The initial photographs of the Hamas-Israeli war arrived, as if out of nowhere, like a kick to the chest. I thought of the American poet Walt Whitman’s stuttering shocked reaction to America’s Civil War. “The dead, the dead, the dead,” he keened, “Our dead — South or North, ours all, all, all, all.”Another, later American poet and political activist, Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), might have been less surprised by the present catastrophe and the images it’s generating. “It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our other histories,“ she coolly wrote in the late 1940s, early in the bitter long Cold War that followed World War II. And one of her specific points of reference is the American War in Vietnam, which she directly experienced.

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Persons: Walt Whitman’s, “, Muriel Rukeyser Organizations: Hamas, Museum of Modern Locations: York, American, Vietnam