‘I find reading the Iliad almost intolerable: that orgy of battles, wounds and death, that stupid and endless war, the puerile anger of Achilles. The Odyssey, however, has a human dimension, its poetry grows from a reasonable hope: the end of the war and exile, the world rebuilt on the foundation of a peace gained through justice.’
Primo Levi, The Search for Roots.
Primo Levi is always a tonic—hopeful in his very acerbity. At a time like this, when the world—literally the whole world—waits on words, it is bracing to hear hope extolled, and exhilarating to think hard about the foundations of peace and how we might lay them down.
In March 1991, as we were preparing the first issue of Eureka Street, Cartoonist John Spooner drew a cover for us (there it is, above, in the almost infinite regress that these plus-ça-change-times dictate).
Because monthly magazines are not news bulletins we gave him specifications to cover all bases: something time-proof, please, to catch the anxious edge of hope and of peace in a period of international uncertainty and manipulated media frenzy (remember the nightly bulletins with their precision bombings looking for all the world like computer games?). Something also to suggest that living can’t be suspended while leaders manoeuvre. Spooner took his ludicrous brief like the lawyer he once trained to be and the great cartoonist he manifestly is, and came up with the goods.
Cartoonists (and Australia has the best in the world) provide a tough registration of the way things are. In their economy of line they manage to get so much in—ironies, hypocrisies, political grey areas, the facts behind the facts, the deals done. Their work could not be more distinct from the syndicated,
massaged, pooled and partial daily reporting that now so constrains dissemination of the news. Often they are the only ones routinely plumbing the depth of issues, and the only ones with tools sharp enough to point a moral that is not mere preaching. Fortunately, there are others who will lay it on the line, some of them journalists, some professional analysts, some statesmen.
On 12 February, veteran US Senator Robert Byrd gave a speech from the floor, calling his fellow Senators to account: ‘On this February day, as the nation stands at the brink of battle, every American on some level must be contemplating the horrors of war.
‘Yet, this Chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully