It has become trite to point out that the war on terror is difficult to define. A conflict with no identifiable enemy that spanned two decades and four continents cannot be easily shoehorned into a single narrative.
Journalist Richard Beck’s sprawling new book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, is an ambitious attempt to grapple with this complexity. Where others have attended to the political and military consequences of the conflict, Beck’s innovation is to foreground the war’s cultural dimension. Under Beck’s discerning eye, everything deserves a second glance: hate crimes and drone strikes, but also Batman and Ironman, Ford Explorers and Super Bowl halftime ads, helicopter parents and tactical baby bags.
Over 500 pages, Beck unravels the twisted knots of innocence, trauma, shame, and aggression that have tied the United States to forever wars abroad and ever-deepening crises at home. In doing so, he provides a gripping account, not just of the myriad transformations of the past quarter century, but of “what it felt like to live through those changes.”
Sept. 11 and American Mythology
Born in 2000, I have no memory of 9/11. Beck provides the closest thing to a substitute for my generation, skillfully evoking the helplessness Americans experienced on that day, as they watched the same clips of dark billowing ash play across their screens on endless repeat. This experience marked a terrifying departure from the relative security of the Nineties, but as Beck demonstrates, the anxieties it triggered were far from new.
Drawing on Susan Faludi’s mostly forgotten work, The Terror Dream, Beck shows how America’s traumatic response to 9/11 followed patterns and myths buried deep in the nation’s past. During the Indian Wars of the late 17th century, Native Americans raided settlements up and down the Atlantic seaboard and captured dozens of colonists. One of these prisoners, Mary Rowlandson, wrote about her experience, and soon a genre was born: the captivity narrative, in which helpless women endure physical dangers and spiritual trials at the hands of an uncivilized other. When Americans watched, as al-Qaeda held the nation’s attention hostage on 9/11, they may not have had these narratives in mind, but the ghosts of Rowlandson and her fellow captives were not far off.
Frenzy of Xenophobia
In the weeks and months that followed, Americans descended into a frenzy of militarization, xenophobia, and nativism. This story is familiar by now, but Beck’s telling is always fresh and often surprisingly funny. Recounting the rise of the Minutemen, a brigade of self-appointed guardians of the southern border that sprung up after 9/11, Beck relays that “one volunteer mistook cows for migrants so many times that someone else put up a sign at camp: a picture of a cow below the words ‘To all people on the line: this is bovine in nature, and not to be confused with Illegal Aliens.’”
This misidentification was as amusing as it was darkly telling: after 9/11, the US needed an enemy, and, as Beck demonstrates, it went looking for one everywhere. The first hate crime after 9/11 was the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man mistaken for an Arab at a gas station. In years that followed, the US targeted its own citizens at will, transforming public spaces into security zones and making everyone a possible suspect. In this climate of paranoia, gun sales surged and SUVs — the chosen automobile of the era’s proverbial “security mom” — increasingly resembled combat vehicles. Surveying these trends, Beck concludes: “The war on terror did not come home. It started there.”
Superheroes, Unbound
When the US did go abroad, its misadventures were mirrored in film and pop culture. Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy was among the most successful franchises of the early 2000s, pulling in over $1.2 billion in box-office revenue alone. Nolan would always claim that his work was apolitical, but as with so many other pieces of media from the era, one did not have to squint hard to see the outlines of the war on terror behind Batman’s stark silhouette. As US special forces scoured the mountains of Afghanistan for the last remnants of al-Qaeda, Bruce Wayne clad himself in an armored suit and set out to save Gotham from a terrorist who aimed to destroy it.
If the US experience of 9/11 was assimilated through tropes of vulnerability buried deep in the nation’s past, its hyper-militarized response was inflected by images of the lone frontiersman, setting off to conquer the wilderness. Figures like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett conjure notions of adventure and flint-eyed determination, but, as Beck reminds us, they made their name by killing and displacing Native Americans. In the 21st century, the media could make heroes out of snipers like Chris Kyle because they conformed to this familiar model of rough and tumble masculinity.
No Consequences
The frontiersman who slaughtered the Native American did not face consequences, and, as Beck points out, his willingness to act outside the law was always part of his appeal. After 9/11, the prosecutors of Washington’s war on terror also escaped accountability. In 2005, when eight Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqis and then lied to cover it up, none of them faced charges worse than a demotion. This was perhaps typical fare for a nation whose folk heroes were outlaws, but it was also part of a culture of impunity that extended to the highest echelons of American politics. None of the decision-makers who launched Washington’s disastrous wars in the Middle East after 9/11 ever faced consequences for their actions.
As the body count grew, Americans turned to Hollywood to ease their conscience. In the wake of Sept. 11, depictions of torture on primetime television skyrocketed, from “fewer than four scenes of torture each year” before 2001, to over 100 scenes by 2007. Television series like 24 were ingenious at devising new scenarios that presented torture as the only available recourse. These shows were wish fulfillment, not because the good guys always won or because bad things didn’t happen, but because bad things done by good people were proven to be necessary, and therefore permissible.
What America?
If Homeland is a sweeping work of social and cultural history, it is also a kind of bildungsroman. Beck was a wide-eyed 14-year-old when the attacks occurred, and by the book’s end, he has seen too much of the country to have much faith in it. Reflecting on the myths of Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and generations of Cowboys and Indians, Beck writes that “we find a people for whom violence is not just a duty but a pleasure, a means of spiritual renewal, a bloody wellspring of national genius.”
Disavowing this violence, the prospects for renewal appear bleak to Beck. He champions protest movements that challenge American militarism from the outside, but downplays the possibility of reform from within. To advocate such reforms, he argues, “you have to believe that the government is capable, or could be capable in the future, of actually enacting the necessary reforms. I don’t.”
But this pessimism about the American project, which is widespread among Beck’s generation (and mine), is itself another symptom of the long war on terror. Those of us who came of age amid the war on terror do not know any other United States, but we will have to try to imagine one.
