Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (review)

A WOMAN READING THE EVENING TRIBUNE NEWSPAPER TO A LITTLE GIRL. 1913. Photograph. Courtesy of the San Diego History Center.

Dirty Wars is a profoundly ambitious book showcasing John Beck's considerable scholarly and critical abilities. As its subtitle suggests, the book is not about war, per se, but about how a variety of western writers have embedded in their texts the destructive effects of weapons testing on landscape and the people who call that landscape home. Using the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 as a baseline, Beck establishes a causal relationship between the maintenance of national security and the emergence of the military-industrial complex, an entity driven as much by profit as by the desire to secure national boundaries and to ensure domestic tranquility.

Toward this end, Beck offers deep readings of approximately thirty texts, nearly all of them fiction, and argues that they constitute a Foucaultian "counterhistory" of the US government's malignant presence in the arid Southwest. This counterhistory, he argues, "interrogates the establishment of a permanent military-industrial presence in the area and explores the repercussions of this presence as it reconfigures social, political, and economic relations at local, regional, national, and international levels" (7). Beck implies that while some wars are indeed dirtier than others, eventually all wars become "dirty." For instance, the military's response at the outset of World War II seems to be "just," but it is soon morally compromised by Executive Order 9066, calling for internment of Japanese Americans, and it is ultimately corrupted by Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Of all the writers represented in this study, the work of Cormac McCarthy is featured extensively, followed by detailed analyses of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977) and Almanac of the Dead (1991) and Don DeLillo's End Zone (1972) and Underworld (1997). Moreover, the subject of the psychological and spiritual repercussions of Japanese internment, as it is expressed through the work of five writers, is likewise closely examined.

The net result is a compelling application of deconstructionist criticism that renders a disquieting vision of the American Southwest as victim of more than six decades of abuse and—to use one of Beck's favorite words—abjection, all justified by national security but in fact fueled by the greed of the military-industrial complex.

Indeed, it is difficult to quarrel with many of Beck's assertions. However, some readers may see hints of Beck's political biases here as well. For example, referring to the hero of It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Beck mistakenly identifies him as George Murphy, the neo-conservative politician of Reaganesque inclination, instead of George Bailey. And while Beck is spot-on in his denouncement of the effects of past weapons testing toxicity, it would appear he is unaware of current environmental safeguards such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Facility Compliance Act, or the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act—all of which closely monitor military waste stream management. One could also quibble with Beck's pleonastic style which makes Henry James and Faulkner seem like Hemingway.

These observations notwithstanding, Dirty Wars is a profoundly useful critical tool. Beck's exegetical skills are to be applauded and his daunting effort appreciated.

John Beck's Dirty Wars was awarded the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award at the 2010 WLA Conference.