Susan Faludi examines the psychological impact of 9/11 on America’s media, popular culture, and political life. Her book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America, takes a look at our reaction to 9/11, and how that reaction is rooted in the experiences of our Puritan ancestors.

She begins by taking you back to that day, 9/11 and the images we saw. Despite the fact that there were three male victims for every female victim in the World Trade Centers, the image the media gave us was of a brawny young man carrying a woman in his arms. This is what happens in America when we face disaster; we turn to “John Wayne.” The images that don’t fit with strong male hero and the helpless female victim are erased. We weren’t shown the images, images of strong women, woman who survived. The media ignored the three female rescuers that died in the line of duty that day. We were shown women as victims, women as good homemakers, needing someone to take care of them. All traces of the victories of feminism were erased from our culture and we returned to the 1950’s traditional roles.

Faludi explains that 9/11 broke the myth, “the illusion that we are the masters of our security, that our might makes our homeland impregnable, that our families are safe in the bowers of their communities and our women and children safe in the arms of their men.” On 9/11 we learned we could not depend on our protectors to keep us safe, “the White House had not acted on the warnings of an impending attack, that the FAA had not made safe our airports and planes, the air force had not secured our skies, that the 911 dispatchers had not issued the necessary warnings, and the cities rescue workers, through no fault of their own, could not pluck their fellow citizens from danger—in short, that the entire edifice of American security had failed to provide a shield.” This assault on our myth resulted not just in rage, but also in shock, fear, ignominy, and shame. Faludi’s book is not about what 9/11 did to women or to men, it is about why we responded the way we did. The Terror dream we immersed ourselves in has cultural roots spanning back more than 300 years. Faludi take us on a tour of those terror dreams.

Faludi returns us to that fateful day and the following media coverage. Reminding us of images we have already forgotten. Rumsfeld on the cover of the National Review with the headline, “The Stud: Donald Rumsfeld, America’s New Pin-Up.” The President vowed to get the “evildoers” and former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan declared that she half-expected Bush to “tear open his shirt and reveal a big ‘S’ on his chest.” UPI’s Peter Roff said Bush’s evildoer rhetoric reminded him of ‘Whams,’ ‘Pows,’ and ‘Biffs,’ and the ‘Whaps,’ of Batman, Bulletman, and the Shadow; stating that America needed a comic book style hero, because comic book language “rallies the nation to even greater accomplishments and sacrifice, bringing forth great leaders to rescue the county.” Marvell Comics and DC comics both rushed into production comic books on 9/11 heroes. Faludi asks, “Why were our serious media insisting on portraying us and our leaders with such cartoon hyperbole? The answer is a bit unnerving. Superheroes are fantasies for a particular type of reader: someone, typically a prepubescent boy, who feels week in the world and insufficient to the demands of the day.”

The reality was that on 9/11 was that most of the victims who made it out alive, walked out on their own. Our hospitals did not fill up with injured. The fire, police, and K-9 units found no one to rescue. “What was a rescuer without someone to rescue?” That day left us as nation impotent, there was nothing we could do but watch. Faludi observes, “The nations frenzy to apotheosize those people suggested a deep cultural unease beneath the hero worship; the culture lofted them into some ridiculous gilded firmament while, at the same time dissatisfied with the example, it kept searching for more available chests to decorate with medals. The suddenness of the attacks and the finality of the towers’ collapse and the planes’ obliteration left us with little in the way of an ongoing chronicle or ennobling narrative. So a narrative was created and populated with pasteboard protagonists whose exploits would exist almost entirely in the realm of American archetype and American fantasy.” Faludi warns that, “There is a danger in being honored with such manufactured laurels, particularly for the tragedy’s survivors: for the fantasy to hold, citizens would have to stay in character, never mind that the command performance prevented them from expressing what they really had witnessed and suffered that day.”

Faludi takes us back more than three hundred years to see the origins of that myth in America. On February 10, 1675, Mary Rowlandson was living in a small village thirty-five miles west of Boston. ‘Indians’ came in great number to burn the village to the ground. The inhabitants of the village gathered with Mary in six fortified homes. As the homes burned, the inhabitants were faced with the same choice that three hundred years later would confront those in the twin towers, burn within or escape. As Mary stepped out the door, she was shot in the side. She would become one of the two dozen townspersons captured that day. Her six-year-old daughter would die in her arms during the forced march north. This was the first war on terror that Americans fought. King Phillip’s war and the confrontation between white settlers and the New England tribes, the Great Crisis, would per capita, be the deadliest war in America. In the yearlong conflict, one in every ten men of military age would be killed. Two thirds of New England towns were attacked, more than half the settlements left in ruins. The psychological damage or the ordeal and the subsequent recovery would have deep implications for the development of American identity. Early settlers dwelled in a perpetual state of insecurity. The men felt shame at their inability to protect their woman and children. Out of these experiences would develop a uniquely American literary genre, the captivity narrative. These narratives were not merely a recording of the ordeal but a medium through which haunting memories could be contained, reconstructed, and effectively repressed. According to Faludi, “White America restored its sense of national security through the compensatory gender narrative. The narratives served to convert actual terror into an illusion of security. The Indian wars induced a spiritual crisis in the Puritan community. Reverend Cotton Mather would assert that God “hath seemed to cast us out, and put us to shame.” Mather would determine that the cause was the spiritual decline of the second generation, who seemed to be setting aside a muscular religious devotion for the enchantments of worldly goods and property accumulation in the land-rich New World. Besides the effeminacy of men, Mather would blame female arrogance.

By the mid eighteenth century, colonial anxieties center less around a satanic enemy. The Indians, of the French and Indian war, were not in league with the devil--but the French. The captivity narrative was transformed. Now the focus was not the stalwart Puritan woman, but the battle hardened and wilderness savvy male who could, even when captured, take on the Indians, the French, and eventually the British. The woman was reduced to a pagandistic role, demonstrating the enemy’s brutality. But in order for American men to become larger than life domestic rescuers, American women would have to be knocked down to the helpless rescuee. These accounts, converting male victimization into heroism, would be become best sellers. Faludi states that, “A culture forges myths for many reasons, but paramount among them is the need to impose order on chaotic and disturbing experience—to resolve its haunting contradictions and contain its apprehensions, to imagine a way out of the darkness. A young nation was struggling to make sense of the troubling legacy of episodic rampant terror in the homeland, a terror that the male protectorate had not been able to check at the familial front door. This was the experience that a national myth was called to address—by remaking its shame into triumph.” By 1890, the myth had perfected its form. A large portion of the Indian population had been wiped out and the remaining quarantined on reservations, along with the centuries of shame.

The 1950’s found us ready to reactivate that myth and its protective powers. Although America had been enshrined as the new world power, we perceived ourselves as more vulnerable than ever before. Edward R. Murrow remarked in his August 12, 1945 broadcast that, “Seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and survival is not assured.” It was our own invention, the atom bomb, combined with long-range missiles, which made our homeland susceptible to annihilation. In the late forties, a Gallup poll revealed that seventy-seven percent of Americans believed we would be facing an atomic third world war within twenty years. Anxieties about gender, that men were not strong enough, and women not feminine enough, resurfaced. The entangling of these gender fears with atomic fears was apparent in a multitude of fifties science fiction films. These films re-envisioned nuclear terrors in the form of mutant monsters and insects that were inevitably female. Such as, the radiated queen aunt on a reproductive rage in the 1954 blockbuster, Them!. However, Faludi observes that, “By the early fifties, a more literal American frontier was on display in virtually every cultural venue.” Fifties westerns focused on a very narrow period in American history, the period from 1860 to 1890, the period when we finally subdued the American Indians. Faludi states that, “In fixing only on the moment of conquest, Cold War America turned its back on the earliest chapters of our history and the insights they contained. One potential insight, which would seem all the more essential in a postatomic age, involves learning to live with insecurity, finding accommodation with—even drawing strength from—an awareness of vulnerability.”

Faludi observes that, “Presented with the chance to free itself from the thrall of a dangerous myth, the country balked and summoned John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead. That same refusal would doom our response to the catastrophe that struck our home soil on 9/11, when, called to forge a mindful future, we succumbed to the haunting of a fabricated past…For a moment on the morning of Sept.11, we were awakened to the reality of our weakness and vulnerability. It was too disturbing to beat and we soon turned away. What if we hadn’t?” In a small booth, inside an art gallery near the 9/11 site, rescuers and victims told their stories, stories that were edged out of the media’s narrative. Men and women shared stories of a humanity forged by the common experience of weakness, fear, and vulnerability. Our culture began quickly to rework the national tragedy into a national fantasy of virtuous might and triumph. Faludi warns that, “No doubt, the fantasies consoled many. But rather than make us any safer, it misled us into danger, damaging the very security the myth was supposed to bolster. There are consequences to living in a dream.” We chose to dwell in a dream state that allowed certain political choices to unfold unimpeded. If we have confronted the truth, we would have found malfunctioning radios, inept intelligence and impeachable dishonesties. Faludi concludes that, “When we respond to real threats to our nation by distracting ourselves with imagined threats to femininity and family life, when we invest our leaders with cartoon masculinity and require of them bluster in lieu of a capacity for rational calculation, and when we blame our fragility on ‘fifth column’ feminist –in short, when we base our security on a mythical male strength that can only measure itself against a mythical female weakness—we should know that we are exhibiting the symptoms of a lethal , albeit curable, cultural affliction.