Inventing and Sustaining a Visible Resistance

Abstract

In the New Yorker, dated September 24, 2001, Susan Sontag identified a disconnection between “last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality” and the “unanimity of the sanctimonious, reality-concealing rhetoric spouted by American officials and media commentators” in the days after September 11. For artists, writers, and intellectuals who encountered a blizzard of expressions produced by media spectacle and government narratives, there were struggles to find adequate and incisive forms of response to the events and their possible causes. Sontag argued that there seemed to be a “campaign to infantilize the public” by licensed voices that systematically avoided acknowledgement that this was “an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as consequence of specific American alliances and actions.”In her distinctions, there were evocations of analyses of American foreignpolicy and military dependency, at home and abroad, to be found in publicationssuch as Chalmers Johnson’s Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire and Catherine Lutz’s Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century. Not surprisingly, Sontag’s essay was unwelcome to readers for whom the agenda of American response was set by different texts. For example, Anne Coulter, in “This Is War: We Should Invade Their Countries” in the National Review Online,September 13, 2001, stated, “We know who the homicidal maniacs are... Weshould invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Reverend Jerry Falwell on Pat Robertson’s talk show, the 700 Club, on September 13, 2001, declared “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say ‘You helped this happen.’ ” Falwell and Robertsonagreed that “we” got “what we deserve.”