Dissent from the Homeland: Essays After September 11 (review)

This collection must have opened eyes when it originally appeared in 2002 as a special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly. Co-editor Frank Lentricchia asserts that “[a]ll of the essays are united in the belief that America is threatened by the most powerful enemy in its history, the administration of George W. Bush” (5). Each essay in the collection wakens the reader, urges a change in the tone of the American response to terror. The essays can be grouped by content as the West’s response to the terrorist attack, meditations upon the politics of American patriotism, or questions about the actions of the religious after such a horrific national event.

In examining the American response, authors discern a line increasingly blurred between right and wrong. Fredric Jameson’s “The Dialectics of Disaster” highlights the initial American hysterical reaction, finding in the country’s rush to war the legitimization of a minority president. Yet Osama Bin Laden is Bush-like, “the very prototype of the accumulation of money in the hands of private individuals and the poisoned fruit of a process that, unchecked, allows an unimaginable autonomy of action of all kinds” (60–61). The actions carried out by Al Qaeda have thus found success in our country’s overreaction, which enkindle the Arab reaction against us.

Slavoj Žižek finds the events of 9/11 just what America wanted, couching our reaction in terms of The Matrix. We are introduced to the Outside through this attack, and in the fantasy fulfilled we suffer symbolically and respond by attacking the weak, i.e. Afghanistan. Jean Baudrillard, in “L’Esprit du Terrorisme,” equates the huge military response to the terrorism with the laws of chaos theory at work, the “initial shock provoking innumerable consequences” (157). Like Žižek, Baudrillard believes that in our subconscious we wanted this attack, though we respond in a way that heightens our ineffectiveness. Robert Bellah’s “Seventy-Five Years” posits a national propensity to lose at war, not based on body counts but because America inevitably grows to resemble our enemies, whether by establishing strong central authority, the military bombing of civilians, or our horrible track record supporting authoritarian regimes. President Bush’s promise to “rid the world of evil” while at the same time putting a bounty on Bin Laden’s head is seen as a mirror to the rhetoric of Al Qaeda. Rowan Williams sounds the theme for this group in faulting blind support of the war. We are too lazy, he insists, to work to find a proper response, and in this failure “there is no moral difference in kind between our military action and the terror which it attacks” (30).

Those who address issues of American patriotism highlight the discrepancies between American symbol and the US reality. Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe defend the sentiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was lambasted for declaring the terrorist attacks “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos” (104). The authors read the American monument at Ground Zero as typical of a popular work in a gallery, with the added bonus of the visitation as a patriotic pilgrimage. Susan Willis examines social contradictions evident in the American flag used as signifier of patriotism, while Catherine Lutz examines part of the war machine, noting the poverty and homelessness rampant in Fayetteville, NC, home of Fort Bragg. Too often, the writers show, symbol becomes exploited to create a ruling imperative.

The essays on the religious theme call for a more stringent adherence to spiritual dicta. Noteworthy among this group is Stanley Hauerwas, who insists that the American determination to dictate exactly who and what is evil in this conflict leads to “a war without clear purpose, but also a war without end” (187). Like the other authors represented, Hauerwas demands action from today’s believers, but finds instead those too willing to follow their government’s secular logic.

The well-written and thoughtful essays call to...