EDITORS' CHOICE

David Griffith, A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2006.

It took a while before I could recognize the gravity of the Abu Ghraib torture photos that open David Griffith’s “A Good War is Hard to Find.” I couldn’t separate them from the dulling parade of bad news in the Times. Maybe it was hopelessness that kept me from looking—the gut feeling that the photos reflected a world nearing its end. Maybe it was the fact that the photos just seemed like your average torture dungeon porn. Or maybe it was the shame.

Encountering Griffith’s nonfiction debut, a collage of images interwoven into eight essays of thoughtful criticism, we learn to see the Abu Ghraib photos as imaginative pathways. We find ourselves standing behind a nude Iraqi in a Christ pose, fearing with him a guard with a weapon raised. We are naked, clutching inward in fear and holdout modesty. And in a sheer 180-degree shift, we are the photographers, we know our own fear, our power. As the author writes, “We meet ourselves coming and going.”

Griffith makes the case that these photos don’t reflect psychological aberrations or the handiwork of bad seeds so much as a culture blind with pride. Seeing ourselves as perennial liberators, we fail to recognize our own capacities for evil. Disarmingly, the author follows that premise to its challenging conclusion and begins the work of exploring his own relationship to violence.

In the book’s opening essay, we meet the teenage Griffith in 1991, watching the bombing of Baghdad on television. A bully has stolen his Notre Dame jacket. His high school band is preparing to perform “Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam, Dresden, 1945).” The piece is alea-toric—providing diagrams and instructions on a style of playing, rather than rote notes on a staff—and designed to pull musicians and their audience away from prescribed notions and into a deeper awareness of the reality of the city of Dresden bombed and burning to the ground.

Inspired, Griffith recovers his stolen jacket and prepares a slide show of images depicting the bombing, then projects them to accompany the performance. But he doesn’t correlate Dresden with Baghdad at all. “Dresden was different, I told myself. Dresden was butchery, barbarity. The bombing of Iraq, as I saw on television every night for a few months, was clean, efficient, just.”

This book, we gather, is a wiser version of the same slide show. Image by image, the author reckons with his life’s exposure to darkness, from watching scary movies in a friend’s basement, to first learning of Hiroshima. In one essay, he detours to the swamps of Louisiana, where, in youth, his would-be wife perches on her boyfriend’s homemade electric chair—a nod to Warhol’s factory—waiting for the electricity. He marvels, half jealously, at the attraction she felt for said boyfriend in the moment when he produced a .357 Magnum and showed her how to shoot—and then laments his own terror of guns.

In another, the author reflects on his own morning-after shame at mugging drunk at a Halloween party for a Polaroid with a friend dressed as Charles Graner, the scapegoat and purported ringleader of the torture at Abu Ghraib. Then he includes that image as a wryly unflattering author photo. Griffith is less interested in assigning blame here than suggesting that we arrive at moments like the one that defined the torturers through a series of small concessions—like the ones we make in daily life as we try to “keep up appearances, to play along in the name of loyalty or love.”

The author finds further small concessions in the art we’re steeped in as a culture. He finds destruction glorified and aestheticized in the movies of his upbringing—ranging in purpose and intensity from Pulp Fiction to Blue Velvet. In Warhol’s work, he finds “not a brave and courageous man but a depressed and morally dislocated artist.” In the Bret Easton Ellises and Chuck Palahniuks favored by his students, he finds “writers who specialize in the kind of violence and obscenity found on cable, albeit with—it would seem—tongues firmly planted in cheek.” And he records how, after watching a slide show of horrifying 20th-century atrocities with the same students, they react with “I’ve seen worse at the movies.”

In our unwillingness to accept shared responsibility for Abu Ghraib, the author also identifies a spiritual crisis. Numb to our own violence, we’ve come so far as to believe that Christ lived in our image, and not vice versa. “How else,” Griffith writes, “could a nation that so strongly self-identifies as Christian . . . stand silent in the face of such barbarity?”

As remedy, Griffith calls for revelatory art that sharpens our sensitivity toward violence—and to our own dark capacities for inflicting it. Like John Hersey writing in Hiroshima, holding “almost holy reverence for the events of that morning, careful to chronicle the last incredulous moments before the bomb detonated in a flash of molten-hot light.” Like David Lynch in Blue Velvet, “showing us the downward spiral—the disappointment, disillusion, and self doubt—that sex and violence can cause.”

Or like Flannery O’Connor, illuminating in her stories “the hidden evil residing in the human heart, the pursuit of good that masks a secret pride.” Or like the Bible, where, if we read it right, we can find Jesus as an inspiring example of non-violence, rather than an endorser of moral blank checks.

By studiously avoiding the didactic, and by softening provocative statements with self-deprecating humor, Griffith establishes his own aleatorics—weaving the rare type of political and religious conversation that doesn’t send all parties scurrying to their ideological trenches. In doing so, he launches the type of conversation that can give our world a shot at real repair. Griffith’s book shines at its best alongside the art he singles out for praise.

Ben Freeman