9/11 as national myth
This article in today's NYT draws some interesting parallels between our national response to 9/11 and our collective response to Indian attacks in the 17th century. Although I think the author, Susan Faludi, may be overstating her case a bit, she makes some very good points about the mythos underlying many Americans' sense of themselves. The heart of her comparison boils down to this:
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.
After showing that the event held some similarity to 17th century Indian wars, Faludi compares that post-9/11 "fugue" to this:
Caught in these coils [of constant Indian wars], early American settlers dwelled in a state of perpetual insecurity -- "an atmosphere of terror," as the frontier historian Richard Slotkin characterized it, in which colonists wandered as if in an "Indian-haunted dreamland."
The point of her comparison is that, in both cases, the popular reaction to those times of terror resulted in the creation of a new mythology which served to make those in power look more capable than they really were, to assuage fears of impotence, and to restore some feeling of national virility against a seemingly ubiquitous and slippery foe.
It didn't work then, and it isn't working now:
Sept. 11 cracked the plaster on that master narrative of American prowess because it so exactly duplicated the terms of the early Indian wars, right down to the fecklessness of our leaders and the failures of our military strategies. Like its early American antecedents, the 9/11 attack was a homeland incursion against civilian targets by non-European, non-Christian combatants who fought under the flag of no recognized nation. Like the "different type of war" heralded by President Bush, the 17th and 18th century "troubles" -- as one Puritan chronicler of Metacom’s Rebellion called them, refusing to grant them "the name of a war" -- seemed to have no battlefield conventions, no constraints and no end.
Unfortunately, by replicating the Colonial war on terrorism, 9/11 invited us to re-enact the post-Colonial solution, to bury our awareness of our vulnerability under belligerent posturing and comforting fantasy.
By making this comparison, Faludi extracts a lesson we should learn:
Such reversions [of national mythology] have led us in some terrible and self-destructive directions -- loss of civil liberties, endorsement of torture and a misbegotten war paramount among them -- because they are based on a need to deny, not address, a disturbing national reality. ... It was in these very times, with recent knowledge of domestic attack, that our founders expanded, not contracted, the concept of democracy, authoring the very liberties we have been tempted to renounce in our own time of "troubles."
Of course, politicians, pundits, and the news media profit more from the denial of that reality than the confrontation of it. By blindly shouting "USA! USA!" without criticism or self-examination, by simplistically demonizing the enemy as "evil," by insisting that every problem has a military solution, and by denying any negative consequences for America's policies and actions, we fail in our obligation to prevent the next attack.
The next terrorist attack on American soil will not happen in spite of our response to 9/11; it will happen because of that response.