Book: A force that gives the campus meaning

Something missing in the educational experience students receive at this university is a common experience. The First-Year Book program, which offers freshmen a free book they can read together, tries to fill this gap. The trick is to find a book that is relevant; one that's not too arduous to read and can interest people from all walks of life.

Provost Nariman Farvardin hit it out of the park with this year's selection: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges. I read the book over the past few days, shouting quotes aloud to my roommates and doubting the school wanted everyone to read such a radical and insightful work.

War Is a Force is partly a memoir of Hedges' career as a war correspondent, and partly a theory about the seductive and destructive power of combat. Hedges doesn't pull any punches, and the provost showed a great deal of courage - or a comparable lack of reading comprehension - in selecting his book.

Hedges writes in the introduction, "Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide hijackers learn that huge explosions and death above a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication? They have mastered the language. They understand that the use of disproportionate violence against innocents is a way to make a statement. We leave the same calling cards."

This is pretty extreme material for the university to be endorsing and distributing. Don't get me wrong, I think it's both insightful and accurate - but I wonder what the administration expects us to get from it.

On the first page of the book is an insert from Farvardin that says, "At a time when the United States is engaged in war, author Chris Hedges offers the university community the opportunity to examine the meaning of war, how wars begin, and the impact war has on our national psyche." But Hedges doesn't just give us the opportunity; he gives us his firsthand experience. And what he says is unambiguous. Hedges writes that war is meaningless. He writes that it's started by the lies of politicians and turns all of us into blood-thirsty and racist "necrophiliacs."

If we believe Hedges (and I certainly do), then what are we to do, especially within our university community? The university is not exempt from the long tentacles of the military-industrial complex. University logos adorn ROTC posters and military recruiters stalk the halls. Anyone who walks into the engineering buildings need only look at the walls to see the companies that profit from bloodshed. They're the corporations that fund our school, and they don't do it to be charitable. They do it because they need the next generation of engineers to make better bombs, planes and missiles - as if there were such things. Farvardin is the former dean of the engineering school; I wonder if he thought about why military contractors donate to the university when he read the book.

We are complicit in the structures Hedges deplores. He didn't write a book to open discussion - he wrote a polemic. War Is a Force is the agonized scream of someone who can't watch any more mindless death. It deserves to be read by every student on the campus. Stop by the Mitchell Building and grab a copy. Maybe after you read it, you'll look around you and ask some questions Farvardin and the rest of the administration aren't ready for.

Malcolm Harris is a sophomore English major and government and politics. He can be reached at harrisdbk@gmail.com.