Pie and Coffee 
A Good War Is Hard to Find
David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find, points to a recent podcast interview with him and Wayne Kostenbaum. He doesn’t point to the mp3, so I’ve linked to it here [mp3]. You can also subscribe to the podcast feed and listen to more of the “Onword” podcast.
Another recent review of Good War at Not a Walking Encyclopedia.
Sorry it’s taken so long to come up with part 2 of my response. Many forces have conspired against me to ensure that I didn’t finish, among them the horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech.
To pick up on point I made in part 1, it takes putting ourselves in the picture (in much the same way that as Christians we must remind ourselves that we are complicit in Jesus’ suffering and death) in order for the violence in the Abu Ghraib photos to strike us as worth our regard (which, for those of who have suggested that I either naively or willfully snubbed postmodernity in my book, is exactly the problem I’m trying to warn against, considering we live in an image-based culture—call it postmodern, if you like—wherein the tendency is for images to serve only as references to other images, not to any actual event).
But to suggest, as Mike Ciul does, that I am on a quest for shame illustrates, to me, the truly troubling (postmodern?) predicament we find ourselves in. This is where I actually think using the term Postmodern is useful, as a pejorative, an ignominious label. It now seems fitting to evoke the set of larger social/cultural/economic/political circumstances that have brought us to this moment, because it surely takes a combination of powerful systemic forces ordering our lives and perceptions to bring us to the point where we distrust our conscience.
Read the rest of this entry »
Author’s note: This is an essay I wrote in 1996 for the late Dr. Peter Fay’s class, Hum 9a, at Caltech; transcribed with corrections in 2001. [Editor's note: Hiroshima is the subject of a chapter in David Griffith's A Good War Is Hard to Find, which we've been discussing here. Here are more of Griffith's reflections on the subject.]
I come from Taiwan, or Takasago, as one would call it back in the days of colonization under the Empire of Japan before the end of World War 2. Taiwanese people who are of my grandmother’s generation were educated to be Japanese; for example, the late pastor of my church, like many Taiwanese who were drafted by the Imperial Armed Forces at that time, was to be one of the kamikaze, the suicide pilots who were crashing their fighters into the carriers of the Allies. People of that age often talk to us about the times of the Japanese occupation and the Pacific War. Although they resented the unnecessary War they had to fight and complain about the occasional cruelty of the Japanese, they described the Japanese rule as a period of order and stability, in which even during the extreme of hardship near the end of the War, rarely did riots arise and corruption of the administration were unusual. It seemed that everyone in the neighborhood cooperated to remain organized for the War. I always wonder how this kind of disciplined behavior was attained.
After reading John Hersey’s Hiroshima, I think I know a bit more about the way of the Japanese. Although the emblem of the Japanese Empire is the glorious chrysanthemum signifying the Royal Family, common people refer to themselves as sakura, the cherry blossoms, which bloom brilliantly in the spring for a very short time, usually only a few days, and then fall to the ground. A respectful Japanese is one that suffers tragically, or even sacrifices oneself, for the cause of the greater organization (e.g., the Empire, or, as is observed in the modern, post-War society Japan, the kaisha, the Japanese idea of the “firm”), just like the sakura flowers. Any performance less than this is considered a shame in the Japanese mind.
Shame. To shame someone. To put them to shame. Shame on you. Shame. Shame. Shame. Shame. Say a word often enough and it starts to lose its coherency. It becomes pure noise: a “shhh” sound, followed by an “ay” sound, followed by an “mmm” sound. I like what Mike Ciul says about shame as it corresponds to my book because it gets me back to thinking about its definition in a serious way.
If shame is the gateway to redemption, then it has a purpose, but it’s not an end in itself. By the end of this book I felt like Griffith had replaced his quest for cool by a quest for shame. He says he used to think it made him more tough or cosmopolitan to be able to watch shocking scenes. Now he says you have to put yourself in the picture and be shamed into repentance. So I’m asking myself, what’s the difference? Am I not cool enough to look at pictures of torture? Or am I not compassionate enough?
When I was in college I watched the movie True Romance with some friends. I’d never seen anything so painfully violent, and I told them how it bothered me. Their response was dismissive and they seemed to think I was some kind of prudish weirdo for complaining about violence. The incident really affected me, and within a year I’d become a Tarantino fan and spent a lot of time trying to justify his use of violence in film.
There is, in fact, something special about the violence in Tarantino’s brand of film. You really feel the characters’ pain when they are assaulted and mutilated. That’s something I never saw in an action movie. I watched a lot of Schwarzenegger films with my dad and though the body count was much higher, I never felt the loss as much as in Reservoir Dogs or even Pulp Fiction.
In A Good War Is Hard to Find, David Griffith talks about how the violence is disconnected, even funny in Pulp Fiction. That’s true in some ways, but in a way Tarantino’s violence is more connected than in a lot of other films. When the guy’s head is accidentally blown off in the car, it is kind of funny, but his death is also very real. He’s not some enemy who won’t be bothering you anymore, and he’s not some mystic warrior who becomes one with the Force. He’s really gone, and it’s tragic. When you laugh, you feel ashamed.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been e-mailing with my little brother Mark about David Griffith’s A Good War Is Hard to Find, and about Christopher Sorrentino’s review of the book in the New York Times.
The New York Times review bugged me, because it didn’t mention Christianity at all, while the last third was on “postmodernity.” I thought that the search for God’s grace in moments of violence was at least as important a theme in this book as Griffith’s critique of our culture. I wondered if those reading the review would think the book was some odd, secular salvo in the culture wars.
Mark straightened me out:
I read the Times review and I’m not entirely sure the Sorrentino guy paints it as a culture wars thing—I see what you mean about his desire to (maybe) justify postmodern cultural artifacts, but I think the key part is the notion that these artifacts come out of postmodernity—there’s a larger social/cultural/economic/political realm there that one might want to take on before one worries about Pulp Fiction. Or so I thought his point was.
In An Ethic for Christians, William Stringfellow wrote: “The unique aspect of biblical faith is that immediate, mundane history is beheld, affirmed, and lived as the true story of the redemption of time and Creation. Biblical ethics constitute a sacramental participation in history as it happens, transfiguring the common existence of persons and principalities in this world into the only history of salvation which there is for humanity and all other creatures.”
It strikes me that this idea of redemption lies at the heart of David Griffith’s essays in A Good War Is Hard to Find. As he describes our “common existence” he seems to desire for Christians to act rather than react, to act justly, tenderly, humbly, rather than react violently either through ouright violence or through complicity with violence born of apathy, boredom, or believing in the euphemistic language used to describe it.
Read the rest of this entry »
This week we’re publishing some thoughts on David Griffith’s book A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. We’ll be featuring Dave’s response, too.
The first reviews are from Mike Benedetti and Christine Lavallee.
Several of the essays in the book are available on-line, in excerpted or adapted form:
See also:
Most young Americans don’t have a firsthand experience of war. Many grow up with no experience of intense violence at all. Their attitudes towards these things are shaped by art: books, TV shows, the news, and movies.
David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence In America, is one of those people. So am I.
My peers and I really didn’t question violent entertainment while we were growing up, I think in part because we figured the stories told by adults were probably a good reflection of the world. (Today’s young people may be naturally more skeptical of these sorts of stories, since they can easily share their own videos with their peers over the Internet, and because their video games are more immersive—they can all use adult tools to act out their own stories. For people of my and Griffith’s generation, access to these tools implied some sort of legitimacy.)
In the essay “Some Proximity to Darkness” in Good War, Griffith revists the movies that shaped his sensibilities as a young man, this time taking a cold, hard look at them. I was shaped by many of these movies, and while reading the book I felt that Griffith was taking a cold, hard look inside my own head. Quite a trip.
Read the rest of this entry »
48 queries. 1.722 seconds.
