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

King Middle School
Berkeley, CA

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women and Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, is also the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

KPFA Benefit, supported by Global Exchange
Admission: $10 advance, $13 door, tickets available at Analog Books, Black Oak, Codys, DIESEL, A Bookstore, Global Exchange/Berkeley, Moes, Pegasus, Pendragon, Walden Pond.
S.F. Modern Times
Tickets on line: www.kpfa.org

In this most original examination of Americas post-9/11 culture, Susan Faludi shines a light on the countrys psychological response to the attacks on that terrible day. Turning her acute observational powers on the media, popular culture, and political life, Faludi unearths a barely acknowledged but bedrock societal drama shot through with baffling contradictions. Why, she asks, did our culture respond to an assault against American global dominance with a frenzied summons to restore traditional manhood, marriage, and maternity? Why did we react as if the hijackers had targeted not a commercial and military edifice but the family home and nursery? Why did an attack fueled by hatred of Western emancipation lead us to a regressive fixation on Doris Day womanhood and John Wayne masculinity, with trembling security moms, swaggering presidential gunslingers, and the rescue of a female soldier cast as a helpless little girl?

The answer, Faludi finds, lies in a historical anomaly unique to the American experience: the nation that in recent memory has been least vulnerable to domestic attack was forged in traumatizing assaults by nonwhite barbarians on town and village. That humiliation lies concealed under a myth of cowboy bluster and feminine frailty, which is reanimated whenever threat and shame looms.

Brilliant and important, The Terror Dream shows what 9/11 revealed about usand offers the opportunity to look at ourselves anew.

Our premiere cultural reporter offers a fascinating explanation of why 9/11 led to such a perverse retreat from our own values only Susan Faludi could do it so brilliantly and engrossingly. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed

Susan Faludi, as always, is simply stunning. With heroic acuity, she digs through the mythological debris of the Bush era to recover the dark fairytaleshades of white savagery on the early frontierthat underlies the vengeance fantasy we call the war on terrorism. Mike Davis

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