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A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America

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Truth in reviewing: I am acquainted with the author of this book, but not acquainted well enough to have known what it would be. I actually expected a novel; we get one writer's reckoning of how America reached the point where its own were humiliating and torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib apparently for kicks. This is not political spin, it is thoughtful moral discourse, the kind of critical thinking that has gone missing for a long, long time.

When the news and photographs from Abu Ghraib hit the radar, they were quickly packaged and trimmed down to a focus on Michael Graner, Lynndie England and one or two other "bad apples." In fact, Griffith reminds us, the original photographs showed more soldiers along the edges of the sensational activities, appearing casual and even indifferent. The "bad apples" were part of the pack and that pack, Griffith finds in an exploration of American character, are us.

In a series of essays illustrated with deliberately grainy reproductions of the images he discusses, Griffith sorts through American history, his own experiences growing up Catholic as well as close readings of the ideas and works of Flannery O'Connor and Andy Warhol, among others, to probe the psycho-social roots of violence in a land so many argue was founded on Christian teachings. The territory he travels is at once familiar and all new, and what he reveals is sobering. Griffith's voice is engaging, which makes this difficult trip doable, even when he is showing us the ironic complexities of everyday life.

What David Griffith does in A Good War is Hard to Find isn't really to attack the Iraq war or the Bush administration, both easy outrages, but to explore the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in relation to the larger problem of human evil. He didn't let Abu Ghraib go down in the flood of fractured information in which we're drowning. It was deeply significant beyond mere politics, and he saw that. I admire his creative and brave response more than I can say. He used the self in the best possible way an artist can, as an instrument of inquiry into something larger.

His own story, unfolding in various scenes, is vital to this: our guide is one of us, an American kid who stumbled upon Hiroshima as a fifth grader and was shocked by doubt. And we can see how his past and his preoccupations bear on his response to evil. Griffith grew up steeped in violent movies, watching in boyhood basements and college dormitory outings, and his book reflects those experiences and his growing moral imagination as a husband and as a committed Catholic. He shows us scenes of himself enjoying violence and becoming uncomfortable. Ultimately he grasps the moral response to violence in Blue Velvet and Deliverance in contrast to Quentin Tarantino's creepy aestheticization of violence and denial of its seriousness in Pulp Fiction.

Before you know it, you're contemplating his true subject, of which Abu Ghraib is a banal symptom. Griffith approaches this the way we must approach something so large, in the sideways manner poetry does, probing at the margins of something large and abstract. And then we get the title essay, which meditates upon Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor's moral vision of the egoistic evil (she calls it "pride") embedded in human nature. Taking his book's title from her iconic short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," about a family led by its foolish, pridefully unconscious matriarch to execution by a serial killer, Griffith asks why America seems peculiarly susceptible to the grotesque violations of its transcendent ideals that its power permits and encourages.

The beauty of A Good War is Hard to Find is that it does not politicize this human dilemma nor does it let anyone off the hook. The problem is deep, intrinsic and everlasting.

This is a text that when you set it down stays with you. Seemingly disperate events/artifacts from american culture are drawn together abu ghraib becomes only more disturbing. When i opened this book i was disgusted by those images but had a flurry of emotions attributed to them more than anythign else. Now, I am compelled to investigate further how abu ghraib is an expected event for where we are as a people. So, you leave this book knowing that every individual, yourself included, is to blame for abu ghraib, but therefore empowered to prevent it from reoccuring.