CURRENT AFFAIRS: The Terror Dream: What 9/11 Revealed about America, By Susan Faludi, Atlantic Books, 336pp. £12.99As the Twin Towers crumbled in 2001, the event was already being swaddled in myth. And as Susan Faludi argues in this stylishly written, extraordinarily brave book, it was myth of a peculiarly gendered kind.
ONLY WEEKS after the attack, George Bush called on a clutch of Hollywood moguls to help market the war on terror, and part of the project was to herald the return of traditional manliness, after what one writer called the "pussification of the American man".
Under the emasculating influence of feminism, American males had grown flabby and gelded, "shaved-and-waxed male bimbos" whose limp-wristed lifestyle had laid the nation open to Islamic assault.
"The phallic symbol of America had been cut off," one blogger fantasised, "and at its base was a large smouldering vagina."
"Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!" was one US reporter's reaction to the loss of 3,000 lives.
A Band of Brothers ethic, as one news magazine put it, could not take root in a female-obsessed Sex and the City culture. The US had lost its balls along with its immunity to foreign invasion. A nation that has traditionally had some difficulty in distinguishing fantasy from reality was now busy conflating the two at every turn.
The aftermath of 9/11, so Faludi reports, witnessed a vicious lampooning of American feminists. The Taliban's oppression of women was much-touted for a while, until the bombs began to fall on Afghanistan and the issue evaporated. Meanwhile, squint-eyed Donald Rumsfeld was being celebrated as "the Stud", "a babe magnet" and - such are the egregious delusions of ideology - "the sexiest man alive".
Square-jawed, short-haired, gun-toting America, thrust into neurotic self-doubt by an army of castrating bitches, had finally come out of hiding, beating its collective chest.
NOT LONG AFTER the attack, men's fashions began to favour hard-hat, military chic and firefighters' jackets. The wide-eyed US , unlike endemically cynical Europe, has always felt a hunger for heroes, and the feeling was abroad that having an aircraft slam into your office somehow made you into one.
Or if that was a hard one to argue, there were always the New York firefighters. The grim truth about 9/11, so Faludi claims, is that the death toll would have been considerably lower had the firefighters not been sent into the World Trade Center.
About three times more firefighters than office workers died on the floors below the impact of the aircraft. But in they went anyway, and the media response was to make Finns and Cuchulains of them all.
"If ever there were heroes possessing godlike prowess. beneficence and divinity," raved one demented journal, "it is the firefighters of the FDNY." The fact that they died partly because their radios didn't work was swept under the carpet.
It was not long before the firemen were erotic figures as well as divine ones. A lust-for-firemen trend was launched.
"Firefighters Are a Hot Commodity in the Dating Game," shrieked one newspaper headline. Women painted their toenails fire-engine red. All this was seen less as kinkiness than as a return to sexual normality.
The presence of women helping at Ground Zero was coolly ignored. Instead, there was a morbid cult of 9/11 widows, glossily packaged victims who were required to stick submissively to a script written for them by the media. Those who rebelled against their all-American-housewife image were instantly repressed. A non-victim called Jessica Lynch was non-saved by US soldiers in a non-heroic non-event.
Terrorism and domesticity were closely twinned: the point of killing Iraqis was to protect your kids. "Goodbye, Soccer Mom. Hello, Security Mom," announced Time magazine, maintaining that the terrorist onslaught had shocked Americans into "a new faith in our oldest values".
Everywhere you looked, people were trying to scramble their way back into the womb. A neurotic desire for security gripped a nation newly conscious of its mortality: women who had placed their career over marriage were said bitterly to regret their mistake. The cosy and connubial were in fashion once again. Who, after all, was going to hold your hand when the next blast came?
A day after the Twin Towers collapsed, Faludi writes, the US "was already reworking a national tragedy into a national fantasy of virtuous might and triumph".
True to its track record, a land in which almost everything seems hyped and inflated couldn't resist making a drama out of a crisis. The US, with its Faustian belief in the infinite will, its fanatical cult of can-do-ery and its contempt for a loser, is a compulsively upbeat, profoundly non-tragic culture. ("We can do it!" cry the mesmerised supporters of Barack Obama. Is it too drearily mundane to inquire: what, exactly?)
Yet the country now has to negotiate one of the most tragic phases of its history. Some of the actual victims of 9/11 spoke not in the usual hubristic language of their nation, but of bonds forged by the common experience of weakness, fear and vulnerability. They knew, as American ideology in general does not, that only through a secret compact with breakdown and failure can any achievement prove durable. The Babel-like response of their masters, by contrast, was to plan a building at Ground Zero even higher than the World Trade Center.
THIRTY YEARS BEFORE the towers fell, the US violently overthrew a democratically elected government in Chile, replacing it with an odious autocrat who went on to murder far more people than died in the World Trade Center.
The US also supported for some decades a dictator in Indonesia who almost certainly massacred more men and women than Saddam Hussein, but who like the US's many other allies on the far right-wing, was never invaded in the name of freedom and democracy.
When the ancient Greeks witnessed such hubris, they trembled and looked fearfully to the skies, aware that it would have its comeuppance. The grim news that Faludi has to relate in this splendid study is that the US's moment of tragic crisis was in no way a spiritual conversion. On the contrary, it has meant business as usual, only a good deal more so.
Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. His latest book is The Meaning of Life (Oxford University Press)