The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet
Posted on November 3, 2007, Printed on November 6, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66823/

In the weeks after 9/11, novelist Barbara Kingsolver wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times that closed with these words, "The mortal citizens of a planet are praying right now that we will bear in mind ... that no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred." She was promptly vilified by Rush Limbaugh and a slew of other right-wing commentators. Shortly afterward, the Los Angeles Times received a letter, among many others, from a collection agency owner who called Kingsolver's op-ed "nothing less than another act of terror."

This is just one of many episodes that Susan Faludi recounts in her new book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. In this scathing critique of the media's response to 9/11, Faludi turns her critical eye to how, in the wake of the powerlessness many Americans felt on 9/11, a myth was spun -- one that stretches back to the time of America's first English settlers.