Susan Faludi, one of the brainest of America's leftists, brings forward a fascinating argument about the role of terror in American history. Thanks to the New York Times' newfound willingness to blog, this op-ed from yesterday should be totally available to readers, and it's definitely worth the five minutes.
But here's her central contention:
Sept. 11 cracked the plaster on that master narrative of American prowess because it so exactly duplicated the terms of the early Indian wars, right down to the fecklessness of our leaders and the failures of our military strategies. Like its early American antecedents, the 9/11 attack was a homeland incursion against civilian targets by non-European, non-Christian combatants who fought under the flag of no recognized nation. Like the “different type of war” heralded by President Bush, the 17th and 18th century “troubles” — as one Puritan chronicler of Metacom’s Rebellion called them, refusing to grant them “the name of a war” — seemed to have no battlefield conventions, no constraints and no end.
Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.
Like the cultural imagineers before them, our post-9/11 press, entertainers and political spin doctors set to work to prop up our sense of virile indomitability — “the return of the manly man” and a reconstituted “John Wayne masculinity” were on every media lip, as the triumphs of torture-prone Jack Bauer heroes were on every TV. The 2004 presidential campaign was given a Western stage set — with the candidates proving their ability to assume the mantle of Crockett in Chief by bragging about their gun collections, hacking at brush and tree stumps and shooting at wild animals. (John Kerry spent so much time in hunting camouflage that he was dubbed “John the Deerslayer.”)
Also restored was the defense of helpless femininity. Witness the Bush administration’s much-trumpeted claims to be saving Afghan women from their burqas and Iraqi women from Saddam Hussein’s “rape rooms.” Or the military’s much-ballyhooed “rescue” of Pvt. Jessica Lynch (albeit from a hospital whose caregivers had tried to return her to American forces, but had been driven back by American gunfire). Or the invention of a supposedly huge new voting bloc of “security moms,” trembling-lipped homemakers desperate to re-elect the sheriff who would keep terrorists from their suburban ranches.
