How to Start a War: McSweeney's 26
By Travis Kurowski

"So I came back a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing Afghanistan. I said, 'Are we still going to war with Iraq?' And he said, 'Oh, it's worse than that.' He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, 'I just got this down from upstairs'—meaning the Secretary of Defense's office—'today.' And he said, 'This is the memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years.'"
—epigraph attributed to General Wesley Clark from Where to Invade Next, McSweeney's 26

 

The amount that the literary world should engage the political world is a subject of some disagreement. Some writers feel that to engage in political debate within the work is to distract from the more important struggle of the heart, while others mourn what they see as a loss of class concern in contemporary short fiction, which seems more concerned with the individual than with the group. In the United States, literature comments more on political matters during some times (1940s) than it does during others (1990s). Currently it seems such literary-political commentary has gone out of fashion for fiction and poetry, though it remains a popular subject for nonfiction and in the adjacent realms of theater and film. Perhaps creative writers realize that to comment on U. S. politics today is to enter into more of a global discourse than a merely national one. Perhaps it seemed easier before, such as during the heyday of The Masses, when the political at least appeared more of a local matter (or at least one tied up between Cold War struggles). Today it is fairly common knowledge that every product purchase is a political decision on a global scale, and that—thanks to the internet, other forms of high-speed communication, and developments in international transportation—national borders appear more porous and fluid than they did previously.

The above commentary can be similarly made about literary magazines, which are at times politically engaged, but almost always leave such matters alone. Immediately after 9/11, literary commentary was high within the pages of literary magazines, in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, but once again such concern has waned. In recent history (i.e. during the Iraq War), some literary magazines have done their small part to continue adding to political discussion: Virginia Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, Mississippi Review, and a handful or so of others. This is not a critique, but simply a commentary on the perceived state of things.

All this to say that Where to Invade Next (pictured above), one-third of McSweeney's 26, is the most unusual and disconcerting political commentary I have ever seen in the pages of a literary magazine—or perhaps anywhere. When I first flipped through its pages, I had no idea how to interpret it or how exactly it wanted to be read. In many ways, I am still in this state, wrestling with the text's meaning.

Simply put, Where to Invade Next is a elongated mock-up of the memo General Wesley Clark is discussing in his quote above—the one that describes "how we're going to take out seven countries in five years." There is no introduction to the book, not even a copyright page, only the Clark quote and a table of contents listing the book's seven sections: Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. Each chapter describes in detail the "threat" each country exhibits and possible measures—from negotiations to preemptive strikes—the U. S. government can take to neutralize that threat. Each chapter is intricately detailed as to the malicious actions by governments in these nations and why the U. S. should forcibly intervene to put a stop to their progression. Finally, the book ends with a long list of footnotes and an assortment of blank white pages. That is it. There is no epilogue or commentary on the book's overall point, where it is coming from, why McSweeney's is producing such a text, or what parts of the book are to be read as false and what true. I assume we are to receive all the contents of Where to Invade Next as "true"—at least as much as that word means in the contemporary U. S. political sphere.

And it seems this idea of what is true in America, or what is perceived as true in regards to the recent "war on terror," is what Where to Invade Next is really about. The McSweeney's website says this about the book: "[It] seeks to give a picture of just how our government could create a rationale for its next round of wars." Or, a reader might extrapolate, how the government created a rationale for the current round of wars. In Don't Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff talks about how framing an issue goes a long way to persuading an audience to perceiving that issue the way you want them to. If Iraq is continually discussed in the context of how it functions in global terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, an audience can hardly help thinking of the nation in terms of those issues. Another example is that when some violent actions are talked about in the context of terrorism and some in the context of combat, it is difficult to perceive the violent actions individually and outside of these contexts. What McSweeney's—and guest editor Stephen Elliot—might be showing us with the intricately researched and frightening document Where to Invade Next is just this: that war seems almost inevitable and even moral if presented in certain manners, and that we must be careful then to look at how our material is received—to look at how well-oiled the American military industrial machine is and just how many decisions we are actually allowed within it.

Or maybe that is not what Where to Invade Next is trying to tell us at all. Perhaps it is simply saying: Look out. This might be your future.

Travis Kurowski is the editor of Luna Park, and also works as assistant editor at Mississippi Review and as soliciting editor for Opium.