Does Susan Faludis Terror Dream Oversimplify Post-9/11 America?
Since September 12, 2001, the American media have churned out a remarkable body of work on our nation’s response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The issue has been hashed out in newspapers and magazines, fiction and nonfiction books, documentary and feature films; yet the question of why we reacted the way we did — with a paroxysm of muscular rhetoric and military might — has never been addressed head on. Instead, the dialogue has generally centered on whether the way in which we reacted was appropriate, and, if it wasn’t, what we should do about it. Now, nearly six years later, Susan Faludi, the feminist author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written a sweeping historical analysis of why our nation — as reflected in the American media — reacted to the 9/11 attacks by “cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom’s childhood,” a domestic Leave it to Beaver-like fantasy. According to Faludi, our return to a fifties-era culture of masculine strength an
