In the days and weeks immediately after 9/11, a curious phenomenon of American political and cultural mythology reasserted itself, according to Susan Faludi in her absorbing essay on the American response to threat and tragedy.
Faludi, a Pulitzer Prize winner who has written extensively on women’s and social issues, argues persuasively that prominent American leaders, journalists, and cultural figures interpreted the traumatic events as a time for masculinity to reassert itself and for women to meekly tend to their homes and families while the real work of meting out punishment to the terrorists was left to the menfolk. In this scenario women were vulnerable victims, needing to be rescued by heroic males who would do the necessary to save the nation. Faludi refers to these notions, which recur prominently throughout U.S. history, as “captivity narratives.”
To buttress her views, Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, has assembled a vast array of articles, statements, and media outpourings from a wide variety of prominent commentators, including mainstreamers, liberals, and, of course, militant neocons, all of whom echo the same basic themes: “the demotion of capable women, the magnification of manly men, the heightened call for domesticity, the search for and sanctification of helpless girls.” These are, she says, the “cumulative elements of a national fantasy…our myth of invincibility.” This pervasive myth can lead us in times of crisis into “adolescent fictions about homeland protection substituted for actions that would have enhanced our security. Our cartoon declarations of ‘evildoers’ masqueraded as foreign policy.”
Tough words, but Faludi’s thesis is mostly convincing. She points out that after 9/11 “America had ample paragons of courage,” but asks whether they had to be “lofted into some ridiculously gilded firmament.” Faludi warns that failure to understand the “mythic underpinnings of our response to 9/11” can leave us “stunned, insensible, when we are confronted by a moment that requires our full awareness.”
Two of the book’s most fascinating examples concern the capture and rescue of Jessica Lynch in Iraq, and the iconic John Wayne/John Ford film, The Searchers. Faludi demonstrates that “the story of a helpless girl snatched from the jaws of evil by heroic soldiers was the story everyone wanted” but had little relation to what really happened. In later interviews, Lynch explained to Faludi and others, including Diane Sawyer, who seemed desperately to want her to follow the captivity narrative scenario, that she wasn’t abused, tortured, or mistreated, and although seriously injured she wasn’t in combat and wasn’t a hero. According to Lynch, the real hero was a Hopi Indian fellow soldier, Lori Piestawa, her army roommate, who actually rescued her and was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade in the same incident. While in the hospital in Germany, Lynch was glorified as a “blonde waif,” and “the tiny girl who was clutching a teddy bear,” but most of the media ignored Piestawa. Faludi uncovers many fabrications concocted by commentators who dramatized Lynch’s story according to their predetermined scenarios, regardless of the actual facts.