Jonathan Shay's books need to be read, Achilles In Vietnam and Odysseus in America ... Please read at least one of them.

While visiting me in Bellingham, just before we invaded Iraq, a friend of mine from Austria said, "No one should be allowed to start a war who has not participated (on the front lines) in a war and seen the death up close." Because he was a middle-aged Austrian, I took his words very seriously.

Why did we allow Picasso's Guernica hanging in the U.N. to be shrouded on the very day the Bush administration went to the U.N. to request a war?



GUERNICA

I don't paint to decorate apartments. Painting
is an instrument of war. --Pablo Picasso, 1937


When the bombers came over, the startled air
Began to vibrate, the earth began to shake.
There are no bombs or planes in the finished work,
Nothing about the scope of the massacre--

Only his drawings of pain-distorted figures:
A dying horse, a long arm clutching a lamp,
A bull unmoved by the grief of a pieta.
More intense than those sepia photographs

Sent from Spain by telephoto, that showed
Bloodshed on the front page of Ce Soir,
He caught forever the stark, unspeakable horror.

He didn't need the bombs or planes or blood--
Only a canvas, twelve by twenty-four
To illustrate the ravages of war.

--David George

"No one escapes the ravages of war behind closed doors."