“American War,” by Omar El Akkad,
2017
This book is ostensibly about a
second American civil war that starts in 2075.
Given that 30%, of the U.S.
population presently thinks another civil war could happen in the U.S., it would
seem to be a book that could surf on that meme quite well.
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| Twice? |
It is actually about something
else. It is a book structured so that we
feel sympathy for a suicide bomber who kills 100 million people. It is far more about past and present events
in the Middle-East – torture facilities, reactionary rebellions, imperial
invasions, refugee camps, armed militias, political suicide, massacres, assassinations,
drones, tribal allegiances and revenge – than a 2nd American civil
war. Not that some of these things might
not occur in the U.S.
as well. In that sense it seems to be a book
about present imperial ‘blowback’ processed through a reactionary logic. And set in the U.S. to ‘bring the message home’ to
readers who are paying attention. Akkad
was a reporter who covered the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so it makes
sense that he would infuse his story with events there.
GLOBAL WARMING
Akkad has combined this overlay with elements of the first Civil War on
American soil in 1860-1865 and the catastrophic effects of global warming to
create a cramped simulacrum of the future.
In the book, Florida is all gone, now
called the Florida
Sea. Only an island prison camp, Sugarloaf, that
resembles Guantanamo
or Bagram or Abu Ghraib remains on a slightly higher chunk of land. Or, if you know your Civil War history, the
old Union prison on Dry Tortuga. New Orleans is
gone, to be replaced by the Mississippi
Sea. Savannah and Charleston are underwater, and now Augusta,
Georgia is the main port receiving aid supplies and contraband. All southern coasts are gone and some eastern
ones, seemingly including Washington, D.C. Hurricanes and storms are
frequent. Overwhelming heat and dust
swirl around the south, so that farms in skyscrapers around Atlanta provide almost the only food for that region. Food from greenhouses provide another source.
GASOLINE
The 2075 civil war revolves around 4
states in the deep South – Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia
and South Carolina
– who refuse to give up the use of gasoline and move to a solar electric grid. They secede and form the “Free Southern
State” (FSS). A singular reed to hang a civil war on, but
that is one of the main motivations in the Middle East. Somewhat funny logic for the U.S. though. “You’ll
have to tear the wheel of my 8-cylinder muscle car from my cold, dead
hands.” Oddly, wind turbines are
invisible in this future. The
southerners are “reds” who start another sad and doomed reactionary rebellion for
gasoline production against the “blues” in the north. (Those colors come from
the present corporate press’s identification of a state’s political loyalties,
of course. Socialists will take back the
color ‘red!’) This scenario reflects the
first U.S.
Civil War, which was launched to defend a reactionary economy, slavery, so long
ago. This civil war involves the reactionary
oil barons of Texas evidently defending their
profits, though Texas
is oddly not part of the FSS. South
Carolina itself has been walled off from the rest of the country, as the North
allowed a biologic agent to damage everyone in the state permanently.
Akkad focuses on a tough, tomboyish
girl, Sarat, who comes from the Mississippi
swamps in ‘purple’ territory.’ She is the book's central character. She eventually ends up with most of her family in a refugee camp called Camp Patience
near the Kentucky
border. The camp is presided over by the
‘Red Crescent’ society – in actuality the present Middle-Eastern version of the
Red Cross. The joke here is that the
Chinese and the large Middle-Eastern “Bouazizi Empire” are now the powers of
the world, who send humanitarian aide to the U.S. FSS. A large chunk of the U.S. southwest has been retaken by Mexico
as well and turned into a protectorate. So
the U.S.
is no longer what it once was.
Given global warming would have
impacted the Middle-East into an even more extreme oil-depleted desert, it is
not clear what the Bouazizi Empire is based on, but fantasies sometimes run
rampant. Nor does anything here tell us why Mexico
would be able to take back the Southwest – as Mexico
would be even more parched than Arizona.
China’s aid seems to be purely
humanitarian and that makes sense. Akkad’s future national imagining is somewhat arbitrary.
REVENGE
Sarat is recruited by a wealthy FSS
agent to be a sniper for the “reds” and she goes on to shoot the top general of
the ‘blues.’ Later she is captured and
tortured in the Sugarloaf detention facility in Florida.
This cruelty and the prior deaths of her mother, sister and deformation of her brother during a massacre at Camp Patience
carried out by a ‘blue’ militia make her even more angry. It leads her to accept another assignment by a
Bouazizi agent. She sneaks into the
North with help from a southern militia leader Bragg (name-checked after
Braxton Bragg, Confederate general.)
There she releases a toxic biologic agent supplied by the agent in the new
northern capital, Columbus,
Ohio. This happens during a ‘reunification
ceremony’ that follows the 2nd Northern victory in the 2nd
civil war.
And like I said, 100 million plus die
in a plague that last 10 years. Revenge.
Other than the view of global
warming, which seems quite accurate for the U.S., this view of the “American”
future uses a Middle-Eastern template which I find unconvincing. There is nothing about class in here, or
rural versus city, or economics or the many other fractures that actually exist
in the U.S. A ‘state-versus-state’
rebellion is actually very unlikely based on one issue, though it fits the conventional
journalistic template. For instance, Atlanta, the ostensible
capital of this southern rebellion, is mostly controlled by black or Democratic
Party politicians now. Houston is too,
as are most large southern cities. Black and Latino people are invisible in this book,
so you have to wonder what happened to them in this version of the South. It is hinted that Sarat might be mixed, but
she is the only one. She’s a lesbian
too. Instead she becomes a ‘rebel’
flying the four-starred and barred flag.
Akkad has basically taken bits of
the U.S. and Middle-Eastern present and stretched them out to 2075, creating a creepy central character
for us to cheer on. Or not. It is an enjoyable read as a bit of
speculative fiction, but its structure is flawed. This is a future civil war vision that liberals would believe in.
ANOTHER FUTURE?
Predictably, the New York Times compared it to Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," an inaccurate comparison. 'The Road' was actually a less political and more Biblical version of dystopia or the future than this. There is another future that might
be imagined, a revolutionary future where the version of ‘civil war’ is
actually that between corporations and the rich one side, with their fascist
allies – and the working class on the other, in all its ethnicities. Global warming is certainly a constant, but
‘capitalism’ - not gasoline alone - will be the real fulcrum around which a
class-based ‘civil’ war develops.
I even know someone that is working
on a book about precisely that.
Other reviews on dystopian
futures: “The Road,” “Hunger Games,”
“Divergent,” “Blade Runner,” “War for the
Planet of the Apes,” “The Heart Goes
Last,” “Good News,” “World War Z,” “Cloud Atlas.”
And I bought it at 2nd
Story Books, Ely MN.
Red Frog
July 14, 2018
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