I Read It So You Don't Have To

“We’re Doomed, Now What? – Essays on War and Climate Change,” by Roy Scranton, 2018

This seems to be another academic’s quota filler for a research/publishing requirement.  Scranton is a volunteer military soldier in Iraq, who drove trucks and military vehicles through Baghdad for 1 year.  He’s also a pessimist on the environment.  He’s now a literature professor.  So he’s put together this series of essays on both topics from 2010 to 2018, adding a literary analysis of ‘traumatized military hero’ literature.  He stuffs in an unrelated essay on a poet who irritated some by ‘tweeting’ “Gone With the Wind” to try to get the Margaret  Mitchell Foundation to sue her.  Odd. And another about the protests around Eric Garner and Michael Brown and being in Moscow.  For my money, the only original stuff is the essay on ‘trauma heroes,’ which could be seen as another branch of the disfunction memoir.

Point of No Return Noted

Scranton took some kind of upscale cruise to the Arctic to report on the melt - like many other people have already done.  If repetition was one of the keys to knowledge – which it is – then maybe his reporting might be interesting.  He also takes a tour through toxic oil-and-gas -saturated Galveston, Texas neighborhoods, where ‘environmental racism’ is not a phrase.  The key takeaway here is that Scranton feels that the point of no return has passed on the environment. This is no doubt now true.  Initially he endorses no plan of action, except believing in ‘neo-humanism’ or ‘post-humanism.’ Really.  This seems more like some form of bad Buddhism or apocalyptic Catholicism than anything else.  But it is definitely post-modernism.  Is he a ‘Deep Green’?  No.  He joins ‘adaptionists’ like Dimitry Orlov, who at least has some skills to pass on for the environmental apocalypse while he floats around on his yacht.  Scrantion sees that reliance on ‘the market’ is already failing.  Only at the end does he state that an eco-socialist solution is the only way to stop runaway climate change.  So the book title is never really answered fully.

Scranton’s take on war is also blurred.  Initially he promotes war as normal, inevitable and manly and describes his experiences.  He goes on to show how veterans are now holders of impressive ‘cultural capital’ that vets can bask in.  After all, he was a kid when he joined, and it proved a lasting event in his life. Then he turns hostile to the destructive invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, which is the position he maintains now.  He covers the bases and everybody should love that - or not.   His journalistic return to Baghdad during a trip for Rolling Stone 10 years after his tour of duty in 2004 exposes the U.S. sectarian approach in the first election there, but this is not news either. He intersperses these musings with poetic paragraphs that only induce rolling eyes. 

What is missing by Scranton is an understanding of the economic system that promoted the war on Iraq or the war on nature – capitalism. He’s the goldfish who doesn’t know he’s in an aquarium.  He mentions capital in passing, but is more concerned with the moral and ethical ramifications of doom.  He says he’s a terrible environmentalist, who can’t give up meat or flying and ignores many other personal issues like over-buying or recycling.  But then he's in the professional middle-class. Scranton should know he is not the source of global climate change, but stoping meat eating is not really that hard. Ah, guilty people are so plentiful and useless.  On a similar tangent, do white people who oppose institutional racism moan about how difficult it is to not be a bigot?  Or men fighting sexism complain that they still think women are only sex objects?  Not normally.

I’m being a bit unfair, as he redeems himself with his review of certain celebrated ‘wounded warrior’ books like “The Yellow Birds” (reviewed below) or right-wing movies like “American Sniper.”  Essentially they personalize the war down to the misery of the returning U.S. soldier, ignoring the greater misery of the Iraqi and Afghani people.  Politics and economics fly out the window for this accepted form of ‘the war story.’  Scranton calls this “the trauma hero myth.”  He even takes a crack at how literary MFA’s perpetuate this myth, a position dear to my heart.  His Iraq war experience tells him that war is not a 'mystical' event, unable to be understood normally.  Nor can you 'aestheticize' war and turn it into something culturally acceptable.  These points are also invaluable in combating imperialist pro-war literature or film.

If you are interested in war or environmental essays, and haven’t had your fill yet, this book may interest you.

Reviews related to this one: “The Yellow Birds,” “Matterhorn,” “Soldiers in Revolt,” “The Five Stages of Collapse,” “Reinventing Collapse,” “Marx and the Earth,” “Catastrophism,” “This Changes Everything,” “Collapse.”

And I Bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

October 2, 2018

Ashland, Oregon