Shooting War

I just finished Shooting War today. It follows the life of Jimmy Burns, a left wing political blogger who happened to be shooting a video in front of a Starbucks that was blown to smithereens in a terrorist attack. He is then recruited by a cable news channel to cover the Iraq war. The story takes place in 2012.

It has some really great points to chew on. The first of course, is what would happen if McCain won? In the book McCain won the election and the US came to be at war with everyone, well almost everyone. This book would have been downright frightful if I had finished it before the election, now it seems to only be a possible path that can not happen now.

In the book they also speculated on what would the government do if we increased our military's occupations across the globe while simultaneously continued our trend for lower recruitment rates. Their answer; robotic soldiers made by Sony using the same technology for PS4. It is almost sickening how easily something like that could happen. One of the most moving scenes in the book is when our hero finds a hospital that has become the victim of one of these remote controlled monsters. It then cuts to a shot of the room where they are being controlled with a young man screaming at the screen. He looks and sounds just like any person playing a violent video game would except when he pulls the trigger someone really dies.

A more subtle message throughout the book is the cost of corporate globalization. Many of the scenes showing Middle Eastern war torn cities are flooded with corporate logos.

I think my favorite part was when Jimmy confronted the lead 'villian' Abu Adallah. Adallah is eating a bic mac and when Jimmy asks him about it Adallah says he likes to eat the food of his enemys before battle and that he feels "sated yet slightly disgusted with himself".