HUMAN SMOKE

author:
NICHOLSON BAKER

Military History
576 pages
Simon & Schuster

Since the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, there have been approximately 57,568 books published with the intent of making you feel crappy about America. I know this because I have read a few of them (check out Tim Weiner’s CIA-disaster opus, Legacy of Ashes, if you’re in the mood to feel especially low). Nicholson Baker, the author of Human Smoke, has not deviated from the task of his colluders, among them Susan Jacoby, Richard Hofstadter, and former Vice President, Al Gore.

If you were educated in America, either publicly or privately, you’ve had a version of World War II beaten into your head by the pugilistic nuns and recovering hippies that plague our school system. Here’s the truncated version: Hitler, an anti-Semitic madman with little background in politics and terrible people skills, rose to prominence in the reviled nation of Germany on the platform of eradicating Jewish culture and its influence on Europe. Then Japan bombed us for no reason, and we, in due turn, nuked them. Afterwards, we hooked up with the rest of the Allies to decimate the Nazi army, but we felt awkward around the Russians and then the Cold War happened.

Other than the bit about Hitler, Baker turns the rest of WWII’s misinformation on its head throughout Human Smoke, which isn’t really a book per se, more a compendium of various newspaper articles and propaganda leaflets issued during the ’30s & ’40s. The meticulous research that went into creating Human Smoke is mind-blowing—I myself couldn’t stop imagining Baker leafing through thousands of pages of The New York Times, grinning like a madmen when he found something to support his thesis (he thinks war is bad, by the way) while stroking the hairs of his robust beard.

Human Smoke is what an old English professor of mine would refer to as “deep, cognitive reading” (see what I mean about hippies?). It’s not overly academic; it’s just meaty. And it’s hard. It’s hard to take in that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—with planes built in Burbank, CA no less—after eight years of us performing military exercises over their heads. It’s hard to take in that our most lionized President, FDR, was a warmonger every bit as anti-Semitic as Hitler (he even worked out a program with the Dean of Harvard to lower the admission rate of Jews). And it’s hard to take in that the “greatest generation” were duped by their government almost as badly as we’ve been by Bush. I don’t know whether I feel bad for Tom Hanks, or if I think he should be dragged out into the street and shot for all this Band of Brothers/Saving Private Ryan propaganda that’s been shoved down our throats.

The book will leave you both smarter and emptier. It documents the rise of our still kicking Military-Industrial complex and the personalities that built it. But, as Eisenhower warned us, did the creation of our “armaments industry of vast proportions” really signal the end of civilization? After reading Human Smoke, it is damn near impossible to feel any other way.

purchase at Amazon.com