One measure of a powerful book is its ability to linger and trigger lines of thought long after you’ve set it aside, and by this standard, Susan’s The Terror Dream is powerful indeed. I reviewed the work this past Sunday at Daily Kos and it turned out to be one of the most difficult reviews I’ve written; every time I’d think I’d followed implications to the end, another would raise its head, demanding to be addressed. In the end, I finally hit “publish” on the post feeling the review was seriously inadequate, that so very much more needed to be said.

Thus, I welcome the invitation to further discuss with the author and a stellar group of smart people some of the thoughts that didn’t make it into the review at the time--and some additional tentative observations triggered by Susan’s opening post in this conversation and Amanda’s essay presented yesterday.

First, Susan’s insight about America’s unique history of dealing with the prototype of today’s terror attacks--unpredictable raids upon “civilized” outposts by brown-skinned, incomprehensible “others”--seems spot on. But beyond that, it occurs to me there has from this nation’s founding been another incomprehensible character in our collective mythological story: the vast continent itself. Unlike the long-settled pastoral European landscape, the seemingly infinite expanse of land to the west--and the capricious harshness of weather and climate--must have weighed heavily upon the earliest settlers. As the push ever westward continued for generations, the same story was playing out over and over: clear a piece of land, cultivate it, wait for locusts or blizzards or droughts to hit, revisit the same supposedly domesticated tract the following spring and survey in despair the re-encroachment of indifferent nature as the wilderness re-takes the area.

Is it any wonder that a “just do it” attitude took deep root in the American psyche? Or that the land itself was cast as something to conquer--an implacable enemy? Surely he or she who paused at the edge of ravaged fields to ruminate too long about the wonders of the natural cycle, its implications for and parallels with human nature, what metaphors could be mined for a sonnet or two... would be winnowed ruthlessly out. Continental expansion and individual success required a constant and unrelenting physical response to the environment, which in the end relegated thinking too much to a scorned category of the soft and the effete (and by association, the feminized and the losers).

The cartoon character action hero Susan examines at such length in The Terror Dream is at least ten generations deep and 3,000 miles wide, which I think at least partially explains the difficulty in uprooting it.

This inclination to despise thought and celebrate action was never more apparent than in post-9/11 America. Unlike Amanda, I wasn’t consciously aware of the rampant sexism in the atmosphere until reading Susan’s book. What I was experiencing though was a deep dis-ease with what felt like a collective regression to a more savage and primitive mind state--reactionary, vengeful, vicious and alarmingly untargeted. That more thoughtful voices (whether male or female) were labeled traitorous and “soft” just seemed part and parcel of a reversion to a simpler, more comfortable black-and-white, good-and-evil mindset. The fact that as a nation we reverted so quickly and unquestioningly can be traced in part, I think, to the inroads made in the previous twenty years by the public resurgence of fundamentalist religion.

Again, I think the seeds of this religious regression were lying dormant in our culture from the expansion era. I have a certain amount of sympathy for the wilderness family that had little patience for pondering the gray areas of metaphysics after 18-hour days of brutal physical labor--just give me a clear-cut checklist of “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” and I’ll keep my end of the bargain and there damn well better be a mighty fine afterlife because this one surely ain’t it. In the same vein, I think the coupling of economic uncertainty as globalization set in and the gradual unraveling of America’s safety net in the years leading up to 9/11 created a subterranean cultural anxiety that seemed to be addressed by a return to Old Testament, Ten Commandment dictates. Make it simple, please. After working a crappy job (or two), worrying about health insurance and retirement and whether your kids did their homework because they better score a scholarship, it makes sense to long for guidelines that at the end of the day don’t require comprehension of Paul Tillich’s more nuanced view of the significance of the crucifixion of Christ.

To hijack Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs model and apply it nationally: In times of collective trauma or uncertainty, all attention seems to demand a return to ensuring the most basic of physical survival needs, and this seems to prompt a yearning for simplistic, non-thinking action. To me, this is a partial explanation of the oddity Susan noted between the response of Europe to the attacks (criminalization) and America’s response (militaristic). The former relies on a system of higher thought reflecting reasoning and deduction, the latter seems designed to guarantee at the crudest level the survival of the nation. The relative adolescence of America compared with the older European civilizations leads, I think, to an almost automatic junking of more recent rights and assumptions that we arrived at through higher-process collective national thinking. These are viewed in times of crisis as distractions or luxuries, not necessities.

I suspect that the regression to the action hero man/helpless rescued maiden motif is but the canary in the coal mine of discarded advancements to which America has eagerly assented in the past six years. The wreckage on the battlefield of hard-fought gains in human rights, civil liberties and populist inclusion may take a generation to survey fully and yet another generation to restore. In one sense, this is quite depressing. But that the process of evaluation has begun, as it has in Susan’s book, is one small sign of hope. And there’s something at least minimally heartening that some of the first serious assessment of damage is coming from a woman, about women.