Submitted by Irfan Khawaja, Oct 15, 2007 10:46

I like this passage: "The failure of colonial men to protect their women from Indian assault, she suggests, is continuous with the failure of the modern American state to defend its citizens against Al Qaeda. In both cases, the resulting shame led to a defensive reinforcement of gender roles. Thus Rowlandson and Duston were written out of history, and the September 11 widows became martyrs for our time."

It seems not to matter in Ms. Faludi's universe that events cannot be "continuous" if they are temporally separated by three centuries, if there is no significant causal relationship between the one set of events and the other, and if she herself is the one telling us that the events are cognitively inaccessible to us and would entirely have been forgotten if not for her brilliant book. What exactly is the etiology that makes the one set of events relevant to the other? Telepathy? Is this something out of the X Files, or a book trying to make a serious claim on our credence?

Also omitted from this ludicrous "narrative" is the fact that the September 11 widows made themselves into "martyrs for our time" by a concerted PR campaign, and that every attempt (male or female) to criticize their more absurd and sanctimonious views was met with moralistic indignation by the left. Where, exactly, does Susan Faludi stand on that, and how does it square with her thesis? What, for instance, is her view of Kristen Breitweiser and the "Jersey Girls"? And why restrict this to September 11 widows (or widows at all)? Is Cindy Sheehan "continuous" with Rowlandson and Duston? Is Michael Moore's martyrology from "Fahrenheit 911" an instance of continuity with the Rowlandson-Duston past?

Incidentally, the reviewer errs in disputing the idea that US military actions were not billed as "rescue operations." Surely both the Afghan and Iraqi wars were billed that way, and in the Afghan case, the war was billed in part as an attempt to rescue Afghanistan's women from the Taliban. My question for Ms Faludi: does she think it wasn't one? What exactly does she think about the Afghan war and its liberation of the women of Afghanistan? Was that bad for women? Unnecessary? Unjustified? Or was it merely a set-piece for her feminist ruminations? Maybe she'll answer these questions when she stops dreaming, stops watching TV, fast-forwards from 1697 to 2007, and rejoins the rest of us on Planet Earth.

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