ABSTRACT
The particular narrative texture that is constituted by the church's relentless loyalty to their higher other in Red State, their ritual human sacrifices administered to appease an angry God. It comes to exemplify the initial spiking of post-9/11 patriotism and the seemingly guaranteed security compensated for obedience. Cooper's exploiting the collective fears of the congregation, by preaching on the probability of an apocalypse, eventually engenders his own legitimacy. This chapter examines the precision and arrangement of the textual features in Red State in order to unpack that which is not rendered directly, a narrative texture which critiques the nature of patriotism in the post-9/11 term. As demonstrated in, by means of Sheriff Wydell's characterisation in The Devil's Rejects, in Post-9/11 Heartland Horror, authority figures in general are portrayed as degenerate, incompetent and rarely functional. Post-9/11 Heartland Horror could rouse reactions in the public sphere that query the demand for super-patriotism as political practice.
