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GAITHER STEWART
GAITHER STEWART is a Senior Special Contributing Editor at Cyrano’s Journal and a seasoned professional journalist and essayist.
A native of Asheville, N.C., Gaither is also Cyrano’s Journal's European Correspondent. He left journalism four years ago in order to write fiction full-time. He has lived most of his life in Europe, chiefly in Germany and Italy. For many years he was the Italian correspondent of the Rotterdam daily newspaper, ALGEMEEN DAGBLAD. His has been a varied life: from university studies in Slavistics and political science in the United States and Germany, to correspondent for European and American radios, to public relations for Italian corporations, to full correspondent for a major European newspaper. His journalistic stories have appeared in the press of West and East Europe. During the last two years his fiction has appeared in a number of English language literary publications. In addition to Cyrano, his essays and reports are widely read on many Internet venues, including Online Journal, The People’s Voice, and other sites. His collections of short stories, Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger and Once In Berlin were published by Wind River Press. (www.windriverpress.com ).
Gaither currently resides in the hills of north Rome with his wife, Milena.
Below we list a sampler of his work on our site.
—Patrice Greanville
Just East of Eden—Iran: Images and Reflections
While the drums of war roll and the US President travels the Middle East while his warships are parked along Iran’s shores, questions and more questions emerge from the disastrous past of US-Iran relations. In this climate and after the great lie about Iraq, one is justified to wonder if Iran’s nuclear ambitions or any Iranian acts at all are the problem. The answer seems obvious-not at all. Oil is the issue.
ITALY, ITALIANS AND SILVIO BERLUSCONI— A CASE OF ANYTHING FOR POWER
HOW MUCH LAUGHTER AND TEARS, consternation and gnashing of teeth Silvio Berlusconi has provoked in Italy, Europe and the world since he entered politics in 1994, or as he colorfully described it with the sports terminology he loves, “he entered the game.” He coined the quip, in Italian scendere in campo, with in mind his championship soccer club, Milan, “taking the field” to win another international cup.
I AM UNEASY writing about Jorge Luis Borges (b.1899, Buenos Aires, d. 1986, Geneva). Borges wrote so much and I have read relatively little of his early works. Yet his world of myth and fantasy and magic and metaphysics has so influenced me in the past that since I am here in his city of Buenos Aires where I can feel Borges the man rather than only Borges the writer I have known from afar, I feel I have to record something about him in flesh and blood.
European Union: A Clique of Multinationals or a Union of Peoples?
In a disturbing cartoon, security inspectors at a US entry point welcome a neatly dressed, probably European foreign passenger. Expeditiously they isolate him, efficiently fingerprint him and record his eyes, then medically they pore into his every orifice before photographing and x-raying him, after which, the dazed and confused tourist or businessman is pushed toward the exit under a sign reading: “Welcome to the USA.”
It’s all so bizarre. No wonder our thoughts sometimes take such crazy turns. I started this piece on “comfort and ease” and spontaneously came back to the subject of torture. I recall once a few years ago I was sitting in the comfort and ease of my living room when on my TV screen appeared the infamous photographs of the American woman soldier with a cigarette hanging from her lips torturing prisoners in the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq.
The Crowded Rightwing Life Rafts or The Great Social-Political Divide: Left or Right
(Rome) After the fall of Soviet Communism some political scientists came to believe that the terms Left and Right no longer made sense, that they were actually the same. Before his death in 1980 former Communist Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to speak of Left and Right as “empty boxes,” as if they had been buried by Stalinism. Other political thinkers began using in their place terms such as progressive and conservative.
My Italian Rizzoli-Larousse Encyclopedia dedicates seven long, tight columns to libertá. Italian, French, Spanish, and other languages are limited to the one Latin root, libertas, while English is blessed with both liberty and freedom, the latter from the Anglo-Saxon freodom and Middle English fredom. To my ear, freedom rings stronger, harsher and more deeply rooted than the romantic and heroic “liberty,” probably because of the historic echo of liberté, egalité, fraternité. Rizzoli defines liberty—therefore also freedom—in many diverse connotations and usages, from constitutional freedoms to freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear.
