Sherry Chandler

The first couple of weeks of September have been highly distracting to me: mother’s 90th birthday celebration, the retirement of a long-time work colleague, etc. The upshot is that I’ve let some items go by unnoted and I’d like to go back now and catch up a bit.

Here awhile back, I wrote an entry on the dangers of belief and the difficulties of de-mythifying our thinking. Not long after that (September 7), Susan Faludi wrote a very interesting op-ed in the NYTimes on the subject of America’s Guardian Myths:

In the weeks and months after 9/11, many commentators described the “dream-like” mindset that the disaster had induced. They attributed our fugue state to the “unimaginable” unreality of the event. Nothing like this had ever happened before. But essential to our understanding of what that attack means to our national psyche is a recognition that it did happen before, over and over. And its happening was instrumental to the formation of the American character. The nation that recently imagined itself so impervious to attack at home was gestated in a time when such attacks were the prevailing reality of American life.

The attacks of which Faludi speaks came about as a result of our conflict with the native peoples whose land we were taking. King Philip’s War (1675-1676) was, according to Falludi, “per capita, America’s deadliest war:”

In one year, one of every 10 white men of military age in Massachusetts Bay was killed, and one of every 16 in the Northeastern colonies. Two-thirds of New England towns were attacked and more than half the settlements were left in ruins. Settlers were forced to retreat nearly to the coast, and the Colonial economy was devastated.

This conflict led to the French and Indian Wars: King William’s War (1689-1697), Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713), King George’s War (1744-1748), and the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The terror and insecurity of these wars carried forward into our westward expansion and led to our formative myth, which Faludi calls “a fable of national invincibility on the American frontier.” “Manifest Destiny,” if you will.

It was this myth that was busted on September 11, 2001, had its plaster cracked in Falludi’s words.

(I would speculate that it was cracked a bit already by the Korean War, Viet Nam, and various terrorist attacks inside and outside the continental U.S., maybe super-glued back together by the Reagan and/or Bush “winning” of the Cold War.)

One intriguing outgrowth of this more-or-less conscious 19th century mythmaking was the re-writing of captivity narratives. Again to quote Faludi:

A defining aspect of this cultural re-engineering was the upending of a gender history that had proved deeply humiliating to men. Time and again, leaders and militias had failed to protect and redeem women and their children. Of female colonists seized in New England and taken to Canada from 1689 to 1730, more than a quarter — and a whopping 60 percent between the ages of 12 and 21 — never came home.

Early American male defenders had suffered the further mortification of hearing female captives (Mary Rowlandson among them) disparage their protective efforts gone awry or, worse, recount how they managed to defend themselves. Rowlandson negotiated shrewdly with her captors and named her own ransom. Hannah Duston, abducted as she lay in bed recovering from childbirth (while her husband fled), escaped after killing a family of Indians with a hatchet and taking their scalps.

In response to this shame, the new model exaggerated iron-clad valor on the part of white men and crinoline helplessness on the part of white women. Thus was born the dime-store melodrama in which manly heroics always save the girl in jeopardy. As the historian Roy Harvey Pearce observed in 1947, the captivity narrative was refashioned into America’s “terroristic vehicle,” our verbal armor against our oldest national nightmare. That wholesale overhaul would inform the plots of everything from “The Last of the Mohicans” to countless television westerns to Steven Spielberg’s post-9/11 drama, “War of the Worlds.”

[Gilbert Imlay's tale of utopia in Kentucky, The Emigrants, is a type of this narrative, a bit of an irony in that he was Mary Wollstonecraft's lover.]

And of course it was this myth that George W. Bush, the swaggering Texas cowboy, invoked in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. “Bring ‘em on.” And the rest of the country’s leaders followed willingly along.

That worked out well.

Susan Faludi’s book on this subject, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, is set for an October 2 release from Metropolitan Books. This op-ed, and the book to follow, are well worth reading.