Without End

By Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa

Hooded and cloaked protesters, acting the part of Abu Ghraib victims, kneel in the street, heads bowed, beneath a banner pleading for the prosecution of the war criminals George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Another protester in a skeleton costume peers through a square hole in a piece of cardboard, on which is drawn a graphic figure in a gas mask exclaiming, “Welcome to Endless War.” A veterans’ contingent marches with banners urging other soldiers to “refuse to fight another rich man’s war.” More signs exhort leaders to spend money on education and jobs, not war. Still others make the calculation that when you add together layoffs, cutbacks, racism, and war, you get capitalism. Meanwhile, in front of the almost comically horrid neoclassical Hollywood and Highland mall, kids pose with actors dressed as Darth Vader and an Imperial Stormtrooper and point blasters and light sabers at camera-clicking mothers. Apparently even in the middle of a peace rally marking the eighth anniversary of the Iraq invasion, doting mothers know no irony.

The venerable activist Ron Kovic headlined the March 19 protest. The speeches, especially from the veterans’ groups, were moving and brought some focus to the largely inchoate sense in the crowd that, yes, war is bad and something had to be done. But what? We seem to have no idea how to get to peace. Perhaps it is this conceptual failure that explains why a spring march for peace in Hollywood brings out thousands of protesters but doesn’t garner a mention in the next day’s paper of record. Is 9/11 so long ago that war is just the way we live now?

So here we are, deep into the era of never-ending war, raising a generation of American kids about to enter their teens with no memory of a time not so long ago when we thought an era of never-ending, post-Cold War peace was upon us. Bin Laden is dead, and that’s well and good. Yet the fighting continues.

While our mission at Slake: Los Angeles is to cover a single city and its stories, for this third issue, we, like so many of our fellow Angelenos, feel compelled to look beyond Southern California for answers. Maybe protesters in the streets of Benghazi and Cairo, and even Madison, Wisconsin, can show us where to go from here. And so we’ve turned to journalists and essayists, painters and photographers, fiction writers and poets to examine peace and conflict around the world and also from within. Because sometimes the wars in our heads are the toughest battles of all.

—Joe Donnelly and Laurie Ochoa

ISSUE 3
WAR AND PEACE

Homecoming G.I. (Jordan Downs)
Art by Sandow Birk

Libertad
Fiction by Sandow Birk

The Sisters Brothers
Fiction by Patrick deWitt

A Man’s Rebaptism in a Town Called Jesus Cares
Poem by John Waldman

On the Benghazi Express
By Marc Cooper

In Praise of War
Fiction by Ben Ehrenreich

This Boy’s War
By Graham Metson

Doom Town
Photo essay by Ted Soqui

Gotterdammeringue
Fiction by Paul Sbrizzi

On Visiting My Mother in the Hospital and Not Finding Her There
Poem by Amy Scattergood

More Than a Feeling
Fiction by Brendan Schallert

The Great Wisconsin Solidarity Experiment
By Natasha Vargas-Cooper

The Edge and Back
Photo essay by Melodie McDaniel and Aaron Rose

The Last Freeway
By Hillel Aron

Eastsiders Project: Little Valley
Photo essay Gregory Bojorquez
Somewhere South of North Alvarado
Poem by Lucy Engelman

Bus Stops: A Memoir
By Owen Wiseman

American Girl
Fiction by Jerry Stahl

Antiepithalamium i
Poem by John Tottenham

Hamm’s Toe
Fiction by Joseph Mattson

War and Peace
Photo essay by Riley Kern

More
Poem by Ernest Hardy

Survivors Guild, Book Two
Graphic story by Matjames

68 Whiskey
By Hank Cherry

Googie among the Mormons
Fiction by Jervey Tervalon

General Relativity
Poem by Erica Zora Wrightson

In Bloom
Fiction by James Greer

Creation Myth
Poem by Laurie Wheeler

Tourmaline Revenge Sequence
Portfolio by Deedee Cheriel

This is an excerpt of an article originally published in Slake No. 3. To read the entire story, purchase or subscribe at shop.slake.la.