Faludi Gives Us the Real Scoop on 9-11

In a tense courtroom scene in the movie A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise badgers Jack Nicholson, demanding the "truth," which prompts Nicholson to erupt in volcanic fury:  "You can't handle the truth!" he thunders at Cruise, the veins throbbing in his neck.

In her latest book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America, Susan Faludi delivers a similar message.

The truth to which Faludi alludes, the truth which so many Americans can’t handle,  is what really happened  on 9-11.  On that day,  the most powerful nation in the world suffered complete and utter humiliation at the hands of a tiny number of Muslim men armed only with box cutters, who managed to destroy the Twin Towers, the symbol of America’s economic power; nearly destroyed the Pentagon, the symbol of our military might; and came this close to destroying the White House, the symbol of this country’s political power.  And they did this while the supreme leader of our country sat stunned in a classroom, continuing to read “My Pet Goat” to  school children, as the chaos unfolded outside and the whole world watched,  mouths agape.

Like a skilled psychotherapist, Faludi  invites the reader to lie down on the couch, positions a box of tissues nearby, and lays out these hard truths, then proceeds to analyze the alternate truths that were fed to us by  politicians and pundits, to make us (and them) feel better.

The new, prettified truths (Faludi calls them myths.), concocted by the opinionmakers, were not about humiliation, but  about heroism, male heroism, to be exact.   Instead of 9-11 being a disaster movie, the politicos and pundits in this country  turned the event into a John Wayne western with superhero firefighters  rescuing damsels in distress and brave U.S. soldiers saving sweet, little Jessica Lynch from fiendish rapists.

Faludi extracted all of these male heroism stories from the pages of newspapers published at the time, as well as other media sources.  Then, she stops and draws analogies between these events and what happened at other times in U.S. history when the homeland was overpowered by invaders: Indians, for example,   in frontier America.

Susan Faludi is the most interesting feminist writer of the day, and The Terror Dream is her take on what happened to us  on 9-11.  It’s well worth a read.

Faludi was the keynote speaker on February 13 at the annual Susan B. Anthony birthday luncheon held at the Rochester Riverside Convention Center.