This was the world we lived in, where the demand for war was only outpaced by the supply of those willing to be fed into its ravenous belly. Fresh meat, fresh fodder for an imperial appetite without limits. There were few jobs for a man his age. The cost of college had skyrocketed and the prospects of making a living wage without an undergraduate degree had plummeted, particularly in a pandemic-stricken world that hardly “ended the War on Terror” or the “9/11 era,” and especially for Muslims and working-class men like John and that young boy, ready to feed himself to the war and its wolves in Washington.

SEED: Could anchor an essay on the quiet economic conscription behind military recruitment — the way cost of college and wage stagnation serve as a pipeline to enlistment. FICTION: The 'fresh meat, fresh fodder' framing offers a visceral register for a character caught between economic precarity and the imperial war machine.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 248