“DMZ is a book of real highs and lows for me.
The lows come in because sometimes I’m straight-up lost in the plot. Which I think is common. Because a lot of the plots revolve around big conspiracies with double-crosses and unknown entities, how is a person ever going to keep it all straight?
The highs are situations like the end of this volume. In essence, a lot of bullshit is blamed on the wrong guy, a soldier in this case. And I think that’s where DMZ speaks to something very real and true.
The big, over-arching ideas in DMZ that mirror our own, the ones about corporations being in bed with government and essentially profiting from war and violence is just old news. It’s sickening news, it’s the oldest story in the book (I’m sure some asshole made a shitload of money selling armor to knights and shit too), which is why it doesn’t do a whole lot for me.
But the ideas that get smaller, when the book focuses in on individuals, I think that’s where it finds its footing.
This book in particular sends a couple messages in a very effective way.
1. It really IS easier to write off victims of war violence who are categorized as collateral damage when they speak a different language, wear different clothes, and live in places that just look so Other. I’m sorry, I have a bad brain, but it’s much easier for me to not imagine someone as having a life when that life is so different from my own, and when all you really see is quick flashes of streets filled with rubble. Setting the book in Manhattan, the America-est of American cities, flips that whole idea.
2. People really talk a lot about supporting the troops, but I think that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the military works. I’m not going to get into it on a big scale here, but here’s what I want to say: You do not support troops by giving the people who boss them around carte blanche. Underequipped, undertrained, outnumbered, young men are not done any favors by you not questioning the people who send them to fight. As an American citizen, the government is your employee. If you owned a McDonald’s and saw a manager assigning one of the cashiers a useless, pointlessly dangerous task, you would not just let that happen for the sake of maintaining harmony at that McDonald’s.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. “