At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture.

• Author: Gunn, Joshua
• Position: Book Reviews

At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture. By Edward J. Ingebretsen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001; pp. xvi + 341. $40.00.

After the ruinous ride of the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse last September, a "new" (or so it was claimed) and alien Gojira emerged from the smoldering rubble of our besieged buildings. His name, President Bush told us, was Osama bin Ladin, and his monstrosity was so monstrous that he could only be described as "Evil." During his September 20, 2001 address to the nation, Bush denounced bin Ladin and his clandestine cabal of "terrorists" (al-Qaida "network") as "enemies of freedom," Yezedi Satanists hell-bent on killing "Christians and Jews ... [and] all Americans," making "no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children." Under the pretense of piety, Bush said, the network carries out unspeakable atrocities, the likes of which we have undoubtedly seen before: these Muslim extremists "are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions-by abandoning every value except the will to power-they follow the p ath of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies." Following these stalwart declarations of war and revenge, in the tone of prophecy and in the "patient" mode of cowboy justice, Bush threatened "every nation, in every region," that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

As James Darsey (1998) has reminded us, the evangelical tone of righteousness adopted by the "leader of the free world" bespeaks an underlying, prophetic tradition that resides deeply in the American political unconscious. In distinction from Hellenic modes of public address that stress reasoned judgment and evidence, Hebraic modes are characteristically obstinate in regard to evidentiary appeals, demanding action or belief on the basis of charisma and faith alone. Edward J. Ingebretsen's At Stake: Monsters and the Rhetoric of Fear in Public Culture, like his previous work Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell (1996), deepens our understanding of prophetic rhetoric by suggesting that Gothic narratives have also been woven into our theological habits. We are, says Ingebretsen, "soul-deep in the Gothic" (p. 200), so soul-deep, in fact, that monster-talk has become an essential part of American civic pedagogy...