Epstein's Shadow: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Ethics of Naming War
Epstein's Shadow: Secrecy, Scandal, and the Ethics of Naming War This essay reads the provocative premise—“This war could very well be called the Epstein Coverup War” (Prof. Clarita Carlos)—as a diagnostic metaphor: a claim about secrecy, elite complicity, and narrative displacement that demands both literary attention and forensic skepticism. I treat the phrase as an interpretive lens, not a literal historiographical verdict. An academic anecdote: how metaphors do the work of inquiry In a seminar I once attended, a senior scholar likened geopolitics to a palimpsest: every new inscription erases but does not wholly obliterate the old. The phrase “Epstein Coverup War” functions similarly—an evocative manuscript that overlays contemporary conflict with the residue of scandal, secrecy, and the moral economy of elites. To call a war by that name is to insist that the politics of concealment are not incidental but constitutive of the conflict’s meaning. Humane and erudite reading: secr...