KEY POINTS:
Susan Faludi analyses American behaviour after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre and claims it included a reversion to a persistent "captivity myth", which was constructed during frontier life three centuries ago and has remained pervasive: the courageous, dominant male rescues the "virginal child-woman" from evil captors, originally the Indians.
A feminist who holds on to the 20th century feminist verities and remains unreconstructed in the new millennium, Faludi writes mile-a-minute prose, pausing only occasionally to punch the air and whoop as she slays yet another victim in the gender war.
She claims, I think convincingly, that a reflexive response to 9/11 was that the feminist movement had emasculated the American male and reduced his effectiveness in his primary role as head of the family and protector of vulnerable women and children.
She says the media collaborated with politicians in reincarnating this old myth of masculine heroes and distressed damsels. For example, the Defence Secretary - a nasty piece of work as we all now know - became "The Stud: Don Rumsfeld, America's New Pin-Up", in a National Review story. Peggy Noonan, famous as President Reagan's speech writer, wrote in her Wall Street Journal column, that she half-expected George Bush to "tear open his shirt and reveal the big 'S' on his chest".
Time dubbed the President the "Lone Ranger". Firemen and policemen were made over into hyper-masculine heroes, and their widows into grieving young mothers bleatingly retreating to domesticity with their children. The women who refused to fill this imposed role were spurned.
Jessica Lynch, the American soldier in Iraq who was wounded and hospitalised by Iraqi troops, becomes a centre-piece in the traditional "captivity narrative". When her army colleagues discovered where Lynch was, they sent a combat group to blaze its way into the hospital and bring her out, shooting wildly and "kicking down doors even after being handed the keys".
The American media responded ecstatically to the rescue, turning the troops into John Wayne heroes. Lynch was portrayed as the needy female victim. Trouble was, the British press soon reported that Lynch had not been held prisoner, had been treated well both medically and personally, and her "captors" had been trying to get in touch with the Americans to return her to their care.
Lynch confirmed that her treatment had been competent and kindly. When she would not comply with the myth, the media either turned on her or ignored her. Faludi's historical background is intriguing. She recounts how pioneer women often behaved with great fortitude and determination after being captured by Indians, but the rewrite was always romanticised into tales of heroic males rescuing "quivering ninnies" from brutal savages.
This book gives a refreshing look at media's determination to find heroes and suitable victims in any crisis, whether they exist or not. This preoccupation fits neatly into the awful modern style of celebrity journalism. I was in America a year or so after 9/11 and newspapers and television were still referring to those killed in the tragedy, without discrimination, as heroes, and the widows and children left behind as grieving victims.
This prompted a letter to the New York Times from the father of a young woman who died that day. He implored media to stop referring to his daughter as among the heroes. "She was an innocent victim," he said. Faludi highlights how fear and a sense of failure tend to make societies regress into old mythical values, and there is no doubt that the United States today is a fearful society.
Despite the undeniable fact that many millions of Americans are as wise and worldly as anyone on the planet, cloying sentimentality is the overweening flaw in their national culture. That sentimentality is what distinguishes their nationalism from that of most other Western countries, demonstrated by the persistent attacks on Barack Obama for not being patriotic enough to wear a flag pin on his lapel.
It took a long, long time for other Western countries to learn the inherent danger of this sort of patriotism which Dr Johnson famously referred to as "the last refuge of a scoundrel".
* Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.
The Terror Dream
By Susan Faludi (Scribe $40)
