Presidential war rhetoric structurally recapitulated Gothic horror storytelling

Evidence

The gothic scenes evoked by Bush as much as Poe involve monsters and ghosts in tenebrous atmospheres that generate fear and anxiety, where terror is a pervasive tormentor of the senses. Poe’s narratives, for example, turn on encounters with dark, perverse, seemingly indomitable forces often entombed in haunted houses. Similarly, Bush’s post-September 11 narratives play upon fears of terrorists and rogue states who are equally dark, perverse and indomitable forces. In both cases, ineffable and potently violent and cruel forces haunt and terrorize the civilized, human world. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 737

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that statecraft borrows its enemy-making from the Gothic genre is dense and paradigm-shifting for the monster-manufacture thesis.