The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

by Susan Faludi

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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of Backlash comes an unflinching dissection of the mind of America after 9/11.In this most original examination of America's post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the country's psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore "traditional" manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we 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 us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling "security moms," swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the "rescue" of a female soldier cast 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 was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite "barbarians" on town and village.
That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about us-and offers the opportunity to look at ourselves.
  • ISBN10 0805086927
  • ISBN13 9780805086928
  • Publish Date 8 October 2007 (first published 2 October 2007)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 4 June 2021
  • Publish Country AU
  • Imprint Scribe Publications
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 351
  • Language English