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.