war | ZETEO

E.E. Cummings, Self-Portrait, 1958, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

Cummings, No Bliss, Robespierre, Optimism

February 6, 2018 by William Eaton

The present short text is also a calling card or an example of one of the kinds of piece that Zeteo is looking to publish. For more in this regard, see the Addendum. now air is air, and thing is thing:no bliss of heavenly earth beguiles our spirits Or so, E.E. Cummings wrote in the poem that begins with these words. From a Marxist, Communist Manifesto perspective, we might be said to be making progress (or to have been making […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Anselm Kiefer, disaster, E.E. Cummings, hope, Orwell, poetry, science, war

Leave a comment

A Syrian man holds lifeless body of his son, killed by Syrian Army, Aleppo, Syria, October 3, 2013, photo by Manu Brabo - AP

Sontag, Hell, Thinking, Politics

December 20, 2016 by William Eaton

To designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aleppo, Camus, Donald Trump, Freud, Goya, hell, Hillary Clinton, La Fontaine, Marx, politics, Susan Sontag, Sympathy for the Devil, war

Olive Pierce: Children, Cambridge, Iraq

September 13, 2016 by William Eaton

By您好, yangyang Geng Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds. — Michael Ignatieff[1] It requires constant vigilance to see people as they are. — Olive Pierce The Portraits of the Jefferson Park Housing Project in Cambridge and No Easy Roses Olive Pierce was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and died on May 23, 2016. She was a lifelong photographer and political activist. She was educated at Vassar College and, in 1948, she traveled with […]

Categories: Article • Tags: adolescence, childhood, children, girls, Iraq, photography, war

Leave a comment

Photo of third suicide bomber behind Stade de France blasts - photo released by French police, 22 Nov 2015 - AFP; Getty Images

Numantia, Cervantes, Vicksburg, Terrorists

June 2, 2016 by William Eaton

. . . though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. — U.S. Grant, writing, years later, about the Confederate surrender at Appomattox[1] Ellos con duros estatutos fieros y con su extraña condición avara pusieron tan gran yugo a nuestros cuellos que forzados salimos […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Cervantes, civil war, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roman history, Spain, terrorism, theater, Vicksburg, war

Leave a comment

Bible / Translation / Kushner / Genesis

October 29, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Biblical Uncertainties I came to Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God well prepared, having, a month before the book was published, heard her talk about her arduous ten-year writing process. When I first learned of her topic, Biblical translation, I expected a discussion of the typical complexities of rendering a work in a language other than its original. But she began her talk with a riveting revelation. Kushner, having grown up in a Hebrew-speaking home in an Orthodox community […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aviya Kushner, Genesis, The Bible, translation, war

Leave a comment

Cardinal, Hector, Iliad, Family

October 22, 2015 by William Eaton

In a tree outside my kitchen window, they built their nest: the male cardinal in brilliant scarlet, the female, a subdued reddish brown. For days they labored, ferrying bits of pine needles, twigs, and leaves to a chosen spot in the middle, buried within the green. “Tree” is perhaps not entirely accurate, as it lacked a trunk, roots far into the earth, branches sprouting from the top. This was more a glorified bush, but the spot they selected was hidden […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: birds, family, Homer, The Iliad, war

Leave a comment

The Possibility for Nuclear Non-Proliferation

July 26, 2015 by fritztucker

Iran and the US have finally reached a deal to limit Iran’s potential to develop nuclear weapons, in return for the US lifting economic sanctions against Iran. The deal includes constant video surveillance of Iran’s nuclear facilities, similar to that in the UN brokered peace treaty ending the 1996-2006 Maoist insurgency in Nepal. Skeptics of the US-Iran deal might point to the failure to demilitarize Germany after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. There are, however, at least two key differences between the recent US-Iran nuclear deal and […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: History, Iran, nuclear weapons, politics, treaty, war

Leave a comment

The Death of Free Speech

February 16, 2015 by fritztucker

(Warning: The above video depicts or describes the murder of several individuals, including children.) The recent shooting in Copenhagen, like most terrorist acts, was reprehensible, unforgivable, ineffective, and immature. At the same time, holding a free speech conference in Copenhagen seems somewhat masturbatory. According to the Committee To Protect Journalists, no Danish journalists have been killed since at least 1992; whereas the most deadly country in the world for journalists in the last two decades has been Iraq, with Syria in distant […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: civil rights, Copenhagen, ethics, free speech, media, politics, war

Leave a comment

The Known

December 16, 2014 by fritztucker

The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive My curiosity piqued by the newly released Senate report on CIA torture, I just watched Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known. The part where Donald Rumsfeld metaphorically chalks up a victory to himself is a pretty good metaphor for the entire documentary (2:46-3:46 above). Morris asks Rumsfeld about torture memos, but not the testimonies of Guantanamo detainees that have been public for nearly a decade, many of which make torture […]

Categories: Fritz Tucker, ZiLL • Tags: crime, death, Donald Rumsfeld, Errol Morris, film, Guantanamo, History, politics, torture, war