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PORTSIDE CULTURE

GRAVE NEW WORLD  
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David Klion
October 1, 2024
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_ This book starts by saying that the 9/11 attacks "occurred at a
moment when “the United States found itself at the head of a global
economic order that had been founded on a growth surge that was slowly
but surely running out of steam." _

,

 

_Homeland
The War on Terror in American Life_
Richard Beck
Crown
ISBN: 9780593240229

 

RICHARD BECK WAS FOURTEEN WHEN THE PLANES HIT, the impact sites in
Manhattan, Arlington, and Shanksville forming a triangle surrounding
the Philadelphia suburb in which he grew up. In early October 2001, on
a school choir trip to Manhattan, he saw two young women in the alto
section tearfully embrace at the announcement of the first US
airstrikes on Afghanistan, an emotional scene he didn’t fully
understand at the time and would never shake. I’m three years older
than Beck, and our shared generation has witnessed a series of
cataclysmic events, but for many of us, 9/11 was the most indelible.
More than two decades later, it’s hard not to feel like the fall of
2001 was when everything started to go terribly wrong.

But Beck, now in his late thirties and a regular contributor to _n+1_,
is well aware that the crises of twenty-first-century America have
much deeper roots than a single day of terror. In his wildly ambitious
second book, _Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life_, Beck
argues that the US response to 9/11 is both the logical culmination of
American history dating back to the first white settlers on the
continent and the backdrop of all that has followed. As he guides the
reader through a generation’s still-unresolved collective trauma, he
links it—for the most part, convincingly—to seemingly every aspect
of contemporary American life.
 
IN HIS INTRODUCTION, Beck writes that Donald Trump’s presidency and
the constellation of reactionary forces it represents were made
possible by the 9/11 attacks. _Homeland_ is not the first book to make
this argument; three years ago, Spencer Ackerman’s _Reign of Terror:
How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump_ was
organized around the same premise. But Beck seems to strain against
the Trump framing as soon as he brings it up: “In fifty,
twenty-five, or even ten years, Trump may look more like a precursor
to larger social and political fractures,” Beck writes. “I would
rather not gratify Trump’s narcissism by making a multi-decade,
global war entirely about him.” And he doesn’t—relatively little
of _Homeland_ is concerned with Trump, and some of the strongest
sections of the book situate the war on terror as part of a primordial
American crusade against perceived alien threats, rather than a
departure from a mythologized age of national innocence.

While Ackerman approached the war on terror as a seasoned national
security reporter, Beck approaches it as a cultural critic. He
observes that most Americans experienced 9/11 as a televisual
spectacle, perhaps the largest such event that ever was or will be,
watched in real time by two billion people worldwide. Beck rewatches
the ABC News broadcast from that morning and devotes several pages to
unpacking everything from Peter Jennings’s shock at the unbelievable
story unfolding before him to the frivolous news items—“a man
whose cell phone had continued to work even though his kayak had
overturned”—that were interrupted by the explosions in Lower
Manhattan. Of the camera crews that arrived downtown after the first
tower was hit but before the second was, Beck writes, “They
understood themselves to be reporting the news, but at 9:03 they
learned that they had been unwittingly pressed into service as
publicists for terrorism.” Al-Qaeda, in other words, managed to
enlist the American media as producers and distributors of the
world’s most widely viewed snuff film.

Americans’ pervasive feeling of helplessness after the attacks
seemed to have few precursors, but Beck finds earlier parallels,
drawing on the insights of Susan Faludi’s 2007 book, _The Terror
Dream_, and Richard Slotkin’s earlier trilogy of histories on the
myths of the frontier. In a long digression about the popular
“captivity narratives” produced in response to the extended
pre-Revolutionary wars between Puritan colonists and Indigenous
peoples in New England, Beck recalls that for centuries, Americans
have told versions of the same basic story: “savages” inexplicably
attack our blameless, vulnerable Christian civilization. Over time,
iterations of this narrative developed a genre of American hero who
responds with righteous violence, “the figure who would serve as the
template for all the myth heroes to follow, from the cowboys and
outlaws of the American West all the way down to Batman. That figure
was the hunter.” There is a straight line, Beck persuasively shows,
from the exploits of Daniel Boone to the celebrated Special Forces who
became the defining real-world heroes of the war on terror, as well as
the various fictional archetypes who came out of the same era, from
_24_’s Jack Bauer to Robert Downey Jr.’s rendition of Iron Man.
The fantasy Americans embraced, and that the Pentagon spent billions
trying to make real, was one in which small teams of high-tech,
heavily armored superheroes patrolled the deadly frontiers to protect
American innocence at home.

The titular homeland itself, meanwhile, would never feel safe again.
Beck chronicles the expansion of security theater in the post-9/11
years, noting the ineffective obtrusiveness of both airport screenings
and the NSA’s notorious surveillance programs. Those come in for
plenty of criticism, of course, but Beck extends his indictment to
include less obvious topics like the soaring popularity of SUVs, which
were simultaneously symbols of consumerist excess, expressions of
stubborn indifference to US dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and
machines that provided the illusion of individual security while
making everyone else less safe. “Now the world was a dangerous place
where terrorists could strike without warning, and SUVs, because they
were taller and heavier than anything else on the road, made people
feel secure,” Beck writes. “The vehicles’ military origins
returned to the foreground—this was the car to drive when the
homeland was a potential war zone.” Meanwhile, there was a rush to
privatize public spaces and establish security zones in major US
cities—Beck notes that the number of Neighborhood Watch groups
nationwide increased by 85 percent after 9/11, and that large sections
of San Francisco and other major cities were subsequently closed off
and blanketed with surveillance cameras to prevent the non-wealthy
from loitering or congregating—producing “an environment in which
the public can barely function at all.” None of this made anyone
more secure, Beck argues: “When the terrorist threat has been so
wildly exaggerated, the only remaining explanation for the security
zones is that their purpose is to monitor the public itself.” While
relatively few Americans have served on the front lines of the war on
terror abroad or been victimized directly by it at home, all of us can
feel its unsettling presence in the architecture of our quotidian
lives.

Beck also devotes a large section of the book to documenting the
xenophobic racism against Muslims and Arabs that came directly out of
9/11. Much of this is familiar: soaring hate crimes, FBI entrapment
schemes, routine violations of civil liberties, and innocent lives
destroyed by a zealous prosecutorial apparatus operating in a state of
exception. Beck has a fine sense of the ultimate stakes of these
abuses. “For Muslims themselves,” he writes, “one of the most
devastating effects of these campaigns was that it became difficult
and sometimes impossible to participate in civic life—to speak your
mind freely in a student group, attend public discussions at a mosque,
respond to a bigot on a Facebook thread about politics, or even argue
with someone who was being a jerk in public.”

He spotlights the story of Adama Bah, a Muslim immigrant from Guinea
whose life became a Kafkaesque nightmare from ages sixteen to
twenty-five after she was caught up in an FBI dragnet that resulted in
her father’s arrest and deportation and in her being interrogated,
imprisoned, forced to drop out of school, and placed on a no-fly list.
While she eventually won an ACLU lawsuit restoring her rights,
irreparable damage had been done. “The story’s ‘happy ending’
notwithstanding, the United States successfully delivered a message to
Adama and people like her: You are not a full and equal member of our
society,” Beck writes. “Whatever dreams and aspirations you might
have cultivated as a child must now take a backseat to the smaller
dream of staying out of trouble.” While Arab and Muslim communities
felt this domestic terror most acutely, Beck demonstrates that
precedents were being established for targeting other groups,
including Black and Indigenous activists and their allies.

_HOMELAND_’S MOST ORIGINAL AND PROVOCATIVE SECTION, and the one Beck
claims that he enjoyed working on the most, offers a theory of the
political economy of the war on terror—the deeper materialist
explanations for why all this happened. Never one to go small, Beck
immerses readers in a five-hundred-year history of global capitalism,
in which an economic system premised on permanent GDP growth has
always depended on hegemonic states to protect and advance it, from
the Italian city-states to the seafaring Dutch Republic to the British
Empire and finally to the United States. To Beck’s mind, the
standard Marxist explanations for post-9/11 US foreign policy—blood
for oil and public subsidies for defense contractors—are
unsatisfying and insufficient. They certainly factored in, but they
weren’t causal. Rather, Beck argues, the attacks occurred at a
moment when “the United States found itself at the head of a global
economic order that had been founded on a growth surge that was slowly
but surely running out of steam.” Here he draws on a wide range of
thinkers—Mike Davis on the slums of the Global South, Aaron Benanav
on secular stagnation, Giovanni Arrighi on the cyclic nature of
capitalist accumulation, and Pankaj Mishra on the rage of the
developing world—to argue that the war on terror has functioned as a
kind of extended police action against restive surplus populations
that the US-led global economic system can’t provide prosperity for.

The form of American imperialism jump-started by the attacks thus
served a holistic function: it became a tool for managing and
suppressing the wretched of the earth in places where capitalism
itself had failed to deliver. Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency
tactics honed in Iraq and Afghanistan could be just as useful in the
Sahel, or on the Mexican border, or in American cities like Ferguson,
Missouri—or, as we’ve seen dramatically demonstrated in the past
year, in Gaza and the West Bank. All of these deployments of state
violence, Beck stresses, “are _part of the same project_, the same
larger effort to preserve American supremacy at the expense of the
global poor even as America loses the economic capabilities that
legitimized its global leadership in the first place.”

Beck also contends that the most enduring legacies of the war on
terror include a sense of elite impunity and a corresponding sense of
hopelessness among younger Americans. His account of the journalistic
failures that manufactured consent for the Iraq invasion is expansive
and unsparing, if perhaps familiar to media junkies by now. We see how
Susan Sontag was pilloried for her measured response to 9/11, how the_
New York Times_ was criminally negligent in publishing Judith
Miller’s anonymously sourced stories about Saddam Hussein’s
nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, and how even ambitious young
progressive bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias understood,
correctly, that it would help their careers to endorse the war and
apologize later. Beck doesn’t want to pick on anyone in particular;
the failure, as he sees it, was systemic. “The very idea that the
American news media, in its current form, can just decide to cultivate
a consistently adversarial relationship with the government it covers
is a fantasy,” he writes. Corporate conglomeration and the perverse
incentives of audience and access make it difficult for journalists to
act as an effective check on power. This is why even today, when
it’s generally understood that the Iraq War was folly and many
onetime advocates have recanted, few seem to have internalized any
deeper lesson. We are condemned to keep making the same mistakes, in
what Beck aptly characterizes in Freudian terms as “a repetition
compulsion carried out on a national scale”—in which the war on
terror’s supporters, its opponents, and the majority of Americans
who try to ignore it and carry on with their lives all find themselves
implicated in its endless, self-sustaining logic.

_HOMELAND_ COMES OUT TO AROUND FIVE HUNDRED PAGES (not including
endnotes), and the range of topics it covers, from Black Lives Matter
to mass shootings to the 2008 financial crisis to the Standing Rock
protests, amounts to an exhaustive survey of the past quarter century
and the news events our generation followed in real time. Though
Beck’s judgments are largely earned, at times the expansiveness of
his interests undermines what could have been a tighter focus on the
war on terror as conventionally defined. There is a trend in
nonfiction publishing wherein a book must promise to explain
everything about our times; whether Beck was encouraged to do so or
took it upon himself, he is insistent that everything that has
happened since 9/11 has been, in some sense, a product of it, even
though he also often gestures at important trends that predate the
attacks and whose ongoing salience didn’t depend on them. John
Ganz’s recent book _When the Clock Broke_ locates the roots of
today’s populist right in the underbelly of early 1990s politics,
which, if we accept the argument, suggests that America was headed in
a certain direction regardless of whether a few terrorists armed with
box cutters managed to slip through airport security in 2001.
Similarly, the housing bubble that popped in 2008 was largely the
product of a series of neoliberal economic policies that either
preceded the 9/11 attacks or would likely have been enacted
regardless. The war on terror may have affected everything, but that
doesn’t mean it caused everything.

Still, it’s hard not to admire Beck’s ambition and the clarity of
both his prose and his moral vision. _Homeland_ is less an explanation
of the precise ephemeral moment that is 2024 than an extended
reckoning with a whole era of American history, one that will remain
relevant to readers who didn’t live through the events it revisits.
Beck seems to anticipate these future generations in his conclusion,
in which he writes, “In the decades to come, some of those people
are going to find ways of changing and living in society that don’t
require a militarized world of swat teams, armored police vehicles,
fortified borders, surveillance, night raids, secret prisons, and
bombs, if only because they have no other choice.” We may still be
living in the long imperial shadow of 9/11, but Beck can see a faint
light in the distance.

David Klion is a journalist and cultural critic working on a book
about the legacy of neoconservatism. 

* 9/11 attacks
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* the War on Terror
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* U.S. imperialism
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* U.S. history
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