Post 9/11 and the Frontier Mythology

[prole]

Sounds like an interesting book. Here's an exert from an interview with the author:

 

"Tell us what the Terror Dream [susan Faludi's new book] is about?

 

Well, I sat down to write this book because I wanted to try and understand what had happened to us after 9/11 because when you go back and look at our reaction, you see something really strange. So much of our response didn't seem to be a reaction to the actual threat; it was as if we had fallen into some kind of fever dream where our politicians were re-enacting wild west dramas and spouting vigilante cowboy rhetoric and our pundits were saying that the war on terror was back to our frontier wars fighting Indians.

 

We had the media hailing the return of John Wayne masculinity, and there was all this talk about scared housewives, you know, wanting protection and men defending family homes from attack, and all of this was quite mystifying on several fronts. And here you have hijackers who had aimed their planes at the monuments of military and financial power, yet our culture as a whole was reacting as if our home and hearth was under attack. And here you have an attack by men who hate western women's liberation, yet the rhetoric and the culture was all about how we needed to return traditional family values and that the attacks were going to cause women to rush out and get married and have babies and reconsider their independence and stay home and sew drapes.

 

And there were some articles about things like more sewing machines being sold or some things like that, weren't there?

 

Right. Right. Time Magazine, well, both Time and Newsweek, among various other publications, but the one I remember distinctly was Time Magazine, saying stay home, sew your own drapes and dresses, and predicting that sewing machines - there would be a spike in sales of sewing machines, meatloaf pans, comfort food, roasting pans. They were right about the roasting pans, but that was simply because the story ran just before Thanksgiving.

 

Was this something that was completely created by the media? Or was it something that you think a lot of Americans actually felt?

 

Well, neither, actually. What I think we were seeing was in a time of crisis, and a particular crisis where we felt threatened on our home soil, we as a culture reflexively reached for a very old mythology. So it wasn't that the media whipped something up, whole cloth. The media, the political culture, the popular culture, reached for a cultural fantasy that we as a society spent many, many years elaborating that the mythologies of ourselves as unassailable and invincible and protected as a nation of helpless rescued women protected by strong, 10-gallon hat men.

 

So it wasn't as if the media came up with something new. It went back to something that, along with the other architects of the culture had been devising since America's founding."

 

The rest can be found here.

 

 

[JayB]

There's clearly nothing more regressive than masculinity.

[prole]

When linked to patriarchy, yes. But given your previous posts condemning such systems in Muslim societies, you'd know that already.

[jclark]

So since the terrorists only attacked financial institutions and military complexes we should have done what instead? What a feminist load of S*&! Seriously WTF??? I have heard it all now.

[joblo7]

our reaction was dictated by the events we witnessed: an inside job. we were told a story that did not add up . by everybody. gov/media/church.

a lie is always hard to live with.

we were told to hate. very specifically,a group easily spotted. beige.

people get up and fight the wrong enemy and yet are suprised to find no resolution.no peace,no solution.

sewing?wtf. lamest angle ever read.