Deep Violence: Military Violence, War Play, and the Social Life of Weapons

War and violence are deeply ingrained in the cultural and linguistic context of modern American and English culture, argues Bourke (The Story of Pain), a British academic who has written prolifically on war and its effects on society. In her opinion, popular culture’s enthusiasm for weaponry, specifically weaponry that uses the language of sport to couch the raw and harrowing reality of killing other people, and the essentially empty gestures of international bans on various weapons of war merely obscure social complicity in mass violence. “We are all responsible for war,” Bourke notes, but the relentless cultural imperatives she critiques make an alternative seem daunting and difficult to achieve. From bluff, hearty diaries and memoirs from WWI soldiers, which describe combat as a “sport with no holds barred,” to the enduring popularity of war-related play, movies, and other forms of “militainment,” the details offered are telling and disturbing. The use of graphically violent first-person shooter video games as military recruitment and training tools particularly troubles Bourke, who quotes combat veterans using games and movies as analogies to actions that are all too real. While her dissection of war and weaponry in culture is astute, a closing chapter on resistance and rejection of these norms is thin on examples of how to transform our culture and leaves the reader less than hopeful. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Mar.)