Challenging U.S. beliefs, post-9/11

“Homeland,” the fourth book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning team of writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson (“And Their Children After Them”), takes on the question of the American character as it’s being shaped by recent and ongoing events, holding up to readers a mirror of who we, as Americans, are becoming in the wake of 9/11.

After watching the twin towers implode from his uptown New York rooftop, Maharidge was curious about how the rest of the country was coping. “I knew that a genie had been uncorked. I of course had no idea what the genie would do,” he writes, as he set out to have a look.

Maharidge found flags flying from most every corner, “God bless America” signs peppering the landscape, and the right to free speech and dissent readily quashed -- though not as he would have expected, solely by governmental forces. It was as if “there were a thousand mini-Ashcrofts scattered around the country,” he tells us. “On school boards, in newspaper publishers’ offices, among some college administrators, on local police departments.... A significant portion of America wanted to partake in some repressing of its own.”

In extended vignettes, he tells us about Americans who have run afoul of what he considers to be the culture’s hyperpatriotic timbre, as well as those who insist that it’s wrong to speak out in times of trouble. “You don’t do that anymore,” a Korean War veteran tells him about protesting in America after 9/11. “That’s not allowed.”

He profiles Katie Sierra, a teenager in a small West Virginia town, who, a month after 9/11, wore a T-shirt to school on which she’d written: “When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America.” She was suspended from school and ordered to see a psychologist before she could return, her life made into a nightmare by those in her community offended by her sentiments.

Maharidge interviews white supremacists in Chicago who are doing their utmost to make the Muslims in their community feel unwelcome so that they will leave, and then speaks with those who have been targets of this behavior. The current climate of fear, he tells us, produces scapegoats. “Our fear is not specific; if it were, Americans would be terrified of Saudi Arabians specifically -- since most of the 9/11 actors were Saudi.” Rather, he writes, we’ve become a nation fearful of anyone deemed “other” who might threaten what little we still possess. “Prick the anger which on the surface may be pro-war and anti-Arab, and one hears of ruined 401Ks, health problems, lost work.”

Maharidge posits that we were a country in peril even before the terrorist attacks, a nation in which many were suffering and in dire economic straits, abandoned by the safety net of social services. At the same time, countless jobs have fled overseas and the “Wal-Mart effect” has depressed wages, further separating rich from poor, particularly in the nation’s heartland, where manufacturing jobs have dried up.

Over the course of their two-year investigation, encompassing thousands of miles and hundreds of interviews, Maharidge and Williamson found two distinct Americas: one in the exclusive preserves of California’s Silicon Valley and Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and the other in the country’s middle. “The first country was living as if the 1990s boom would never cease,” Maharidge writes. “The second country was languishing, as if locked in a 1930s Great Depression time warp.”

Our current fascination with the “war on terrorism,” Maharidge posits, may be rooted in our frustration with this disparity and our own domestic distress. “For many, the default chant of ‘USA! USA!’ is a way of drowning out the realities we don’t want to face.” And, from the government’s point of view, fueling this fear is easy compared with dealing with the underlying issues.

Ultimately, he draws a disturbing if not altogether convincing parallel between the resonating fear and anger he senses we are now experiencing as a nation -- discouraged, economically adrift, looking for an answer or someone to blame -- with the Weimar Republic that led to the rise of Nazi Germany. Though this element of his argument will be beyond the pale for many readers, on balance, his narrative raises essential points about America as we exist today.

“When people get riled up with nationalism, they have blind faith,” says a college student in Iowa who had hung a flag upside down in his dorm window to protest U.S. foreign policy in late 2002 -- until the police ordered him to remove the flag or face arrest. “That’s really scary.”

Prefaced by more than 30 black-and-white photos by Williamson, including abandoned downtown storefronts, a soup kitchen and pro- and antiwar rallies, this book is a call for all Americans to examine our beliefs, our anger, our racial prejudices and the economic injustices fueling our unease. Readers do not have to agree with Maharidge’s politics to realize that the questions he raises, especially at this critical moment in our nation’s history, deserve our utmost attention.