Sherry Chandler

Rosalie O’Leary sends word that she is reading Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America. Ro says the book is helping her understand some of her own reactions to the post-attack world and, even though she hasn’t quite finished the book, it has already evoked a short poem. Maybe two by this time. She wrote a couple of days ago.

So far, I’ve only read about the book but I certainly enjoyed Faludi’s recent op-ed in the NYTimes, which I blogged about earlier when I was ranting about the dangers of belief.

Faludi became my hero years ago, however, when she debunked Robert Bly and Allan Bloom in a book called Backlash. I remember reading Bly’s Iron John nonsense when my sons were a certain age, thinking I might get some hints from this poet about how to be a better mother to sons. And I remember ranting all the way through it, things like, “If a man hasn’t got spunk enough to cut the apron strings, that’s not his mommy’s fault.” Really, I haven’t been able to read Bly’s poetry with the proper respect since.

I have long suspected that Bush and Company are cowards in a similar way, hiding behind bluster, bullying, and secret torture.

I have a busy day today and won’t be near the computer much, so I thought I might provide you to links to some reviews of The Terror Dream.

Here’s the NYTimes:

Susan Faludi, a relentless reporter, an unapologetic feminist and a brilliant scourge, begins her CAT scan of our traumatized psyche with a demurral: “The Terror Dream,” she says, is about only “one facet” of the American response to the hijacker bombings of Sept. 11: the cover story and screenplay promptly confabulated by our government ministers and news media heavies, a “security myth” and a “national fantasy” starring John Wayne and Dirty Harry as the Last of the Mohicans. But after escorting us briskly from witch hunts in Puritan New England to regime change and Manifest Destiny on the Great Plains and lynching bees in the Old South, from hostage-taking by Barbary pirates to sleeper cells in the cold war all the way up to a patriarchal White House and a quagmired Iraq, she concludes with a curse: “There are consequences to living in a dream.” We’ve sleepwalked into hallucination, regression and psychosis.

And here’s Salon:

Before she can pursue the big picture, Faludi must start where everyone else in America did: her personal experience of Sept. 11. There is her prophetic dream on the night of Sept. 10, in which she is shot while on a plane, a bullet lodged in her throat; she wakes only to discover that the world is under attack. Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, “Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!”

Not 24 hours out, and Faludi has been handed the key to how this plot will unfold: To her mind, Sept. 11 will give the nation, uneasy with the strides made by women in the decades leading up to the attacks, an excuse to stuff them back into traditional boxes. That first gleeful caller is soon joined by others, all anxious to know how quickly women will abandon their corner offices and get back to tweaking their meatloaf recipes.