Book Review: American Culture Transformed: Dialing 9/11, by Priscilla L. Walton and Bruce Tucker

Abstract

American Culture Transformed: Dialing 9/11. Priscilla L. Walton and Bruce Tucker. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 200 pp. $25 pbk.At the intersection of semiotics and sociology, where competing histories and conflict- ing frames of reference give rise to meaning and mythology, is a post-9/11 America littered with angels, demons, and a lot of spin. Co-authors Walton and Tucker sift through a series of cultural icons-from Enron to Abu Ghraib, from Martha Stewart to Michael Moore-for clues to a central paradox: How did the terror attacks of September 11, 2001-among history's most complex geopolitical acts-topple America's toler- ance for pluralism in public discourse and replace it with a need for simplistic answers.Walton is an English professor at Carleton University and editor of the Canadian Review of American Studies. Tucker is a history professor at the University of Windsor whose current research examines the revolutionary tradition in modern American political culture.Offering case studies from business, politics, the arts, and the military, American Culture Transformed: Dialing 9/11 distills the media's role in shaping and perpetuat- ing a society that, the authors believe, suffers from post-traumatic stress. Diagnosis is based on what Walton and Tucker view as initial silence in the public square followed by a nationalist master supplied by the Bush administration: Only a very few mainstream narratives ran counter, Walton and Tucker observe. They suggest that lack of dialogue made it possible for voters to accept government overreaching, such as the rush to pass the Patriot Act of 2001.Dialing 9/11 opens with a concise chapter that situates the authors' methodology beside work by thinkers as unlike as Jonathan Safran Foer, Susan Faludi, Slavoj Zizek, Don DeLillo, and Al Gore, among others. Walton and Tucker go on to identify our post-9/11 craving for simple and single 'truths' and show how this desire permeates American culture today. Insisting on a singular Truth is dangerous, Walton and Tucker warn, because it disregards important contradictions inherent in the terror attacks them- selves: We (believe) things are 'extremely complicated' . . . that we are all complicit in 9/11, and that the tragedy must be placed in context. Subsequent chapters analyze representative icons and reveal how parts of the story become the whole story.The book is not another treatise on why news media favor easy explanations and dupe the rest of us. Instead Walton and Tucker present a more layered view-one that deserves wide notice despite occasional unclear writing. For instance, a thoughtful section on bankruptcies of meaning concludes that while there may very well be constant slippages of meanings, and a postmodern play always/already at work, when it comes to translating that play into finances, war, and religion (among other areas), its interpretational aspect must be foregrounded. Syntax becomes clear a sentence or so later when we learn that Enron's failure only goes to show what happens when truth and the interpretation of truth become one-for-one replacements.A closer look at one case history offers a glimpse into how evidence is marshaled overall. Spinning and Counter-spinning compares reductionist accounts that attached to Army Private Jessica Lynch and Army Reservist Lynndie England following Lynch's rescue as a prisoner of war in Iraq and England's court martial in connection with the torture of Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.(Lynch) did not create her own narrative, Walton and Tucker observe. It was written for her, and as the media invented and reinvented her persona . . . (they) may well have moved the captivity narrative into a new form of mythmaking. …