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

Dave Wallace in Illinois: In Memoriam David Foster Wallace

2008-09-15T23:18:00.006-04:00

I’m a writer, and I grew up in Decatur, Illinois, 45 minutes from David Foster Wallace’s stomping grounds, so the news of Wallace's suicide has really hit me hard. I know in my bones the “true religious-type wind” that, he writes, “informed and deformed” life in the Midwest, and I whispered “Amen” when, based on this anecdotal evidence, Wallace questioned Chicago’s right to the name “Windy City.” My Midwestern upbringing doesn’t necessarily give me the ethos to hold forth on why, now that he has left this world, Wallace matters (confession: I’ve never been able to finish Infinite Jest) and has mattered for nearly twenty years, but it’s really all I have to go on.

To the best of my knowledge, he is the only writer from central Illinois—“Downstate,” Chicagolanders sniff—that has achieved such literary success. But it’s not so much his success that impressed me years ago when I first started reading his work; it’s that he consistently articulated phenomenological truths about growing up in the Midwest that I was incapable of (“[I feel] best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved corners”) and because his work retained the ethic and aesthetic native to the region: a fundamental decency, roughened by a self-deprecating and ironic sense of humor reminiscent of central Indiana native David Letterman, who Wallace simultaneously lionizes and lampoons in his hilarious short story “My Appearance.”

Despite his highly allusive, referential, reflexive, digressive, meta-ness, Wallace was (much like Letterman) charming in a nerdy, didactic way. And he was, contrary to exasperated remarks about his use of footnotes, endnotes, sidebars and marginalia (Wallace notes on the copyright acknowledgment page at the beginning of his first book of stories, Girl With Curious Hair, that parts of his long story “Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way” (another one I’ve always had a hell of a time finishing) were written in the margins of Barthes’ “Lost in the Funhouse and a book of stories by Cynthia Ozick) eager to make himself clear. “There’s a way, it seems to me,” said Wallace in a 1996 interview with Charlie Rose, “that reality is fractured—at least the reality I live in.” The “footnote thing”—Rose’s phrase, not Wallace’s—“is a way to speak to this essential fractured-ness without creating a text that is unreadably fractured in and of itself.”

After reading a lot of DFW (as his cultish fans refer to him, although I do not refer to him this way because I’ve never been able to finish IJ ), you come to understand that this fractured prose style, characterized by segmented super-structures, labyrinthine sentences and protracted digressions, by turns entertaining and maddening, was not just surfacey glimmer belying great depth, but an actual concern with being precise. It’s revealing that Wallace briefly pursued a PhD in philosophy at Harvard before dropping out to devote himself to being a writer.

Internet posters who are now pointing out the hypocrisy of Wallace’s apparent suicide because his work so often plumbed the icky depths of selfishness and vanity (his New York Observer article “Great Male Narcissists” takes on the likes of Updike and Roth), clearly have not read him—or perhaps any literature for that matter—closely. Wallace’s whole ouvre reveals a deep-seated concern for human frailty, especially his own.

To my mind, Wallace’s articles and essays are among some of the best examples of nonfiction’s capability and flexibility as a literary genre that can bring the personal and the global to sensible speaking terms. He avoids the shrill ad hominem attacks of most cultural commentators by taking the empathetic high road with the likes of porn directors, right wing talk radio hosts and John McCain. Oh, how I wish he were still alive so he could bring a sane perspective to the Sarah Palin hysteria.

In his much anthologized essay, “Ticket to the Fair,” (retitled “Getting Away from Pretty Much Being Away from it All” for his collection of essays Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) he does not rub elbows with the unwashed masses at the Illinois State Fair to simply make fun of the antiquated ways and facile beliefs of middle Americans, so de rigeur in this election year, nor did he do it in order to gain the populist cred that so many artists have a difficult time genuinely earning. No, it seems to me his project was more transcendental: he was interested in understanding how humans have the capacity to contain both hideousness and goodness—beauty is conspicuously absent at the fair. Wallace avoided sentimentality. I liked to think that he shared a bit of Flannery O’Connor’s view that sentimentality is the premature, unearned, naive claim to innocence, which tends by some strange alchemy to become its opposite.

His first book of short stories Girl with Curious Hair changed my life. In grad school I was under the dual influence of Flannery O’Connor and John Cheever, two of the undisputed masters of the post-war short story. I would sit in my apartment and read and re-read their stories trying to understand how they worked. The result was stories with Cheever’s lofty exposition, decorous prose and interest in domestic rifts over money and O’Connor’s penchant for characters with allegorical-sounding names and some sort of deformity eventually knocked down several pegs by an act of violence. Writing those stories felt like watch repair rather than an ecstatic rendezvous with the muse. And then one day I spotted Girl with Curious Hair in a bookstore and opened it to the title story.

“Gimlet dreamed that if she did not see a concert last night she would become a type of liquid, therefore my friends Mr. Wonderful, Big, Gimlet and I went to see Keith Jarrett play a piano concert at the Irvine Concert Hall in Irvine last night.”

My jaw was on the floor. I laughed and looked around to see if anyone noticed. I wish I could tell you that in that instant I realized what I was doing wrong—nothing so grand happened—but at that moment I knew that I had no voice of my own. Later, after reading all the stories (with the exception of “Westward the Course of Empire Makes its Way”), it would further dawn on me that stories did not have to open and close with a sharp, neat click, like so many of O’Connor’s and Cheever’s where the endings are dramatically satisfying and pitch-perfect, some so perfect that I nearly quit writing all together. Wallace’s stories are messy and dispense with the old trope of everyday life being interrupted by crisis in favor of stories that begin, for example, in the twi-lit hyperreality of a sociopathic man with a malformed hand he calls “the asset” because he uses it to get laid, or in a recent New Yorker story, eavesdropping on a young, evangelically-Christian-oriented boyfriend and girlfriend discussing plans to abort their love child. Many writers have fecund enough imaginations to dream up such characters and circumstances, but Wallace was one of the rare few able to make them uncannily familiar to us—to see in these troubled characters aspects of ourselves.
Perhaps this is David Lynch’s influence. Wallace’s admits his indebtedness to Lynch in the essay “David Lynch Keeps His Head” about hanging around the set of Lynch’s Lost Highway: “For me, Lynch's movies' deconstruction of this weird irony of the banal has affected the way I see and organize the world..” Wallace defined Lynch’s brand of irony as the “kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter." Examples of such irony abound in Wallace’s work. In “Girl with Curious Hair” the narrator is a bigoted, card-carrying, English Leather cologne wearing Young Republican who hangs out with acid-tripping punk rockers who burn one another with cigarette lighters while performing fellatio.

The David Lynch article is a wonderful, fragmented homage, but, more than that, an ars poetica displaying Wallace’s intellectual and aesthetic foundations and formation—what reviews used to be. Wallace, prone to stuttering in public interviews, points out that even Lynch’s manner of speaking is postmodern:

“like Jimmy Stewart on acid . . . This is a genius auteur whose vocabulary in person consists of things like okey-doke and marvy and terrif and gee. When a production assistant appears with the tuna-fish sandwich he's asked for, he stops in the middle of his huddle with the Steadicam operator and tells her "Thanks a million." David Letterman says this kind of stuff too, but Letterman always says it in a way that lets you know he's making fun of about 400 things at the same time.”

Wallace had this capacity, too, but instead of allowing those 400 things to hang suspended there, implied, he enumerated them.

It wasn’t that he was trying to be, as many critics and readers estimate, humorous in a po-mo ironic way, and it’s not just that he’s worried that he has not made himself clear, but that he goes beyond the point of mere worry to chronic, paralyzing self-consciousness. He does admit that if there is a “schtick” in his essays its origins are in his self-consciousness about being sent by magazines to cover events as a journalist would, press pass and notebook in hand, when he does not consider himself a journalist. And it’s not just that he doesn’t consider himself a journalist but that he knows that he in fact is not one: he has not the training or the skills. This, it seems, is the genius of Wallace’s work—and not genius in that rarified way often bandied about, meaning innate, unteachable, near-magical, but in the way that genius may be said to be something native to all humans but rarely realized; personal genius; to do much with what one has been given. In short, his genius is in his awareness of what he doesn’t know, or is not very good at, and owning up to it in such a way that paradoxically restores our confidence in the importance of searching for knowledge through personal experience.

In his essay on tennis he writes of the “unlyrical problem” of trying to accurately strike a ball within the rectilinear lines of a tennis court on windy day in central Illinois: “the best-planned, best-hit ball often [blows] out of bounds.” Wallace’s writes that his tactic was to not overcompensate for the wind but to simply hit the ball as true as he could back up the middle of the court and allow the wind to distort its trajectory. His opponents, much bigger and stronger and better-coached, were sent into racket-throwing tantrums at the unfairness of being screwed over by something as unpredictable and uncontrollable.
In the years that follow, the task of trying to estimate David Foster Wallace’s greatness will prove to be similarly unfair and maddening.

Sweet Briar College 2008-2009 International Writers Series

2008-08-11T13:48:00.001-04:00

Today Sweet Briar College announced the line-up for its 2008-09 International Writers Series. Readers will include Azar Nafisi, Zakes Mda, Yiyun Li, Zhang Er, Luis Goytisolo, Manil Suri and Bernardo Atxaga. All lectures and readings are free and open to the public.

As many of you know, I now teach at Sweet Briar. This is going to be an amazing year. John Gregory Brown, director of Creative Writing, has put together a stellar slate of writers. If you are in the area please stop in.

For more information, please visit the official Website at

http://www.events.sbc.edu/international_writers.html

Just When I think I Can get Away from Writing About Torture...

2008-08-10T23:28:00.008-04:00

Do yourself a favor and read the NY Times article on about the art installation on the boardwalk at Coney Island, NY. It depicts an interrogator in executioner's hood waterboarding a detainee in an orange jumpsuit.

The story is not straight news, nor is it strict editorial; I guess it's more of a feature. In terms of contemporary journalistic practice, this is both nothing new (articles of this sort are written every day) and very important because in the absence of an actual serious review of the art she allows the multiple layers of cloying irony surrounding the art and its exhibition to overrun the the article.

The first level of irony is that Steve Powers, the artist, is totally not what you would expect. Kaminer focuses, in keeping with narrative journalistic convention, on his manner of dress: he is wearing pink seersucker shorts when the author interviews him and is pushing his 15 month old in a stroller. I know, spooky. Then there's the irony that the installation is at Coney Island, home to the ghost of freak shows past, right across from where, according to Kaminer, the World's Tiniest Woman used to chill. Then there's the irony of the disparate responses to the installation. Some actually feel that waterboarding is a fine way to get terrorists to talk! Some even think it's funny!! Then there's the voice (and style) of the article, full of asides and editorializing, which totally provides a house for this irony orgy to go down--come on over to my house; I'm totally down--*wink*. Stylistically speaking, there's no accounting for taste, but the result I'm more concerned with as a reader is that Kaminer isn't a credible reviewer of the work; in fact, she doesn't review the work at all--she's in bed with artist, so to speak. Steve Powers' art, on the strength of his politics and depth of his empathy, is given a free pass.

Now, Kaminer and Powers are, no doubt, talented people (Kaminer has recently been named editor of the Art and Leisure section at the NY Times and Powers is, according to the article well-represented and financially supported by a community arts organization, Creative Time), but my point is this: If we're gonna call something art--in this case an animatronic interrogator waterboarding an animatronic detainee that writhes for 15 seconds after being doused--then there needs to be some accounting for whether it's successful or not. Kaminer doesn't explicitly go there. She is caught between her journalistic duty to remain objective and, it seems, her cynicism that such art will change hearts and minds. Fair enough, but it also feels to me that in dodging any sort of judgement she is saying that she is either too cool to actually say anything earnest about art and its capacity to change our minds about anything--let alone torture--or that she feels incapable of it. There is also the possibility that the tone and style of Kaminer's article are actually calculated to subvert Steve Powers' work. She does seem to have a problem with the fact that he doesn't particularly have a agenda other than to get people thinking about the issue. But I think that this kind of looking-down-the-nose treatment is even more distasteful (and, frankly, typical of the Times). I mean, look, I'm totally against waterboarding, but do me a solid and tell me whether the art is good or not. That's why I read the Times. I'm looking for an informed view not coyness.

I'm not calling for a hatchet job; I'm just looking for a voice of reason. Let's cut through the b.s. and tell it like it is. It's clear to me that Kaminer, as editor, could do this if she wanted, but instead she sticks with the dominant cosmopolitan brand of narrative journalism in which on the surface the author appears objective, but underneath there is a holier-than-thou current.

I would recommend Dave Hickey's book of art criticism/essays, Air Guitar and some of Virginia Woolf's book reviews.

I did have a thing here about how much I love David Lynch because he doesn't mess around with low levels of irony. He goes right for the uncanny, the unsettling, the unheimlich. But I took that out. I'm sure you are all sick of hearing me crow about how brilliant Lynch is.

I wonder if the NY Times would publish this as a letter to the ed?

Artist of Month and Review of Standard Operating Procedure

2008-08-10T21:28:00.005-04:00

Sorry for the long radio silence. I was away for the last six weeks in Erie, PA teaching fiction writing at the PA Governor's School for the Arts. This was my eight summer up there. Hard to believe. It was glorious. The kids blow me away every year. Anyway, back to my excuse: My schedule up there is crazy (M-F 8 :00 am-6:30 pm, with a break for lunch and dinner, as well as a morning class of Saturday), so needless to say when it comes to the end of the week I do not feel like writing.

The other reason why I haven't been keeping up with the blog is because I'm beginning a new book project. And with a new book project--the working title is Any Poorer Than Dead--comes a new blog, which you can find over on Wordpress at www.davegriffith.wordpress.com. It's really just a notebook, a place to throw words around, but you can check it out if you like.

All that aside, I felt compelled to write a post here because a couple Abu Ghraib/A Good War is Hard to Find related things have happened in the last week.

1.) The literary journal Image has named me Artist-of-the-Month. Check that out here. Image is a beautiful journal. Great production value. Great writing. Great people running it.

2.) My review of Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure is up at Bookslut.com. If you read it, please bear in mind that my crankiness is the result of the fact that I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours reading articles and interviews about Abu Ghraib for my own book, and so I set the bar very high for a book whose publisher basically claims it is THE book to end all books on the subject. More than that, Penguin claims that it should be considered in the same league as Dante's Inferno, Heart of Darkness and "The Grand Inquisitor" of Brothers K fame. I'm a liberal arts educated kid, so I've read all of those books, and I'm here to say, it ain't in the same ballpark. Not that it's a bad book--quite the contrary. It's just not life-changing if you've kept up with coverage of the scandal the way I have. Although I have to say I'm concerned that this means I won't be publishing in the Paris Review EVER (aside: Gourevitch is the editor).

I'll continue to post here when relevant to Good War, but I'll be spending most of my energy over at the other blog, Any Poorer Than Dead.

Peace

Dave

John Wideman Has Won the Pulitzer

2008-04-27T10:26:00.002-04:00

John Wideman's new book, Fanon, reviewed today in the New York Times Book Review should win the Pulitzer Prize if it's as good as advertised. I'm calling it right now. I just ordered it and can't wait for it to arrive. I haven't been this excited about a book in a long time. Check out the review here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Siegel-t.html?ex=1366862400&en=85b22786dd151e74&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Depravities of War at 2nd Street Gallery

2008-04-10T10:33:00.005-04:00

I wanted to put up some pictures from the panel discussion I was a part of at the end of March. The work on the wall behind me is Sandow Birk's, the man sitting to my right, and is part of his new exhibition, Depravities of War. It is a truly stunning body of work. Check it out if it comes your way.

"Funny Games"

2008-03-14T10:40:00.004-04:00

You have to check out A.O. Scott's review of Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's
new film, Funny Games.

Here's a taste of it:

It is likely that Mr. Haneke would take the last two adjectives as praise — it’s fine with me if they show up in advertisements — or at least as the acknowledgment of fulfilled intentions. His is an especially pure and perverse kind of cinematic sadism, the kind that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism. We will endure the pain he inflicts for our own good, and feel bad about it in the bargain.

“Funny Games,” Mr. Haneke’s first English-language film — and a compulsively faithful replica of his notorious 1997 German-language feature of the same title — subjects its viewers to a long spectacle of wanton and gratuitous brutality. So, of course, do countless other movies, though few of them can claim this one’s artistic pedigree or aesthetic prestige. And indeed, the conceit of “Funny Games” is that it offers a harsh, exacting critique of vulgar, violent amusements, a kind of homeopathic treatment for a public numbed and besotted by the casual consumption of images of suffering. That the new version takes place in America is part of the point, since Americans — to a European intellectual this almost goes without saying — are especially deserving of the kind of moral correction Mr. Haneke takes it upon himself to mete out.

Bravo. But what's strange is that Scott was not so tough on Tarantino's Grindhouse. That film--gory, campy and masturbatory as the day is long--won Scott over, it seems, because he saw it as a hearkening back to the good old days of midnight showings of tasteless B movie:

“Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry.

It seems to me that Haneke's film hits a bit too close to home for Scott's likening. Throughout his review he passive aggressively attacks Haneke's implication that Americans are intellectually shallow, have coarse (or at best) unrefined tastes, and are driven and derided by blood-lust.

Here is Scott ranting about the film's self-awareness--the killers in the film look into the camera and address the audience:

At these moments, using techniques that might have seemed audacious to an undergraduate literary theory class in 1985 or so, the film calls attention to its own artificial status. It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.

So why does Scott see metaphor and meaning in Tarantino, but film school pretension with Euro-trash B.O. in Haneke? It's tricky to parse, but I'll give it a shot. First, Scott is right on the money with his assertion that Haneke's film engages in the "kind of cinematic sadism . . .that seeks to stop us from taking pleasure in our own masochism." He is also dead-on with his sense that a tied-up Naomi Watts hopping around in her underwear is, as academes say, problematic. Scott wonders aloud at the possibility of audiences finding this titillating.

And to give Scott further credit, he is careful to say that Haneke is trying to evoke such problems and effect, not that he has successfully done so. Only a handful of film masterpieces like Lynch's Blue Velvet and Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour have, I think, successfully entered and dabbled in such dark territory. In Blue Velvet we become voyeurs and detectives along with Jeffrey and learn how the two are, to say the least, in conflict. In Mon Amour we are told that we (Westerners) have actually seen nothing and know nothing of Hiroshima--don't even try.

However, ultimately (ostensibly), Scott is reviewing the film, not Haneke, right? Well, Scott is subtle about it, or maybe even unaware, but his reaction to Haneke's film seems tinged by a cultural clash. American film is big-budget, slick, sexy, garish--the term embarrassment of riches springs to mind--violence is lovingly and spectacularly (sublimely!) rendered. Haneke's film and filmmaking--an English language remake of his own 1997 film with Hollywood actors (though the leads are not American)--is "immaculate," "manipulative, "clammy" and "repellant." According to Scott, the camera remains still, steady, gazing on the violence. Something anathema in Hollywood film. And while I'm sure Scott can name many films, foreign and indie, that share these same anti-Hollywood, anti-American qualities, I can't escape the feeling that calling Haneke a fraud is an easy way out. If he is a fraud, then he has no strength of conviction. His ouvre is not driven by vision but by pure intellect. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing I hate more than art that comes with a prerequisite reading list in order to understand it, but Scott sounds here in his appreciation of Tarantino and scorn for Haneke, like one who still refers to french fries as Freedom Fries.

Depravity, Upheaval and the 'Good War'

2008-03-08T09:13:00.003-05:00

If you're anywhere near Charlottesville, Virginia in late March have to check out Second Street Gallery and their exhibition of LA-based painter/illustrator Sandow Birk's work on the Iraq War, straightforwardly titled "The Depravities of War."

And if you happen to by passing through at the end of the month you can check out a panel discussion at Second Street Gallery featuring Sandow Birk, myself and composer Judith Shatin, moderated by Bill Cleveland, author of the forthcoming Art and Upheaval. The panel is titled "Depravity, Upheaval and the 'Good War'" and is a part of the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is a big to-do replete with high teas, luncheons and banquets feting famous writers.

Should be a great evening. Hope to see you there.

Up in Michigan

2008-03-06T11:01:00.004-05:00

So I did a reading at Hope College in Holland, Michigan two weeks ago with Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, my mentor from grad school. Here are pictures of the marquee outside the theater where we read. We learned just before taking the stage that Harry Houdini once performed on the very same stage.

If you don't know Buddy's work, please please please do yourself a huge favor and pick some up. His novels Sharpshooter Blues and Wolf Whistle are devastatingly funny and tragic, and his short stories Sugar Among the Freaks and Music of the Swamp are necessary reading if you consider yourself an connoisseur of the short story. Those of you into memoir should read his genre-bending book Boy with Loaded Gun.

Criticisms Welcome

2008-02-11T13:55:00.000-05:00

I just read this review of my book on a blog called Unionstreet

The author is a PhD candidate in Education and seems to know his stuff, which is why I'm putting part of his critique up here. The review is, on the whole, positive--I get likened to W.G. Sebald--minus the "transcendent" quality, which I'll take any day of the week. The gist of his critique takes aim at the perceived "pop-culture is to blame" message in my book. I don't think that's really what I'm saying, but enough caveats--here it is (note that my last name is Griffith, no "s":

Griffiths periodically succumbs to a familiar argument: that it is our pop culture that has inured us to violence, that has removed any shame that we may feel from the sight of people being humiliated, burned, tortured in our name. But his own experience indicates something more subtle, and difficult to diagnose, at work than this. One of the most riveting passages of the book recounts the events of a Halloween party, in which he poses as a guard from Abu Ghraib, giving the notorious ‘thumbs-up’ sign before another guest, hooded for the moment as an unfortunate prisoner while carrying a beer cup in one of his outstretched hands (Griffiths includes the photo into the narrative, and the reaction becomes all the stronger when you realize that it’s not from Abu Ghraib, but from the party itself). How could someone so sophisticated in his sensibilities succumb to such moral indecency? Surely it is too lame an answer to blame it on Pulp Fiction, video games, or the stupidities and embarrassments of youth.

Readings in the New Year

2008-01-11T15:31:00.001-05:00

It's been awhile. I just finished my first semester as a full-time, tenure-track faculty member, so I think that explains the long radio silence.

Lots happening in this New Year pertaining to my book. Here's a list (to be followed by specifics as we get closer to the date):

1.) Saturday, February 2nd: I'll be reading in some illustrious company as part of Soft Skull Press' 15th Anniversary Reading at the Associated Writing Program conference in NYC. Here's the line-up: Lynne Tillman, Matthew Sharpe and Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz. All of them are tremendous writers. Hope to see you there.

2.) Thursday, February 21st: Reading at Hope College in Adrian, Michigan with Lewis "Buddy" Nordan, who is hands down one of the best fiction writers in America.

3.) Friday, March 28th: Panel, Virginia Festival for the Book with Bill Cleveland, author of Art and Upheaval (other visual artists to be announced).

Hope to see some of you at these events.

Have a peaceful and prosperous 2008!

Reading at Gist Street tomorrow Night 8 pm

2007-12-06T23:50:00.001-05:00

All you Pittsburghers check me and fiction writer Ben Percy out at the Gist Street reading series tomorrow night at 8pm. Get there early if you want a seat--at least this is what I'm told.

Good Jazz is Hard to Find

2007-12-04T20:57:00.001-05:00

This is a clip of a friend of mine George Burton's group. If you're not into jazz then don't watch.

clipped from www.youtube.com

The Limits of Social Justice?

2007-11-28T08:12:00.001-05:00

I'm beginning to research attitudes towards the homeless and homelessness for my next book, and it just so happens that a very interesting debate is underway in Roanoke, VA, about an hour southwest of where we live now.

In January 2007, Roanoke conducted a study of the homeless population and found that the number of homeless had increased 326% since 1987. The City Council is worried that Roanoke is attracting too many homeless people. Councilman Bev Patrick is characterized in the Roanoke Times journalist Mason Adams as being "fed up."

clipped from www.roanoke.com

"It's about the fact that we're letting people come here because we're too daggone nice," he said. "They find out about it, and they're coming. We've got to corral that. I just say plug it, somehow, so we're doing the right thing for the people of this valley who need us and we're not doing it for everyone else."

The Content of this blog is "Genius"

2007-11-19T14:49:00.000-05:00

Someone sent me a link to a service that will evaluate the reading level of your blog. You put in the url and it scans the content and voila! I'm not sure what the different levels are--I saw one site that said "undergraduate." After only a few seconds an icon with a brain came on the screen proclaiming that goodwar.blogspot.com is "Genius."

My parents will be happy to hear this.

You can get your blog evaluated here: http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx

Good News All Around

2007-10-23T16:17:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post to spread some good news.

Last week my wife, Jessica Mesman, found out that her essay "It's a Wonderful Life" received an "notable essay" distinction in the 2008 edition of Best American Essays, edited this year by one of my heroes, David Foster Wallace.

The essay orginally appeared in Image, which is a fantastic journal and worth subscribing to.

I also got word that my book was reviewed in the American Book Review, which is available on-line if your academic institution or library has a subscription to Lexis/Nexis or the like. It was a very positive review/essay by Christopher Robbins, Assistant Professor of Social Foundations at Eastern Michigan U. I'll try to put excerpts up here, but I haven't figured how to turn a pdf into html. I am computer illiterate.

Colgate University

2007-10-10T15:37:00.000-04:00

I'm on a little break before I give a reading here at Colgate University--what a beautiful place!--and while checking my email ran across this article in the San Francisco Catholic, a diocesan newspaper in SF, covering a recent talk by retired Army General Taguba at the University of San Francisco. Taguba is, of course, the author of the Taguba Report, the official report commissioned by the US Military to investigate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison.

His talk reveals much of what we already know, but it is well-worth repeating: Defense Sec. Rumsfeld was antagonistic toward Taguba after learning of the unfavorable nature of the investigation and, it seems, either lied under oath in the Senate hearings looking into the prison scandal, or was intentionally not fully briefed by his aids on the investigation's findings in order to shield him from being complicit in the scandal.

The most poignant aspect of his talk was his statement that though he was not responsible for leaking the now-infamous Abu Ghraib images to CBS, which ended up on 60 Minutes in 2004, he believes that whoever did were within their First Amendment rights and, furthermore, that if it weren't for CBS the world would still be in the dark about what happened there. In fact, he said at his talk, the American public and the world still doesn't know the half of it. There are images, according to Taguba, that make the ones leaked seem tame--a video of a female detainee being sodomized by a soldier, for one. A video, it should be mentioned, that shows another soldier in the background with a video camera taping the assault.

I'm off to the reading. More on Colgate later.

Here's the link:

http://www.catholic.org/diocese/diocese_story.php?id=25621

Internet Radio

2007-09-25T16:43:00.000-04:00

Just a quick update to tell you that you can hear an interview with me and Wayne Koestenbaum, author of the fantastic new book, Hotel Theory on "The Eclectic Word," a radio show hosted by Victor Infante.

Check it out here: www.blogtalkradio.com/...serid=4073

We talk about everything from Abu Ghraib to George Hamilton--no kidding.

Also, for those of you in upstate New York, I'll be reading at Colgate coming up in October. See the links along the right side of this blog for more details.

Grace Paley, Dead at 84

2007-08-27T12:11:00.001-04:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/books/24paley.html?ex=1345694400&en=2c87a6330233bece&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Iraqi detainee numbers up 50%

2007-08-25T12:11:00.000-04:00

A bit from the NY Times article by Tom Shanker:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — The number of detainees held by the American-led military forces in Iraq has swelled by 50 percent under the troop increase ordered by President Bush, with the inmate population growing to 24,500 today from 16,000 in February, according to American military officers in Iraq.

...Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody are Sunni Arabs, the minority faction in Iraq that ruled the country under the government of Saddam Hussein; the other detainees are Shiites, the officers say.

Military officers said that of the Sunni detainees, about 1,800 claim allegiance to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. About 6,000 more identify themselves as takfiris, or Muslims who believe some other Muslims are not true believers. Such believers view Shiite Muslims as heretics.

Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order — a movement that drew from former Baath Party members and security officials who had served under Mr. Hussein — and has become religious and ideological.

But the officers say an equally large number of Iraqi detainees say money is a significant reason they planted roadside bombs or shot at Iraqi and American-led forces.

***

The rise in numbers seems to indicate that the US military is using similar insurgency-combating tactics as the French in Algeria: round up the suspected and...then...what? Is there any other way to put down an insurgency? Just when you think you've got all the politically and religiously motivated rounded up, here come the soldiers of fortune.

Is there any denying that War is attractive because it is profitable, especially when your economy is struggling.

I Have Moved

2007-08-16T07:17:00.000-04:00

Sorry for such a long hiatus--not that anyone is really out there waiting with bated breath for my posts--but I like to err on the side of decorum.

One reason for the long break is that we have moved to Virginia. I am now gainfully employed at Sweet Briar College. Extremely beautiful country down here. Cell phone reception is awful, but that's a perk as far as I'm concerned. I'll post pictures ASAP.

Those of you in Southern Virginia: I'm giving a reading at the College Sept 5th at 8 pm. Mail me for more info at dgriffith@sbc.edu

Peace--

Breaking Radio Silence for News of Lynndie England

2007-07-15T10:31:00.000-04:00

I'm away on a summer teaching gig, so I haven't been keeping up with the blog, but this AP story picked up b the Press of Atlantic City, New Jersey seemed worth posting.

http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/nation/story/3658936p-13022021c.html

Essentially, England, after being released from a San Diego military prison in March, has been hired to the volunteer recreation board of Keyser, West Virginia, a town in the state's eastern panhandle.

Here's a bit from the article:

...England, 24, contributed her knowledge of computers, electronics and graphics for Keyser's Strawberry Festival, which helped her land the unpaid position, said Roy Hardy, the England family's attorney.
"When (council members) saw how hard she worked for the festival, they didn't hesitate to put her on the board," said Hardy, who is also a board member. "If it wasn't for her, we wouldn't have been able to pull off (the Strawberry Festival). She was an absolute asset."

England handled the festival's advertising, scheduled entertainment acts and helped set up vendor booths and stages, among other things. She also helped organize a spring fishing contest and the city's Independence Day activities.

**

I'm going to let John Stewart and Stephen Kolbert handle this one...

Proximity to Darkness: The Collected Stories of Leonard Michaels

2007-06-10T09:16:00.000-04:00

For those of you who have never read Leonard Michaels, or just read one story and thought "he's a pervert," here's your chance to really get to know and appreciate his work better. FSG has just published his Collected Stories and republished his autobiographical novel, Sylvia. Both books are reviewed by Mona Simpson in today's NY Times Book Review. Simpson "gets" Michaels--at least I think so--and gives some fascinating insight into how he a New York Jew who only spoke Yiddish untl the age of 6 came to be one of the most lyrical writers of American vernacular.

I teach his story "Murderers" often and I write about its influence on me in my book. Uncannily, Simpson focuses on the same story in her review. In fact, the title of the review, "Proximity to Darkness" is, uncannily, very close to the title of the chapter in my book, which I titled "Some Proximity to Darkness."

The thing that makes Michaels worth reading, especially now, is that his stories span the spectrum from young boys fascinated by the mysteriousness and strangeness of sex to adults mired and addled by their own sexual rapacity. I took immediately to Michaels' work, because unlike his contemporary, Phllip Roth, he is able to express the the sorrow and disillusionment of the libertine lifestyle, while making you laugh. His work is not merely cleverly, ironically or situationally funny, but comedic in that deep divine way which has you smirking to yourself because you recongnize the impulses driving the characters.

Michaels' work helped me to see that there was a way to write about being an adult male that wasn't annoyingly self-lacerating or idiotically macho.

Are the Restrictions on War Journalists Doing Us a Disfavor

2007-05-29T09:26:00.000-04:00

Check out this op-ed by David Carr in the NY Times. Not sure that I can agree 100% with his thesis, but it's a provocative piece.

One corrective I'll point out immediately is that Carr sites Matthew Brady as one of the pioneers of war journalism, but neglects to point out that Brady came along after the battle was over and took photos of the fallen, often having his aides move the bodies to create more dramatic poses.

Drama: Another Casualty of War

2007-05-27T09:06:00.000-04:00

Check out this insightful article exploring Time's theater columnist, Christopher Isherwood's, "certain impatience" with "Journey's End," a critically well-received play now on Broadway written by a WW I survivor about British solidiers waiting for a German attack.

From the article:

[As to why "Journey's End" is flopping with audiences]:

"A potential conclusion: War in the newspapers isn’t necessarily good for war on movie screens and stages. The conflict in Iraq (and Afghanistan) is so much with us these days that maybe audiences have no inclination to engage with stories from old battlefields.

"Can you blame them? We absorb images and information about the current strife every time we turn on the television, listen to the radio or pick up a newspaper. Obviously not much of the news is good. As the steady drumbeat of grim statistics rolls on — the rising death tolls, the roiling sectarian violence — Americans can perhaps be forgiven for failing to warm to entertainment that underscores what journalism is making brutally plain every day: War is a cruel and destructive enterprise that maims or destroys the lives of people on all sides, even when fought for a noble cause.

"Perhaps right now audiences don’t need to — or can’t bear to — revisit testimony from the past, however artfully and honestly it is presented, to experience the range of emotions that an encounter with the ugly realities of war elicits. Compassion for human suffering, dismay at man’s brutality, understanding of both the moral beauty of courage in the face of danger and its often painful inefficacy: We can cycle through these again every time we read or see detailed accounts of the everyday human costs of the conflict — in life, in prosperity, in dignity and happiness. Art can evoke little more pity and terror, to use those old Aristotelian words, than the immediate news of the waste going on in the world today, intimately taken account of in the best journalism.

"If the freakish success of the recent movie “300” is any indication, a lot of Americans are hungry for narratives that offer escape from the uncompromised truths of the world as it is today. This luridly silly epic offers refuge from the increasingly unavoidable idea that war is always an ethically complex enterprise that can be as demoralizing — and dehumanizing — for the apparent victors as it is for the subjugated. War as a cartoon battle between good guys and monsters more easily satisfies a taste for vicarious excitement after all."

**

So, I'm with all of this, especially the success of "300," which I haven't seen, but a friend of mine whose judgment I trust says she just laughed her ass off the entire movie because it was just so over-the-top, melodramatically masculine.

What I'm disappointed with in Isherwood's article is his comparison of previous wars to the current:

"...Several years into a confusing war with complicated foes and several years after the Sept. 11 attacks, we may have finally reached a point where the old forms of war fiction are no longer capable of giving us the solace and understanding we look for from this kind of material. Stories of noble sacrifice amid the comparatively uncomplicated moral climate of the two world wars seem so remote that emotional indulgence in them seems too much like escapism, a turning away from the truths that we need to keep our eyes sharply focused on."

Indeed, the reason our current "foes" are our foes is very "complicated," as is the reason why we're in Iraq in the first place (Afghanistan isn't so hard to understand, intially, since that's where Osama was shacking up). BUT to say that the first two world wars, from our historical perch, were waged in a "comparatively uncomplicated moral climate" is, if not historically farsighted, at least hubristic--to use another of Aristotle's dramatic terms.

What's wrong about it? Well, there was tremendous reticence to enter WWI. In fact, war was seen by many in the U.S. as barbaric, irrational, something of the past. The U.S. involvement in WWII was delayed, in part, by fears of getting involved in another war like the first. And it should be pointed out that in neither war was the "moral climate"--an unfortunate, inexact, yet smart-seeming po-mo phrase that has made its way into our lexicon as shorthand for the shifting attitudes of the people, that is subtly disapproving of "moral" as an ethical category--"uncomplicated" for untold numbers of conscientious objectors who went to jail for refusing to fight, or the many women involved in the pacifist movement.

Also, to say that the current war is more "confusing and "complicated" is to surrender to the post-modern tendency to see all contemporary situations as irreducible to any one set of analytical tools or cultural perspective. Indeed, it is important to try to understand the impulses that lead many young people of the Islamic faith to become suicide bombers. In fact, art is trying to pick up that slack with a rash of books dramatizing the lives of such people (Delillo's "Falling Man" dramatizes the last moments in the cockpit of one of the planes that hit the WTC on 9/11). But of what use is such fine rhetorical gesturing, concentrated cultural analysis or artistic exploration if we (and I mean everyone), at the end the day, can't agree, or just plain refuse to pass judgement, on whether or not violence is a workable solution to conflict?

If we really want truly complicated drama, we need to start looking more closely at those who refuse to fight under any circumstances, who would turn the other cheek, not just as a thought-experiment but as an ethic to live by, no matter the consequences. My guess is that such drama would strike audiences as tragic, but in that contemporary sense of the word, wasteful.

Thanks to the Students of DePaul U

2007-05-27T09:01:00.000-04:00

So I was told not to expect very many students for my reading, it being the end of the semester and all, but when the reading began the room--capacity 36--was filled, standing room only. The final count was over 70. Thanks so much for the great questions and for buying books, which helped defray the cost of gas ($3.75) from South Bend to Chicago (90 miles).

Reading at DePaul Univ. this Wednesday

2007-05-20T20:12:00.000-04:00

I'll be reading from my book and answering questions this Wednesday at 7 pm in room 312 of the DePaul University Student Center. Click on the title of this post for more info. Hope to see some of you there.

NYT report: College Students Curious (More than Ever) About Religion

2007-05-02T08:46:00.000-04:00

I'm drawing attention to this article in the New York Times ( "Matters of Faith Find a New Prominence on Campus" http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/education/02spirituality.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin) because it is typical of the coverage religion is getting these days.

Here are some highlights in which nothing much at all is actually said and when somthing is it's vague:

“All I hear from everybody is yes, there is growing interest in religion and spirituality and an openness on college campuses,” said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. “Everybody who is talking about it says something seems to be going on.”

**

"David D. Burhans, who retired after 33 years as chaplain at the University of Richmond, said many students “are really exploring, they are really interested in trying things out, in attending one another’s services.”

**

Here's my favorite, which closes the article:

"Among the new clubs is one created last year to encourage students to hold wide-ranging dialogues about spirituality and faith. Meeting over lunch on Thursdays in the chapel’s basement, the students talk about what happens when you die or the nature of Catholic spirituality.....

"The discussion was off and running, with one student saying one needed only to believe in “something outside yourself” and another saying that “sometimes ‘Thank you’ can be a prayer...”

"...Afterward, several students talked about what attracted them to the sessions, besides the sandwiches, chips and fruit. Gabe Conant, a junior, said he wanted to contemplate personal questions about his own faith. He described them this way: “What are these things I was raised in and do I want to keep them?”

Look, I'm pleased as punch that folks are asking these difficult questions, but this article reads like something from the Onion--"Something's going on, but no one knows what it is, really." I mean the tone the article takes is, "Holy shit, what's going on here--this is weird--college students asking deep existential questions!!"

I have an idea, why don't you actually interview some of the students instead of just getting talking-head pull-quotes from chaplains, sociology and religion professors? And why no interview with an actual theologian?

But maybe the most clear sign that, as I argue in my book, the mainstream press is not at all equipped to cover matters of religion is this moment:

"The Rev. Lloyd Steffen, the chaplain at Lehigh University, is among those who think the war in Iraq has contributed to the interest in religion among students. “I suspect a lot of that has to do with uncertainty over the war,” Mr. Steffen said."

Notice the way his view is characterized "among those who think," as though it is widely known that there are all these other people expressing this opinion. Similarly, the caption of the accompanying photo [a group of Colgate students sitting in a circle, heads bowed in prayer] reads: "One of a growing number of religious student groups at Colgate." Here, the phrase "growing number" is used to gesture, imprecisely, toward an increase in an unknown number of religious groups. For all we know, this is the only one, but surely more are expected given this nation-wide epidemic of faith. And this is to say nothing of the ambiguous "uncertainty" in the Iraq War that had "a lot" to do with an interest in religion among students.

So what's the point of such an article? What is its newsworthiness on a scale of 1-10? I give it a 3, but it could have been much much higher had the writer focused on the students and why they're asking these meaningful questions.

Taxi to the Dark Side: Bagram Abuses (finally) Explored

2007-04-17T17:00:00.000-04:00

The Huffington Post (click on the title of this post to go there) is reporting on a sneak preview of the new documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, which focuses on the abuse and murder of two detainees at the U.S. military-run Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. I write about Bagram in my book, so it's gratifying to hear that someone has continued to press for more information on the incidents that took place there, which are too often overshadowed by the Abu Ghraib scandal.

London Times: Ultraviolent sadism is now in Hollywood's bloodstream

2007-04-15T10:05:00.000-04:00

Good War in Wash Post, Subliminally

2007-04-06T09:01:00.000-04:00

I got this email this morning from Peter Manseau ed. of Killing the Buddha (www.killingthebuddha.com):

Hi Dave --

I just spotted this and thought you'd get a kick out of it: a Home
section feature by Sally Quinn, wife of former Post editor Ben
Bradlee, about how to decorate. There's an interactive image of her
library, and sure enough A Good War is Hard to Find is there on the
coffee table:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/artsandliving/homeandgarden/features/2007/house-home-040507/gallery.html?hpid=artslot

I could spot that cover a mile away!

Hope this finds you well,
Peter

Another Review...This one at Bookslut

2007-04-03T09:06:00.000-04:00

http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_04_010890.php

Religion and Activism Blog (Pie and Coffee) to Host A Discussion of Good War

2007-04-01T13:56:00.000-04:00

Check out the site "Pie and Coffee: Activism, Religion Hospitality" at www.pieandcoffee.org for a week-long discussion of "A Good War is Hard to Find." Pie and Coffee is run, according to the site, by "Catholic Wokers, personalists and Adam Villani."

For those of you not familiar with the Catholic Worker Movement, check out Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Worker_Movement) and www.catholicworker.org

Thanks to Pie and Coffee for hosting the discussion.

"Good War" Reviewed in New York Times Book Review!

2007-03-31T22:41:00.000-04:00

After many months of teasing and leading us on, the New York Times Book Review has seen fit to publish a review of my book, A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America." (Click on the title of this post to read the review. Also, make sure to check out the link to the first two chapters of my book.) We kept hearing that there was "still a good chance" and that the editors "were waiting for it to be assigned a 'run date'" Frankly, I abandoned hope a couple months back when the Book Review ran a "War" issue, but now here it is, and on April Fool's Day, no less.

Christopher Sorrentino, author of the novels "Sound on Sound" and "Trance" (a finalist for the National Book Award) wrote the review. I'm reading "Trance" right now, and I have to say that the man can write--not that he needs my validation--just for the record.

The review is also accompanied by a very smart graphic (see above image) by Lenny Naar. Good work, Lenny.

Here's a taste of the review:

In the manner of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others” and Roland Barthes’s “Camera Lucida,” the book is quiet, offbeat, at times intensely personal. Griffith claims that “the Abu Ghraib photos are the very picture of the American soul in conflict with itself,” that the reaction to them “calls attention not to a difference but a similarity in belief between author and audience.” He sees an enormous gap between the viewing of disturbing images and contemplation of the ways in which we are implicated in the acts they portray. It’s a valid observation, as we continue to fight a war whose strategic rationale, in part, is surely to allow us to continue to pay less for a gallon of gasoline than we do for a bag of Chips Ahoy.

Thanks to Soft Skull and Richard Nash and my agent Andrew Blauner for whatever voodoo spells they cast to make this happen.

"Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" Screening Snafu (As Told by a "Whistleblower")

2007-03-27T19:01:00.000-04:00

Click on the post title for a look at an article by former Army Sgt. Sam Provance an intelligence analyst at Abu Ghraib stationed there when the notorious abuses occured. He describes the "surreal" upper-crust, dog-and-pony show screening of Rory Kennedy's documentary, "The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" in Washington D.C. Provance was the only soldier present, besides former Gen. Janis Karpinski, formerly in charge of 17 military prisons in Iraq. Also in attendance were Sen. Ted Kennedy (D) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R) who lead a Q and A/discussion following the film. What went down is worth reading about...

Billboards for Lionsgate Film, "Captivity," Rankle Parents

2007-03-20T11:32:00.000-04:00

This is the movie poster for a new film that is causing a furor in Hollywood. Imagine this on a huge billboard.

This, from an article in the LA Times:

Shanise Laurent and her friends left Palms Middle School one afternoon last week and stopped for a soda at Jack in the Box.

Shanise, a seventh-grader, didn't need me to point out the billboard across the street. She said she had noticed it the day before.

"What a graphic, nasty billboard," said the 13-year-old.

Her sister Rachel, 11, was in agreement, as were their friends.

"There's kids who walk around here," said Taylor Shaw, 13, who didn't think kids should be subjected to such images on their way home from school.

"I think it's scary," said Cameron Olivas, 12.

Across the busy intersection of Overland and Venice was one of 30 billboards in the Los Angeles area promoting the May 18 release of the film "Captivity." The ad consisted of four panels:

Abduction, in which a terrified young blond woman has either a gloved or black hand over her face, as if she's being kidnapped.

Confinement, in which she's behind a chain-link fence and appears to be poking a bloody thumb through the fence.

Torture, in which she is flat on her back, her face in a white cast, with red tubes that resemble jumper cables running into her nostrils.

And Termination, in which her head dangles over the edge of a table, the murder complete.

Hooray for Hollywood.

Posthumous Susan Sontag

2007-03-11T21:08:00.000-04:00

Check out this review in the New York Times Book Review of Susan Sontag's At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches (FSG).

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/books/review/Mishra.t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

I have yet to pick this up, but I plan on it. Her 2004 essay in the New York Times Magazine on the Abu Ghraib prison photos, "Regarding the Torture of Others," was one of the reasons why I began writing my book, A Good War is Hard to Find.

AP Photos deleted by U.S. Special Forces

2007-03-04T20:23:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/03/04/afghan.photos.ap/index.html

Flattering Review in The Literary Review

2007-02-19T11:05:00.000-05:00

Ben Freeman at Fairleigh Dickinson U's The Literary Review has written a flattering review of Good War in their Winter issue. Click on the title of this post for a look.

Here's an excerpt:

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.”

Thanks, Ben.

Why Are the Pascifists So Passive?

2007-02-12T07:48:00.000-05:00

An op-ed from the NYT by Lynn Chu and John Yoo:

...The fact is, Congress has every power to end the war — if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse. Its British forebears in Parliament micromanaged the monarchy quite a bit, for instance by making money (the “sinews of war”) contingent on attacking one country and making peace with another. And there is more direct precedent: In 1973, Congress affirmatively acted to cut off funds for Vietnam. It also cut off money for the Nicaraguan contras with the Boland Amendment in 1982.

Not only could Congress cut off money, it could require scheduled troop withdrawals, shrink or eliminate units, or freeze weapons supplies. It could even repeal or amend the authorization to use force it passed in 2002.

A pullout, however, would have no chance of success, because its supporters are likely to lack the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto. But to stop President Bush’s proposed troop surge, Congress doesn’t have to do anything. It can just sit back and fail to enact the periodic supplemental spending measures required to keep the war going. Congress has wielded considerable power by just threatening such measures, as with President James K. Polk in the Mexican-American War and President Ronald Reagan in Lebanon after the 1983 barracks bombing.

The Constitution doesn’t pick winners. It leaves it to the three branches to use their unique powers to struggle for supremacy. James Madison, the leading intellectual force behind the Constitution, rebutted Patrick Henry’s firebrand attack on executive war powers during the Virginia ratifying convention by reminding him that Congress could control any renegade president by stopping the flow of money.

But with power comes responsibility. The truth is that this Congress is not sure what to do in Iraq. Its hesitation reflects America’s uncertainty and divisions. Antiwar bluster is high at the moment, echoing popular frustration and grim news from Baghdad.

Celebrating the Work of Brett Yasko

2007-02-09T13:39:00.000-05:00

Click on the title of this post for a flattering article about Brett Yasko, Pittsburgh-based graphic design guru. He designed my book and won an award from the AIGA for it. For a closer look at the design and a statement by Brett on the design, go here: http://designarchives.aiga.org/?s1=2|s2=1|eid=1209

An excerpt:

“It’s crucial to think about everyone out there,” the lanky, soft-spoken Yasko says, “and hope my designs have an effect on them. I’m touched when they do.

“I always wanted to make things,” [Yasko] adds. “Design is good for that. Design is where I’ve fallen.”

Fallen is far too passive for so rich a graphic portfolio, so powerful a vision in two dimensions – especially given the raves Yasko’s getting all over town. All over the world, in fact. With clients in New York, Virginia, and Barcelona, Yasko has placed his graphics in the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection, the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) Denver archives, Partisan Project’s poster archives in LA and so on. As a fave of New York’s Princeton Architectural Press, he’s designed three books.

Books? In this e-age? “I feel great when I finish a book,” Yakso says. “It goes on a shelf. It has a permanence. I love books.”

Good War excerpt in Utne Reader

2007-02-05T21:52:00.000-05:00

Click on the title of this post to read my most recent publication in the Utne Reader.

Two Charged in Manhole Murders

2007-02-04T12:51:00.000-05:00

Click on the title of this post to read the South Bend Tribune's coverage.

Also, check out an interesting story on "scrapping" in South Bend: http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070204/News01/702040358

South Bend Trib reports on National (and local) media attention garnered by Manhole Murders

2007-02-02T07:49:00.000-05:00

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday when South Bend Tribune reporter Alicia Gallegos showed up at our apartment to ask me a few questions about my interest in the murder of four homeless men mere blocks away. She had read this blog and after a bit of driving around, she spotted the green awning that I mention in my post about the murders. She guessed at which doorbell to ring and got it on the first try. Despite attempts by my 13 month-old daughter to rip the pen from Alicia's hands while taking notes, we had a nice chat about the ongoing case.

Click on the title of this post to read Alicia's Tribune article.

About the photo: This is the photo that accompanied the story on the South Bend Tribune's Web site. It is of the New York Time's photographer walking near the train tracks where the men were found. Post-Modern anyone?

Good Article in Sojourners (makes mention of Good War)

2007-02-01T11:02:00.000-05:00

http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0701&article=070165

Nice words about Good War

2007-01-31T12:35:00.000-05:00

Book reviewer Colleen Mondor is working on a review/article about my book for Bookslut and posts on her blog:

Griffith's book is deeply personal; it's a collection of essays of his thoughts on everything from Hiroshima, the bombing of Dresden, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the motivations of those directly involved that draws on all sorts of pop culture references. He writes about Flannery O'Conner at one point and Deliverance and Pulp Fiction at another. High culture, low culture, even the weirdness of his wife's old boyfriend having a home built electric chair in his living room (college boys are such fun, aren't they?). It all wraps around and comes together in Griffith's mind as he tries to understand and come to terms with his place in a country that largely identifies itself as Christian and knows about such violence but determinedly remains oblivious to the real impact of that violence on others.

This is exactly the sort of small thought provoking book that I think should win awards and I'd love to know if anyone on any of the big nominating committees has even ever heard of it.

Thanks, Colleen!!

A Brief History of Bohemianism (a working title)

2007-01-20T00:58:00.000-05:00

We live in an old brick apartment building within a few blocks from the center of downtown South Bend, county seat of St. Joseph County in northcentral Indiana. When people ask where we live I tell them that our building is one block from a great stone, ivy-covered mansion built by the Studebakers, the once great car manufacturers whose plant closing in 1964 left 30,000 people jobless. South Bend hasn’t bend the same since. The mansion is now a restaurant that is known for their fancy brunch and as a destination for summertime wedding receptions. Big white tents are pitched on the lawn and when it gets dark luminaria mark the stone steps leading down to the dark grass so tipsy twenty-somethings don’t trip and sue. When I was a student I never went to this part of town at night, now I live here.

We chose to live here so we could be closer to downtown where there is a well-appointed liquor store, two coffee shops, a decent breakfast spot, a bar that doesn’t allow smoking and even a couple art galleries, but we are also on the verge of one of the worst neighborhoods in South Bend, the near west side, where just two weeks ago two men were found bludgeoned to death at the bottom of a manhole on the crest of a railroad trestle, four blocks away. Three days later two more men were found in a similar state in a manhole just one block east from the first. As it happens, the men are all known to be homeless, frequenters of the Hope Rescue Mission, a few blocks east of where their bodies were found, and the St. Peter Claver Catholic Worker House, which is one block further. Police are treating the deaths as murders, most likely connected to the underground “scrapping” business, a hustle in which scrap metal is collected and redeemed for cents on the pound at scrap yards. Although to say it’s “collected” is to overlook that fact that much of the time the metal is copper wiring, plumbing pipes and aluminum siding stripped from vacant homes; or, in the case of these four men, from old industrial sites, such as the half-demolished Stuebaker manufacturing plant. The police say that the manholes the men were found in provide access to long tunnels that run beneath the old Studebaker plant and give access to the decimated factory, tunnels that contain electrical wiring that could be cut and stripped of its copper and sold. The police cautioned that the tunnels are so long that after awhile they cease to contain breathable air, which sounded like an urban myth purposefully perpetuated in order to dissuade future scrappers. In any case, it is believed that these men were in the process of scrapping—perhaps even working together to pull off a large scrap score. An acquaintance of one of the men is quoted in the South Bend Tribune that his friend asked him if he wanted to make 250 bucks and then hinted at a plan to push something out of a window, possibility something far too heavy to carry—maybe an old piece of machinery or a boiler.

When the third and fourth bodies were found is when I began to worry about my family; specifically, I worried that Jessica would hyperbolically conclude—as she usually does—that we were all going to die at the hands of some homeless serial killer lurking in the sewers bopping people over the head; that he would find his way into the building through the drain in the laundry room. I decided not to tell her because as I parked the car at the curb outside I happened to look up and see the train underpass in the distance and realize that it was the very place that the men were found.

Four Murdered Homeless Men Found Blocks from Our Apartment

2007-01-16T01:17:00.000-05:00

This week I've begun work on an essay about the recent discovery of the bodies of four homeless men at the bottom of a manhole. They were found a couple days apart in manholes near railroad tracks owned by Norfolk Southern Railroad, the same railroad my dad has worked for for 30 plus years. My interest in what the police are calling murders is that I can see the railroad viaduct from the front of our apartment here in South Bend. Police believe that the men were murdered while in the act of "scrapping," a slang term for salvaging scrap metal for money. This past May, amid a rash of house guttings in which copper wire, plumbing and aluminium siding were stolen from abandoned houses and construction sites, South Bend passed an ordinance making scrapping a more serious offense. Click on the title of this post for more on the murders.

Above are pictures I snapped of the area near where the bodies were found. Stay tuned for more and excerpts from the essay.

Link to Harvard op-ed

2007-01-08T18:52:00.000-05:00

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110009391

Harvard Faculty Shoots Down "Faith and Reason" Requirement

2007-01-08T15:43:00.000-05:00

I've just been forwarded a pdf of an op-ed from the Dec 15, 2006 Wall Street Journal in which Professor of Religion Richard Schmaulzbauer of Missouri State U takes Harvard to task for not following through on the university's Task Force for General Education proposal to require all students take a course that would fall under the broad heading, "Faith and Reason." The proposal came with the rational that the tension between religious faith and reason is one of the defining issues of our times and a course broaching the subject is necessary for molding informed citizens.

I reported on this back in October or November, I believe, and was very excited by the prospect. In fact, I figured this was a done deal, but didn't know at the time that such a proposal would be voted on by the faculty.

Schmaulzbauer laments the defeat of the proposal as a missed opportunity for Harvard to set a precdent for other universities and colleges to take faith seriously.

In place of a course on "Faith and Reason", the faculty has countered with a course on "what it means to be a human being."

It seems to me that such a course must deal in some way with religion, right? We'll see.

The books I'm reading right now in preparation for my next book project would make for an interesting reading list for their proposed class on "being human":

William James' Varities of Religious Experience

Harvey Cox's Religion in the Secular City

On Killing by Lt. Dave Grossman

What books would you add?

Excerpt from Good War in Jan/Feb Utne Reader

2007-01-07T10:24:00.000-05:00

Don't know if I mentioned this or not, but the check out the latest Utne Reader for an excerpt from my book. It has a snazzy title: "An Orchestrated Attack : War's sound track echoes from Dresden to Baghdad."

The chapter concerns the my experience playing Daniel Bukvich's Symphony No. 1 (In Memoriam Dresden) as a sophomore in high school and how it changed my life. Ok, a little dramatic, but true.

Recordings of Bukvich's symphony aren't readily available. Trish from San Mateo, CA already wrote to ask where she could get her hands on a recording. You can download recordings of it here:

http://www.bukvichmusic.com/comp/symphonyno1/index.asp

Boy hangs self after seeing Saddam death

2007-01-05T21:20:00.000-05:00

HOUSTON, Jan. 4 (UPI) -- A 10-year-old Houston-area boy apparently hanged himself accidentally while mimicking Saddam Hussein's execution, police said Thursday.
Sergio Pelico's mother told authorities the boy had been watching a TV report on the execution of former Iraqi president on a Telemundo news broadcast before he hanged himself.
"It appears to be accidental," Police Lt. Tom Claunch told the Houston Chronicle. "Our gut reaction is that he was experimenting."

Box Office Faire Reflects Cultural Appetites?

2007-01-05T07:44:00.000-05:00

Same old same old, but it's a question that must be asked over and over until...

From the Houston Chronicle:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/4441190.html

Contractors Are Cited in Abuses at Guantanamo

2007-01-05T07:38:00.000-05:00

From the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/03/AR2007010301759.html?referrer=email

FBI reports that Gitmo Abuses No Myth

2007-01-03T01:15:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/01/02/guantanamo/index.html

The FBI inquiry reveals the details of 26 incidents of abuse witnessed by FBI agents, including abuses that previously were thought to be mere rumor, including the use of naked female interrogators, tricking detainees into believing they were being defiled with menstrual blood.

This has to be the nail in coffin for those who were holding out hope that reports of abuse at the Guantanamo Bay prison were overblown and isolated incidents.

Read the official report here:

http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/guantanamo.htm

The interesting thing about the release of the FBI's report is that it was completed in Sept 2004 but not released to the public until now as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request. However, the FBI was quick to point out, the substance of many of these allegations has previously been reported elsewhere. Those of you that have been keeping up with allegations of abuse at Gitmo will recall that FBI agents have indeed come forward several times over the past few years. The importance of this report seems to be that we now have an official document from the FBI saying that they back the witness(es) of these abuses. Previous allegations would be reported and then forgotten because they seemed to lack credibility and corroboration.

It will be interesting to see if this leads to the closure--once and for all--of Gitmo.

Refusing to Deploy Because the Iraq War is Illegal

2007-01-02T10:57:00.000-05:00

The Court-Martial of Ehren Watada Begins

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010207J.shtml

From Truthout.org:

A pre-trial hearing is scheduled to take place Thursday in Tacoma, Washington, in the court-martial of Ehren Watada, the 28-year-old Army lieutenant who is the first commissioned officer to publicly refuse to deploy to Iraq on the basis that the war is illegal. Captain Dan Kuecker, the Army prosecutor based at Fort Lewis, Washington, has subpoenaed Truthout contributing reporter Sarah Olson and Gregg Kakesako, a Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter. Kuecker had also stated his intent to subpoena Truthout's executive director Marc Ash, assistant editor Sari Gelzer, and contributing reporter Dahr Jamail to appear at Watada's trial in February.

Abu Ghraib "Whistleblower" Can Never Go Home Again

2006-12-22T01:48:00.000-05:00

Sorry I wasn't more on top of this. I didn't catch the 60 Minutes interview with Joseph Darby, the Army specialist who received the now infamous Abu Ghraib abuse photos from his friend Charles Graner and decided that the actions portrayed in the photos "had to stop."

This from Nat Hentoff's editorial on Darby:

When [Joseph Darby] arrived at Dover Air Force base, with his wife there to meet him, the Army told Darby it wasn't safe for him to go back to Cumberland, adding: "You can probably never go home." And, indeed, reported Anderson Cooper, "the Army's security assessment had concluded: "The overall threat of criminal activity to the Darbys is imminent. A person could fire into the residence from the roadway."

Darby, who left the Army recently misses his home, as does his wife. Their current residence is secret. "It's not fair," Bernadette Darby told the New York Daily News (Dec. 8). "We're being punished for (him) doing the right thing."

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=1300&dept_id=374730&newsid=17620029&PAG=461&rfi=9

U.S. Inquiry Falters on Civilians Accused of Abusing Detainees

2006-12-19T10:14:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/washington/19detain.html?_r=1&th=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&emc=th&adxnnlx=1166541137-D8IyikxGrtBwWvZHYzeeXQ

Brett Yasko: Design Stud

2006-12-13T21:41:00.000-05:00

As some of you know, Brett Yasko (www.brettyasko.com) is an extraordinary Pittsburgh-based graphic designer and artist. He is the designer of my book, A Good War is Hard to Find.

Anyway, he's featured in this month's issue of Communication Arts, the leading trade journal for visual communications.

Please visit his site and marvel at his work.

Failures of Imagination

2006-12-10T00:11:00.000-05:00

A GREAT piece in the Sept/Oct issue of the Columbia Review of Journalism by Eric Umansky on the way the American press covered stories relating to torture in Iraq.

If I were a journalist I would be very very pissed that I didn't write this piece. As it is, I'm just pissed.

He spends the beginning discussing the death of two Afghan men at Bagram Airforce base, a story I deal with in considerable detail in my book.

Please, please check out this article:

http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/5/Umansky.asp

New Issue of The Sign of Peace now On-line

2006-12-10T00:04:00.000-05:00

Some of you may know, but many probably not, that I'm an associate editor with a journal called The Sign of Peace, the official publication of the Catholic Peace Fellowship (an organization dedicated to raising a "mighty league of conscientious objectors.") Their Website is a wonderful resourse for anyone interested in pacifism and conscientious objection.

I have a brief backpage piece in the latest issue. It's a spin-off of the chapter in my book on Hiroshima. Check it here:

http://www.catholicpeacefellowship.org/nextpage.asp?m=2507

Great Review in the Pittsburgh City Paper

2006-12-07T23:14:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Bill O'Driscoll for his review. He really captures the essence of the book (if I do say so myself), which is difficult considering I'm all over the place.

Check it out here:

http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A20280

My favorite part is the last three paragraphs:

...Griffith was in Pittsburgh recently to lead a seminar at the 412 Creative Nonfiction Festival. Now 31, and back at Notre Dame as a teacher, he's tall, sandy-haired and unassuming. As with any good essayist, you can hear him thinking on the page; yet in print as in person, the boyish Griffith exudes the humility not necessarily of a trombonist (which he was in Pittsburgh with Johnsons Big Band) but of someone who has some pretty good ideas about the world but is asking your help to work through them.
A Good War is Griffith's first book; it grew out of a shorter, self-published version by he and Yasko that Yasko submitted to Soft Skull. Drawing a line between the news on our TV screens and the movies on our theater screens is an old endeavor. Griffith says he hopes to move the conversation beyond vengeance, rage and insensibility.
"My belief is forgiveness is going to trump everything," he says. "If you're going to radically reform culture, there has to be reconciliation. Changing not just minds but hearts."

Job Search Driving Me Crazy

2006-12-04T02:07:00.000-05:00

Don't want to name names (that would be unethical), but this job hunting stuff is making me paranoid. I keep having dreams that my cover letters all have typos and that I sent the wrong letters of recommendation to the wrong school, etc. ect. etc.

My wife is feeling it too. We were driving in the car today and she said, "I just had an image pop into my head of a sandwich being cut with a pair of scissors."

A Refreshing Word About Suffering

2006-11-30T11:41:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the ironic headline. It seems that's the only way to get people to think about suffering.

The link below is to a great little article by James F. Keenan, S.J. in The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. I came across this while doing some research for upcoming job talks (presuming I get interviews at MLA and then get invited for a campus visit). My book draws upon some premises in Elain Scarry's The Body in Pain, a real doozy of a book dealing generally with pain and its effects on humans and specifically with torture.

Anyway, Father Keenan's emphasis is on the importance of listening to those who have endured suffering, instead of trying to intepret their pain for them--explain it away using theological interpretation. Victims are denied voice, as Scarry discusses at length in terms of the way pain stifles the voice, or at least makes it incoherent, and they must be allowed to voice their own story freely.

Keenan feels he needs to raise this caution because many Christians try to interpret suffering and what its purpose might mean for those who have suffered, for example Catholics trying to improve Christian-Jewish relations by trying to make sense of the suffering Jews endured during the Holocaust.

Keenan admonishes, quoting Marcel Sarot, instead of asking how can we make sense of this suffering we must ask, "How can we prevent that Christianity ever again can provide fertile soil for anti-semitism and kindred movements?"

http://www.med.yale.edu/intmed/hummed/yjhm/spirit2003/suffering/jkeenan2.htm

Peace on Earth? Not in Our Subdivision!

2006-11-27T19:35:00.000-05:00

Unbelievable....

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/27/peace.wreath.ap/index.html

Standing up to "Bully"

2006-11-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

elow is a link to a brief article concerning the latest violent video game sensation, "Bully," in which you are enrolled in a tony Northeastern boarding school and must fend of upper-crust bullies through violent means.

http://newsinfo.nd.edu/content.cfm?topicid=20182

Darcia Narvaez, Assoc. Prof of Psychology at Notre Dame says of the game:

One might think that standing up to bullies makes a good game, but not if you are using violence to stand up to them,” said Darcia Narvaez, a University of Notre Dame psychologist who researches moral development in children and the effects of violent video games on them.

The most powerful effect of violence on users is the hero using violence to meet a goal, especially if it is humorous. This type of violence is more likely to be imitated when seen, and particularly when practiced repeatedly.”

Though “Bully” doesn’t involve any blood or killing, fist fighting in the game is almost constant, with one test-gamer reporting that he engaged in 400 fights by the halfway point of the game.

“With violent video game play, children learn to associate violence with pleasure when they are rewarded for hurting another character, and this undermines moral sensitivity,” said Narvaez , director of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethical Education.

60 Abu Ghraib Photos Leaked to Sydney Paper

2006-11-12T09:36:00.000-05:00

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/the-photos-america-doesnt-want-seen/2006/02/14/1139890737099.html

Photograph with the Enemy

2006-11-06T15:12:00.000-05:00

http://insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/06/penn

University of Pennsylvania's president, Amy Gutmann, hosted a Halloween party at her home and was put upon to take a photo with a student dressed as a suicide bomber. The student, Saad Saadi, wore camo pants, a package of fake dynamite strapped to his chest and carried a toy gun, which he used, according to the story, to stage mock executions around campus. The photos are circulating through cyberspace on Facebook and have gotten president Gutmann in hot water.

Those of you who have read my book will immediately grasp the relevance of this story. In a middle chapter of my book (which is excerpted at Killing the Buddha www.killingthebuddha.com) I write about attending a Halloween party and encountering an aquaintance--a guy I had a class with once--dressed as Charles Graner, so-called ringleader of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. He wore rubber golves, glasses, had trimmed his mustache to approximate Graner's and carried a sandbag and a Polaroid camera. (Check out the excerpt to see how the situation played out for me.)

Let me reflect on the U Penn situation via my own experience.

First of all, it's important to point out that at the party I attended, now two years past, no one recognized the costume for what it was. There was no discussion among the party-goers about the tastefulness of the costume. There was no whispering behind his back or nervous laughter, at least that I saw. Not that lack of recognition on the part of party-goers absolves either Saad Saadi or Graner for their poor taste, BUT the root of the problem here is the photographic record of the decision--both the student's decision to wear the costume and president Gutmann's decision to allow her picture to be taken with him. Deciding whether or not a picture of the moment is worth making is an interesting moral conversation in and of itself. John Berger, in his essay "Understanding a Photograph" agrees that a photo, the actual thing itself, is a statement:
"I believe this moment is worth capturing." Therefore, a photo is a reflection of our moral vision.

BUT is it inherently immoral to take such a photo when it is clear that the intent is to create a memento, a conversation piece to show others? Unsure? Well, what about when it is probable that the photo will be widely disseminated to potentially millions of 18-22 year olds via Facebook, a faddish yet extensive online social network as integral to college lifestyle as a cell phone, IM screenname and wireless laptop? Now we're getting closer to the line, and closer to the reality of picture taking today. If you want to become infamous, just take a photo or a video of yourself doing something tasteless, idiotic, pornographic, or all three, and put it on your Facebook/MySpace account or YouTube. Within days your deed will have circled the globe several times over. But, again, is such behavior immoral?

The short and long answer is "No."

The photographs taken of Saad Saadi create moments that are meant to be seen as transgressive in that they resemble or mimics other images we have seen, images of actual militants brandishing weapons and actual executions. This similarity creates a moment of reckoning for the viewer, a moment where the awfulness of the original image is commented on by the reinactment. In the case of Saad Saadi's costume the suicide bomber is ridiculed, made to look like a fool now he is seen in the absurd context of a Halloween party standing next to the president of Penn, who is dressed a a princess, or fairy, or whatever she is sypposed be. The ultimate effect of scary costuming is thus achieved: All of a sudden the bogeyman isn't so scary anymore now that we've seen him for ourselves and we realize that he has no power over us.

Be this as it may, such an explanation does not negate the fact that many may be wounded by such images, especially the images that depict execution style killings, in particular the one in which Saadi appears to be reading the Koran (although it looks suspiciously like the green-covered New Testaments campus preachers distribute) while another party-goer kneels before him as though waiting to be shot. Clearly, the Islamic faith is being indicted. Saadi may honestly (however, naively) believe that he has not impugned Islam, but this reveals his ignorance of how religious people of all Abrahamic faiths feel about how they are represented in popular culture. This sensitivity toward religious peoples is rejected because of the perceived damage and destruction religion reaps--such a corrupt institution does not deserve reverence. But, again, Saadi would probably deny such a blatant attack.

A quick glance at Saad Saadi's website reveals the kind of intellect we're dealing with, an intellect that despite his Ivy-League pedigree is woefully common among young men these days. One link on his page takes you to YouTube and dozens of clips of an amateur "Fight Clubs," in which scrawny kids in boxing gloves try to beat one another up. Another link takes you to video footage Saad took himself. The majority feature him in different settings make masturbatory hand gestures.

With this in mind, it's difficult to give him any credit for putting together a "transgresssive" costume. He just desires to be contrary, which is irresponsible, though not immoral, given the current global climate.

What should be the punishment of idiocy and irresponsibility? Having being part of a similar situation--although I am not president of a university--I would say that these moments catch you by surprise. You want to believe that what you are doing has very little consequences. However, I found that the consequences were, for me, personal and caused me to reflect on my own complicity not just in this kind of Halloween shenanigans but how actual images of pain and suffering change us.

A Great Quote from Thomas Merton

2006-11-05T20:55:00.000-05:00

I'm writing this review for the Merton Seasonal, a little journal put out by the International Thomas Merton Society, and I really want to incude the above quote but just can't find the room, so I give it to you.

In a letter to Fr. Dan Berrigan:

In the beginning I was all pre-contemplation because I was
against trivial and meaningless activism.
But now I have been told that I am destroying the image of the
contemplative vocation, when I write about peace. In a word, it is all right for the monk to break his ass
putting out packages of cheese for the old monastery, but as to doing anything
that is really fruitful, that is another matter altogether.

Killing the Buddha

2006-10-30T14:28:00.000-05:00

Killing the Buddha, the "religion magazine for people made nervous by churches," has published an excerpt from Good War. Check it out and make sure you stay to read their other high-quality articles and essays.

http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/prime
directive.htm

Thanks to Peter Manseau, the editor of KtB, and author of Vows and coauthor of Killing the Buddha with Jeff Sharlet, editor of The Revealer, www.therevealer.org

Check out this blog

2006-10-30T12:58:00.000-05:00

Very interesting blog run by Jim Johnson titled "(Notes On) Politics, Theory and Photography"--right up my alley.

He wrote and called my attention to a post he wrote on my book.

Thanks, Jim

http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2006/10/good-war-is-hard-to-find.html

He writes:

I find Griffith's stance in many ways persuasive, but also remain deeply skeptical. He repeatedly chastises Americans for mis-understanding or mis-interpreting what it means to inhabit a "Christian Nation." He at several points calls attention to the literal ignorance of American Chirstians, many of whom when questioned cannot, for instance, name the ten commandments. But I find this narrative of authentic Christianity despoiled by those who are inattentive to or ignorant of its teachings too easy. Here is Griffith: "Nations cannot be Christian, only individuals. And while it may be true that all those who believe in Christ are united in one body, they quickly find themselves at odds with one another, divided by those things that belong to Caesar." The problem for me is that the differences in political and social outlook among various sorts of American Christian cannot be attrbuted simply to the distractions of this world - as though there would not be differences in interpretation and doctrine absent such factors. Any cultural system (of which a religion is one variety) will be contested and contestable for all sorts of internal reasons. Such differences, it seems to me, invariably will play themselves out in politics.

I disagree that religion is just "any cultural system," but I take his point and appreciate it very much.

Nice mention on the National Book Critics Circle Blog

2006-10-28T20:01:00.000-04:00

http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2006/10/saturday-morning-roundup_28.html

War is Love....War is Porn

2006-10-26T22:03:00.000-04:00

A fascinating review of Clint Eastwood's latest, Flag of Our Fathers at beliefnet.com.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/202/story_20234_2.html

I haven't yet seen the film, but the trailers I've seen on prime-time TV make it seem that this is another shallow glorification of the Greatest Generation's sacrifices. Robert Nylan, the reviewer, and a veteran, seems to think this film transcends such ultimately damaging pap by "telling it like it is."

But the line from the review that makes me want to see the film is:

"Maybe there's no such thing as an anti-war movie. On some basic level, it's all war porn."

Reason and Faith at Harvard

2006-10-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

Coincidentally, this op-ed appeared in today's Washington Post by Father John Jenkins, president of the U. of Notre Dame and Thomas Burrish, the university's provost.

The op-ed draws attention to a recent decision by the Harvard curriculum committee to begin offering more classes that explore the "role of religion in contemporary, historical or future events--personal, cultural, national or international," in order to point out that the ways that Notre Dame is already doing so and invite secular scholars into dialogue with scholars of faith.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/22/AR2006102200714.html

The Fragmentation of the American University

2006-10-23T12:45:00.000-04:00

This just in... A very interesting essay by Alistair MacIntyre, prof of philosophy at Notre Dame, on the ways that American Universities (even Catholic ones) are failing to address the important questions pertinent to human beings due to specialization amongst academics.

Such specialization, he argues, obscures the connections between disciplines, places that need to be studied and understood in order to adquately address the rifts between positions and cultures.

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1767

Review in TimeOut Chicago

2006-10-19T17:11:00.000-04:00

Below is the link for the first print review of my book.

http://www.timeout.com/chicago/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TOCWebArticles1/86/books/a_good_war_is_hard_to_find.xml

From the review:

...Asking key questions about the state of our country’s faith and humanity without the crutch of an agenda, this book is a massively forceful piece of criticism.

5 out of 6 stars.

Abu Ghraib More About Porn than Torture

2006-10-17T11:03:00.000-04:00

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/10/13/ap/politics/mainD8KNUTR00.shtml

Republican Rep. from Conn, Christopher Shays, said in a Wednesday debate against his Democratic opponent Diane Farrell, that he believed what happened at Abu Ghraib was not torture, but the actions of a "sex ring"--more about porn that torture.

However, when pressed about his remarks Shays captiulated: "I was maybe not as expansive as I needed to be," he said. "Of course, the degrading of anyone is torture. We need to deal with it."

General Says Abu Ghraib Officer Lied

2006-10-17T10:53:00.000-04:00

http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2006/10/16/ap3095740.html

Not a big shock, but the lack of attention the story is getting on the major news outlets is astounding.

Good Question: To What Extent Does Art Help to Change Political Realities?

2006-10-17T10:52:00.000-04:00

Thoughts?

Abu Ghraib in Paint

2006-10-17T10:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.nysun.com/article/41632

An Article on a traveling exhibition of Columbian artist Fernando Botero's series of paintings based on the Abu Ghraib prison photos.

From the article:

Naked figures writhe in an eerie darkness. Vicious beasts bare their teeth and snarl. The faces of lost souls cry out in unimaginable agony, forced into strange and contorted positions reminiscent of crucifixion.
Such a vision evokes a scene of the apocalypse typical of 15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. But no, these paintings by Colombian artist Fernando Botero are depictions of real events. Despite their hellish subject matter, they are all meticulously based on photographs and press accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003.
It seems hard to credit, but Mr. Botero says the pictures, which many will undoubtedly view as a scathing indictment of American foreign policy, are not meant to convey a political message.
Although he admits that President Bush "is not my favorite president," Mr. Botero says art has no effect on political realities, adding that his work is merely a relic to be looked upon by future generations as evidence of events past.
"You just leave a testimony," he said. "It's something that comes from the heart. It's something immortal that moves you to do your work."

Soldier Hoped to Do Good But Was Chaged By War

2006-10-13T08:16:00.000-04:00

Check out this article in the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/us/13awol.htm

A born-again Christian from Washington who claims to have gone to Iraq to serve his country and God and began to doubt if he was serving either.

From the article:

He said he saw American soldiers shoot and kill an unarmed Iraqi teenager, and rode in an Army Humvee that sideswiped Iraqi cars and shot an old man’s sheep for fun — both incidents Sergeant Clousing reported to superiors. He said his work as an interrogator led him to conclude that the occupation was creating a cycle of anti-American resentment and violence. After months of soul-searching on his return to Fort Bragg, Sergeant Clousing, 24, failed to report for duty one day.

Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism

2006-10-01T22:51:00.000-04:00

I'll be giving a paper at a conference this weekend in Grand Rapids, MI at Grand Valley State U. The conference is uncannily titled, "Flannery O'Connor in the Age of Terrorism" Fits right in with what I've been writing about.

Tonight I sat down to make sure I know what I'm going to say. As usual, I started reading another book instead: Archbishop of Cantebury, Rowan Williams' book of essays, Grace and Necessity. His chapter on Flannery O'Connor is perhaps the best thing I've ever read concerning her work that treats her Catholicity as the reason for her consistently soul shaking brilliance, instead of pointing to it as her tragic flaw.

Williams points out that the irony famously associated with her work can hardly be helped. The irony in her work is the greatest irony: Humans made in the image and likeness of God yet tend toward evil.

I'll be talking about this irony and its relationship to Grace--the notion that God extends invitations to deeper intimacy with Him through unexpected encounters. Because it is inevitable that Humans tend toward evil, irony, although unhinging, should not be looked to as an end in itself, but as a surface indication of a deeper spiritual disturbance--a starting point rather than impasse.

This is what it means for art to empower depth of sight.

Today is Good War's Official Release....I Promise More Posts!

2006-10-01T22:16:00.000-04:00

October 1st.

This is the official release date of the book. Let the reviews begin...I hope.

It seems that Good War will be reviewed in the New York Times Book Review. No idea when. That's just the hunch at Soft Skull Press because the Review asked for a finished copy.

Time Out Chicago is reviewing it sometime in the next week or so.

I just downloaded this gadget for my Mac that lets me post to the blog without going to the site and logging on. This should lead to more posts. So keep it tuned here.

Flattering Words from Lo-Fi Tribe

2006-09-21T12:18:00.000-04:00

An excerpt from a review at Lo-Fi Tribe (www.lofitribe.com), a hip blog dedicated to religion and theology maintained by Shawn Anthony. He's a seminarian studying to be a minister in the Unitarian Universalist Church:

David Griffith has produced one of the deepest critiques of contemporary American culture I have read to date. He did so in less than 200 pages....I was moved by the author’s ability to totally avoid the familiar rhetoric and party lines owned and wielded by the twin sides of a culture war whose participants miss the big picture entirely. This is especially impressive considering the inspiration of the book: Abu Ghraib. Griffith, however, holds up Abu Ghraib as a mirror in which we can honestly see our state as a nation of collected and individual selves.

Click on the title of this post to see the entire review.

Thanks, Shawn.

Abu Ghraib: the Last Great American Movie

2006-09-08T20:34:00.000-04:00

The other day, Peter Manseau, editor of Killing the Buddha sent me an email with this quote from author Michael Tolkin's interview in the New York Times:

"I don't think America's had a good movie made since Abu Ghraib," Tolkin said, before clarifying that he's talking about big movies, not the minuscule ones that have met the industry's quotas for unembarrassing award nominees. "I think it showed that a generation that had been raised on those heroic movies was torturing. National myths die, I don't think they return. And our national myth is finished, except in a kind of belligerent way."

It's difficult to know whtat exactly he means by this, but I'm taking it as a statement about the provocative nature of the images and the way the images call the audience to reflect on not only the character of the American military but their own character, their own response to such images. Let's face it, very seldom do American films provide such a critique. "Boys Don't Cry," the fim that dramatized the life and death of Tina Brandon comes to mind, but I can't think of others off the top of my head.

This got me thinking about ground that I wanted to cover in my book (A Good War is Hard to Find) but just didn't have the space or the time. Might there be a connection between a national cinema that boldly deals with issues of pain, suffering, war and peace in earnest (unironic) ways and the peacefulness of that nation's people? I'm going to need some help from international film experts on this, but my instincts are leading me to think that there might be some truth in this.

The absolute dearth of American films critquing violence as a means of conflict resolution leads me to ask:

Is it plausible that American cinema is responsible for the degradation of a culture's moral imagination, its movement from a nation (prior to WWI) that looked upon war as a barbaric solution to a nation that largely supports violence as a means of achieving what is in the nation's "best interest"?

It's hard to know exactly which films Tolkin is critquing in his statement, but let's take a look the 1980s, since that was when I was doing my first movie-watching. Consider Rambo (especially part 2) Friday the 13th (and its interminable sequels and imitators) and Indiana Jones; in each, violence and identity stand in interesting relation.

Rambo II: Rambo wants to get even with American policy-makers who botched the Vietnam War by sending the cartoonish Army-of-One, Sly Stallone back into Vietnam to kick some Vietcong ass. Pauline Kael's review is a hilarious read as she skewers the film not only for the its crude appeals to the barely pubescent (Arrows tipped with explosive charges blowing up helicoptors) but also the disgruntled vets with not-so-subtle Christ imagery and troubling lines such as, "In order to survive in war you have to become like war." In effect, the film celebrates vigilante justice, critiques American foreign policy makers but, ultimately, further projects the myth that America's strength lies in its rugged individualism. Thus, we see the logic of the U.S. Army's current "Army-of-One" ad campaign: Entice a generation of young people cagey about authority to enlist in the military, a decision that signs away your civilian rights, by telling them that they will become "somebody"--the ultimate fighting machine.

Friday the 13th: Although intended as cheap thrills for teens, through the lens of Tolkin's comments, becomes a series of films that shows us teen on teen sex through the eye holes of a hockey-masked (he was badly burned as a child) serial killer who's pissed off because he's badly deformed and his mother is dead. This formula continues to be bankable, so much so that contemporary American culture is inundated with similar plots and images. There is an odd sickness in American male culture that makes us interested in the violent assault of beautiful woman. Men both revere and wish to protect beautiful women but also punish them for being so beautiful and therefore beyond attainment. Violence becomes associated with the sexual urge to both love and conquer at the same time. (Brett Easton Ellis' "American Pscyho" most recently and infamously explored this issue.)

Indiana Jones: While the most dear to my heart is, nonetheless, a film that portrays bearded men in turbans (Muslims) and men with sinister German accents and monocles (Nazis) teaming up to use the Ark of the Convenant, one of THE most powerfully holy relics to Judeo/Christian thinking, to, ostensibly, wipe out the Jews and the Americans. Hmmm.

What do these films have to do with Abu Ghraib, torture, and the American public's authorization of violence? Well, based on the research done by sociologists and psychologists on what motivates torturers, such films aren't necessarily creating torturers. On the whole, torturers see what they do as a job, a job that would be unncessary if only the subject would talk. Though this may be the case, it seems that Abu Ghraib is not so much about state mandated torture (although the boundaries of what is what is not torture do seem to have been intentionally blurry), it is about young people whose moral consciences did not cause them to balk and a citizenry that failed the same test.

Film studies folks have been thinking about the roots of misrepresentating the "other," and "problematically" totalizing the complexity of cultural identity, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. through the deployment of a subtle visual rhetoric, some of which is conscious and some of which is, arguably, subconscious. These scholars hold that film can call attention to such problems. Just look at countries along cultural fault lines, such as Irish and Mexican film: both deal quite literally with borders and the violence that erupts as a result of the tension between perspectives. In these films the violence is understood as symptomatic of deep social undercurrents.

The explication above is just a beginning, but I think it starts to get at the sinister undercurrents in American culture: how sex, violence, nationalism and religion are connected in the American psyche. The Abu Ghraib seem to be a nexus point for thinking about these connections in the American subconscious and how the connection influences the American mind.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts

2006-08-22T00:31:00.000-04:00

I just got done watching Spike Lee's new HBO documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts." My wife, who was born and raised in Slidell, just across the lake from New Orleans, a community equally hard hit by Katrina, had to get up and leave the room because she thought she might have a panic attack. That's how striking this documentary is. And I'm pleased to report that Lee achieves this without taking any of Michael Moore's effective yet impudent (adj 1: marked by casual disrespect; "a flip answer to serious question") tone. Moore's brand of mock naivete and sass isn't appropriate here. And why not? I kept wondering as I watched. Why isn't Spike narrating over top of these images? I kept waiting for his now iconic voice--that kid-trying-to-be-cool voice that I first heard in Air Jordan commercials back in the late 80s--to come in with that hip-hop politico swagger, but he restrained himself. And what a difference it makes.

Although there are some moments where the nice is twisted, particularly at the beginning when Louis Armstrong sings "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" over top of stock news footage of the inundated city. For me, this is the big question that the documentary is asking me to grapple with. The photos and news footage gathered from CNN and other networks ask us to review the evidence and ask: Can you fathom this? How could this happen? Human beings left for four or five days without food or water at the New Orleans Convention Center and on interstate overpasses. Armed mobs blocking the Crescent City bridge so that inner-city New Orleanians cannot seek shelter in their white enclave.

What results truly is a requiem, a solemn service to the dead. In short, Lee has done this right. He has jazz musician and composer Terrance Blanchard as a talking head and a contributor of original music for the soundtrack--one that doesn't just--again, like Moore--ironize, but that rounds off the sharpness, the sting of the photos in such a way that doesn't feel sentimental, very much anti-CNN. After all, sentimentality, according to Flannery O'Connor is "an early arrival at a mock state of innocence," a condition that leads to obscenity rather than actual grief.

It is grief that a requiem, in its very structure and solemn pageantry, is meant to provide a proper outlet. It is is meant to affirm the gift of life even amidst doubt and darkness. Without having seen the second part, which airs tonight on HBO, it's too soon to say where Lee will leave us off, but I suspect we won't be let off easy.

Lee's documentary reminds me of a classic of the genre, Harlan County, USA, in which poor white coal miners and their families eek out an existence in a place that looks like a Sebastio Salgado photograph. Similarly, "When the Levees Broke" shows America to be not so different than your typical despot-ruled third world country: concerned primarily with wealth and war.

Book is Out, Apparently

2006-08-12T08:59:00.000-04:00

Well, it seems that the book is out. Finally, after many delays and false alarms and sabotage attempts--no lie--by disgruntled employees of at the printer in Montreal, the book is, apparently, in warehouses all across the country. I say apparently because Amazon.com has changed the status of the book's availbilty from "We have no fricking clue. Good Luck!" to "In Stock."

And,also apparently, the book is selling. As of this morning, Amazon.com tells me, there are "only 3 left in stock" at their warehouse. I'm hoping that this means hundreds of copies have been shipped to the four corners of the earth; although, I suspect that several dozen are heading for Perrysburg, Ohio--where my parents live.

The next step is to place some excerpts from the book in various places to promote more sales. So far I have leads with Killing the Buddha , the award-winning online website for those who aren't exactly atheists but aren't exactly believers either and The Huffington Post, the online political and cultural news clearing-house. This last lead has an interesting wrinkle in that the editor I've been working with is passing my book on to John Cusack, who, she told me, expressed interest in the premise of my book. Apparently, she was talking with John at a party at Arianna Huffington's house one evening and mentioned my book to him and he--who has just finished shooting a film in which he plays a guy whose wife is killed in the line of duty while serving her country in Iraq--apparently--said, "I'd liked to check it out."

Weird. Wonderful.

Review in the National Post of Canda

2006-07-08T13:39:00.000-04:00

Randy Boyagoda, author of the forthcoming novel "The Governor of the Nothern Province" (Penguin Canada, September 2006), chose Good War for his Hot Summer Reading list. Below are his kind words:

A Good War is Hard to Find by David Griffith (Soft Skull). This slim study of violence and visual culture in America explores the cultural conditions that prepared the way for the Abu Ghraib photograph scandal. Two elements rescue the book from banal American self-hatred and soft lefty self-righteousness: first, Griffith's idiosyncratic involvement of Catholic social teachings in his approach to cultural critique; second, his first-person reckoning with the wider problems that the Abu Ghraib images signal, which admits a personal culpability in their creation as much as it accepts a personal responsibility for their correction.

Thanks, Randy! I highly recommend his novel. I had the pleasure of reading an advanced copy of it recently. It is that rare breed of book that begins as ambitiously as it ends, not shying away or taking the easy way out when confronting the complex issues of racial prejudice, assimilation, local politics and the manners of an entire nation.

Final Blurb for Book Compares Good War to Merton

2006-05-03T09:12:00.000-04:00

Got the last blurb for the book just before the "drop-dead" date--the point of no return in publishing lingo--from Greg Wolfe, editor of Image, the only literary journal dedicated to Judeo-Christian art and artists. Click on the title of this post and check out Image's Web site.

Here's what he said:

David Griffith is a writer to watch--politically engaged and bitingly funny, but never shrill. His passion for social justice is grounded in his understanding of art and religion-two forms of vision that, rightly understood, increase our awareness of irony and ambiguity rather than stifle them. This combination of talents and interests is rare indeed: Griffith is working the same territory as Thomas Merton in books like Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander and Seeds of Destruction. In short, this is cultural criticism with a soul.

Highest Ranking Abu Ghraib Officer to Date to be Charged

2006-05-03T09:10:00.000-04:00

Amnesty Says Abuse in U.S. Detention Facilities 'Widespread' Despite Denials

2006-05-03T09:07:00.000-04:00

Sr. Helen Gets Standing "O" at Valpo

2006-03-28T19:14:00.000-05:00

Went to see Sr. Helen Prejean last night at Valparaiso University. Man, she's a force of nature. I definitely was on the verge of tears a couple times. I picked up her new book, The Death of Innocents, and had her sign it. I also thanked her for blurbing my book. More later....

Toronto-Based "This Magazine" Gives Good Review

2006-03-27T11:48:00.000-05:00

The first review of my book is out from This Magazine, a well-known and long running Toronto-based alternative magazine of politics and culture. Below is the review by Brian Joseph Davis.

The Jam once ambivalently sang, "A smash of glass and the rumble of boots, an electric train and a ripped up phone booth, paint splattered walls and the cry of a tom cat, lights going out and a kick in the balls ... that's entertainment." It's a sentiment also echoed in Davis Griffith's first person essay, A Good War Is Hard to Find.

Focusing mostly on the strangeness of the Abu Ghraib torture photos and '90s-style transgressive culture, Griffith's thesis is that society is suffering a disconnect between its feelings and the images we produce. As a subjective essay, A Good War takes its time in saying what it wants to say, but Griffith's impassioned and always-questioning mind makes the journey worthwhile. Even if you disagree with him (as I do), take comfort that someone is asking uncomfortable questions about what makes what worthy of humour, or disgust.

Not bad, huh? "Impassioned and always questioning mind"--I can live with that. I'm happy that he's honest in his disagreement of the thesis. Go to This' Website by clicking the title of this post.

Haunting Photograph: Abu Ghraib Icon or Political Opportunist?

2006-03-15T17:14:00.000-05:00

Salon.com is reporting that the New York Times got the wrong man in its front page feature on the alleged man-behind-the- hood in the now iconic photo from Abu Ghraib prison (see the orginal article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/11/international/middleeast/11ghraib.html). Click the title of this link for the Salon account.

It seems fitting that the identity of this man is hard to pinpoint. I don't know why I think that. I guess it's as though that this man--whoever he is--is a sort of bogeyman, an apparition that embodies the horror of the Iraq war. Just as the tomb of the unknown soldier in any country touched by war inspires mournful respect and reflection, the photo of the unknown torture victim inspires frustration and anger. As Donald Rumsfeld said: "Those pictures never should have gotten out." It's safe to say that Susan Sontag was right: "Photographs haunt."

Death of a Christian Peacemaker a "Wake Up Call"?

2006-03-13T16:36:00.000-05:00

The Catholic Peace Fellowship (http://www.cpfblog.blogspot.com/) has a
number of wonderful posts up at the moment. Check out the lovely post about
the death of Tom Fox, a member of the Chrisitian Peacemaker team that was
kidknapped months ago. The post takes on pundits who believe the murder of Fox is a wake-up call for "naive peaceniks" who feel they can make a difference by going to Iraq--or wherever strife exists--and acting as an instrument of Christ's
peace. Also check out the CPF's posts on the ROTC debacle at Marquette University.

Times Op-Ed: Use of Dogs at Abu Ghraib Understood as "Legal"

2006-03-04T15:00:00.000-05:00

An Op-Ed by ex-Army interrogator ANTHONY LAGOURANIS published in the February 28, 2006 NYT discusses how confusion among soldiers, and double-speak on the part of top brass, as to how detainees at Abu Ghraib should be considered (POW? Enemy Combatant? Insurgent?) lead to following through with orders that are clear violations of the Geneva Conventions.

What It Takes to Be a Conscientious Objector

2006-03-01T15:28:00.000-05:00

The Catholic Peace Fellowship has a great story (click on the title of this post for the story) about a soldier who applied for Conscientious Objector staus, got it, and then was Honorably Discharged from the Army. Now the Army is trying to change his discharge status to "General," which would deprive him of many benefits, like the GI Bill. Click on the link at the bottom of the story to see excerpts from his statement of conscience, which is needed in order to make a successful bid for CO status.

Which gets me thinking: Wouldn't it be great to gather together statements of conscience and put them together in a big book? What would you say in your statement of conscience?

Gay Porn Used in Guantanamo Interrogations

2006-03-01T11:48:00.000-05:00

The Nation's blog is reporting on an ACLU report in which FBI agents conducting interrogations at Gitmo witnessed the use of Gay pornographic films as an interrogation tool. Click on the title of this post for the whole story.

Since the beginning of the war we have been hearing allegations that the military's plan of attack against the "Islamic male" is rooted in an understanding of Middle Eastern culture's sense of shame, specifically when it comes to sexuality. The Abu Ghraib photos seem to support such allegations of a systematized approach to "softening up" detainees.

However, the fact that the ACLU is breaking this story doesn't bode well for its acceptance as "fact." In my experience, here in the middle west, the ACLU is given no more cred than a grocery store tabloid.

How do we combat such prejudice?

Radical Nun Big On Book

2006-02-23T09:30:00.000-05:00

Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, which was made into a film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, is the first to offer a blurb for my forthcoming book.

Below is the email she sent me.

Dear Dave,

We need your book.

All the best...

Sister Helen

BLURB:

Griffith offers gripping personal testimony to the difficulties of living out the Christian imperatives of love and forgiveness amid a culture that legitimizes government violence as the only "real" way to establish social order.

Short and to the point. Punchy. I hope my book lives up to it.

Click on the title of this post to see her website, in which she argues persuasively for the abolition of capital punishment. And while you're at it buy Dead Man Walking: ww.amazon.com/gp/product/0679751319/sr=8-2/qid=1140705069/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-9023702-9307200?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Here's a number to remember: 14,000

2006-02-21T08:50:00.000-05:00

Anti-war.com reports that there are over 14,000 Iraqis incarcerated in U.S. military prisons.