Quick happy-go-Monday plug for Chris Hedges's War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which seeks to understand what happens to a culture when nationalism and militarism sweep through the population. Using the former Yugoslavia, Israel/Palestine, the Falklands War, and the Gulf War as his major points of reference, the book was too early to really discuss post-9/11 America—but the cultural form that Hedges identifies certainly seems to fit our moment as well.

The national enemy is first identified racially, a brutal and irrational Them who understand only violence and can never be reasoned with. Their acts are heinous and unforgivable; ours are resolute and morally praiseworthy. But the true enemy is just as immediately internal: the immigrant, the intellectual, the dissident, the artist. These are the fifth columnists who must be rooted out. Selective amenesia becomes the dominant mode of history—the national myth is now the only thing remembered and the only thing worth talking about. Soldiers, scorned and suspect in peacetime, suddenly become the highest and unimpeachable exemplum of honor and virtue. Hedges does a particularly good job addressing the complicity of cultural institutions in drumming up war fever, especially the complicity of the press, as well as in describing the rush of pure adrenaline, of existential meaningfulness, that overtakes the warring population:

War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty and comradeship. It waits, especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation in war with our own destruction. The ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis—to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes.

War throws us into a frenzy in which all human life, including our own, seems secondary. The atavism of war creates us in war's image.

And when peace comes at last, war is simply the bad dream from which we have all awakened, which nobody wants to think about, much less talk about—setting the stage for it all to recur, again and again.