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• Thursday, September 4, 2008 02:32 PM

  "The Terror Dream" by Susan Faludi

  If you want to understand the Palin pick, read The "Terror Dream" by Susan Faludi.

  http://www.susanfaludi.com/terror-dream.html

  Why did our media react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling-lipped "security moms," swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the "rescue" of a female soldier compulsively recast as a "helpless little girl"?

  The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack is also a nation haunted by a centuries-long trauma of assault on its home soil. For nearly two hundred years, our central drama was not the invincibility of our frontiersmen but their inability to repel invasions of non-Christian, nonwhite "barbarians" from the homestead door. To conceal the insecurity bred by those attacks, American culture would generate an ironclad countermyth of cowboy swagger and feminine frailty, which has been reanimated whenever the nation feels threatened. On September 11, Americans were once again returned to an experience of homeland terror and humiliation. And, once again, they fled from self-knowledge and retreated into myth.

  —Karenn22 Read Karenn22's other letters
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