the overall trend she is elucidating. Also throughout, Faludi makes clear that the picture being painted by the media was of a fantasy reality, one in which one or two anecdotes of individual women deciding they were going to quit their jobs and concentrate on their kids become "proof" of a new trend of a massive female retreat from the workforce, one in which:
Whether women in the real world cooperated or not... was of little importance. Time and the others were willing a transformation in another realm, the commercially mediated dream world in which "trends" attain an ersatz truth, fictional dramas command their own hyperreality, and the characters on Sex and the City stand in for real women. Americans didn't have to change their private behavior; they just had to subscribe to the sanctioned fantasy. And to judge themselves accordingly. They could adhere to its dictates and enjoy a pat of approval for their submission, or they could fail to meet its standards and suffer the shame of cultural and self-recrimination. Either way, they remained safely within the borders of the dream. If the myth's constructions ran afoul of the average American woman's reality, well, defying reality was the point. What mattered was restoring the illusion of a mythic America where women needed men's protection and men succeeded in providing it. What mattered was vanquishing the myth's dark twin, the humiliating "terror-dream" that 9/11 had forced to the surface of national consciousness.
The problem being that while the cooperation or not of real people may have not been important to the establishment that was putting forth this fantasy, that doesn't mean it should have been unimportant to Faludi.
Anyway, I had to read the first half of the book in small doses, as every few pages there was a new tidbit that made me angry at W. and his media lapdogs all over again. I was reminded of much that I already knew, such as the fact that the entire Jessica Lynch story, as presented by the military and the Bush administration to the lapdog media, was a complete lie from beginning to end. And I learned much that I did not know before, such as the less than fully competent and heroic rescue of five other soldiers captured along with Lynch, which included America's first black female POW. Or about the fact that Lynch herself thought the real hero of her experience in Iraq was her colleague Lori Piestewa, a Hopi Indian and Lynch's buddy, who died in the crash that put Lynch in the Iraq hospital, who Lynch named her daughter after, and who was the first native American woman "ever to be killed in an American war. On foreign soil, that is."
That last comment, referring to the long history of White America's genocidal wars against Native Americans, leads us to the second section of the book. Which is where Faludi's over-identification with the establishment version of events really starts to hurt her.
Faludi draws a parallel between the Jessica Lynch story and the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was captured by Comanche warriors in a raid on an isolated Texas fort in 1836, who was eventually (in 1860) 'rescued' from "people her countrymen viewed as rapacious non-Christian murderers," and whose 'ordeal' and eventual 'rescue,' as narrated by the White media of the time, bore no relation whatsoever to the actual truth of her experience. Via Parker, Faludi introduces us to the genre of American literature known as the Indian captivity narrative, pointing out common themes that recur again and again in the history of the genre.
On the one hand, the real histories of these captives tend to be stories in which women and children (and sometimes men) are captured due to their male relatives' cowardice, profound incompetence, or both; in which the captors treat their hostages quite humanely and without violence (rape of captives in particular was almost unheard of); and in which the captives either free themselves (though simple flight or unfeminine violence), or else discover they actually rather enjoy living among the Indians and decide to stay and marry into the tribe.
On the other hand, the "captivity narratives" that are reprinted and retold endlessly are invariably edited with each retelling to make the captives more and more helpless and feminine, the captors more and more barbaric and sexually violent, and the male relatives and rescuers more and more manly, brave, competent and heroic.
On the gripping hand, captives who failed to fit into the roles assigned to them (either because they murdered their captors and freed themselves, or because they insisted on being independent women after being freed, were either quickly shuffled off the stage, or else demonized. Women who failed to be properly feminine were also blamed for the pathology of menfolk who failed to live up to the standard of manly valour expected of them.
Faludi traces the development of the captivity narrative, from Puritan New England, to the Salem Witch trials, to revolutionary America and beyond; its permutation after the Civil War into the myth of the Black rapist, used to justify the lynchings and terrorism of the Klan; and its transference from (purportedly) factual accounts to the outright fictions of James Fenimore Cooper and later writers. At every step, she shows how the canonical captivity narrative became over time more and more fixed and rigidly traditional in the gender roles assigned to its characters... and how over time it became more and more identical to the establishment fantasy that was brought into play in the wake of 9/11.
Puritan settlers faced the very real possibility of being destroyed:
To this day King Philip's War remains, per capita, America's deadliest war: in the yearlong conflict, one in every ten white men of military age in Massachusetts Bay died, one of every sixteen in the Northeastern colonies. Two-thirds of the New England towns were attacked, more than half the settlements were left in ruins, and the settlers were forced to retreat nearly to the coast. The war... brought the entire Puritan project to the edge of annihilation.
And that fear of destruction, along with its accompanying feelings of helplessness and impotence, are the emotions that the captivity narrative, as a cultural myth, seeks to prevent, or at least, cover over and hide.
The brilliant part of this is how well it all works, both within the book, and in relation to other works that Faludi probably didn't even have in mind. The cartoon in Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" that tries to explain American gun culture fits in perfectly with Faludi's observations about the Puritan's very real fear of destruction at the hands of the Indians. The "satanic abuse" scares of the 80's and early 90's were basically rehashed versions of the captivity narrative, with "satanists" (figured primarily as day care workers, whose threat to the traditional gender roles is obvious) taking the place of Indians.
Faludi helped me realize something that has always seemed not quite right to me about the thesis of Michael Bellesiles ("Arming America"): Bellesiles, along with Gary Willis ("A necessary evil") show that contrary to the NRA and popular myth, guns in colonial America were fairly rare. The only gun manufacturers existed in London or on the continent, guns tended to rust and become useless after a fairly short time, and when militias were mustered, authorities invariably complained about how poorly armed the people coming to the muster were. In the early 1800's, the US government owned and operated gun factories which were just able to fully arm the US military. It was not until the Civil War created the mass production capacity, and the end of that war created the incentive for gun manufacturers to stay in business by selling their wares to the general public, that gun ownership became ubiquitous among the American public.
The problem is that Bellesiles doesn't really have a good explanation for the American fetish for guns - the obsessive desire to have them, to the extent that early American literature obsessively and counterfactually portrays a world where all white settlers own guns and are a sharpshooters with them. He shows, clearly, that this fetish dates back to the colonial era, but he can't really explain why. The reason, I now think, was the white settlers' helplessness in the face of Indian raids. Faludi shows that this helplessness led, in the rewritten versions of captivity narratives and the original fictions spun from them, to power fantasies in which the white male hero slaughters countless Indians without breaking a sweat. Perhaps the same need for power fantasies inspired the obsession with guns.
So, that's what works in the second section of the book. What doesn't work is Faludi's complete failure to talk about why such a high proportion of women captured in Indian raids decided to live among the Indians and were reluctant to return to the White world. What doesn't work is the extremely brief and inadequate discussion she gives of the Indian point of view in all this, of why they were raiding, why they took captives, why they treated those they took as well as they did. And it wouldn't hurt if she had included discussion of the unacknowledged twin of the Indian captive story, the large numbers of settlers, men and women, especially in the Virgina Colony, who voluntarily decided to leave the colony and live among the natives. I don't recall where I read of this, but a simple tally of the number of immigrants versus the number of recorded deaths reveals a significant proportion of the settlers in Virginia were simply up and leaving the colony, presumably because they felt living among the 'savages' would be a better life for them. Little more is known since Virginia authorities seem to have regarded these people as traitors, and said as little about them in their chronicles and journals as possible,
What doesn't work is the way these absences in her discussion lead to instances of racefail like this:
We perceive our country as inviolable, shielded from enemy penetration.... And yet, our foundational drama as a society was apposite, a profound exposure to just such assaults, murderous homeland incursions by dark-skinned, non-Christian combatants under the flag of no recognized nation, complying with no accepted Western rules of engagement and subscribing to an alien culture, who attacked white America on its "own" soil and against civilian targets. September 11 was aimed at our cultural solar plexus precisely because.... [events like it were] the characteristic and formative American ordeal, the primal injury of which we could not speak... Our ancestors had already fought a war on terror, a very long war, and we have lived with its scars ever since.
Bad enough that Faludi accepts and uses, without interrogation or deconstruction, the establishment's portrayal of Al-Quaeda and Muslim extremists. Even worse that she then proceeds to equate modern terrorists and colonial era Native Americans, again without unpacking the label she places on them.
I like to think Faludi knows better than to uncritically look only at the Establishment's story without turning away to look at the stories of those who are not part of the mainstream media, the punditocracy, or the political elite. I like to think that she knows better than to portray Native Americans desperately trying to fight off genocide as "terrorists." I know that she is not one of those lapdog journalists Glen Greenwald excoriates for being far too deferential to and complicit with the ruling elite.
It's more of a gut feeling than a reasoned conclusion, and I really hate to say this, but I think Faludi has (unconsciously) allowed the Establishment to dictate to her the parameters of her argument and the limits of her investigation. I think, in essence, she did not look at alternative voices in the present or in the past because she was (unconsciously) afraid of being labelled as being "with the terrorists" if she showed too much empathy with the native American raiders, or if she dared to look outside the bubble of the media's fantasy narrative. And the book, superb as it is, is the weaker and poorer for that.