25 January 2007

Breaking the Chains



In a perfect world, I would be more worried about the revelation that Georgian officials recently thwarted the transfer of Russian weapons-grade uranium for the second time in less than two years. Georgian security officials arrested a Russian man carrying a little under four ounces of the nasty stuff, breaking the smuggling chain.

There was no word where he was going.

The last shipment they nailed in Georgia, a traditional part of the Silk Road to the east, was about seven ounces headed for Armenia in 2003.

It is not enough to make a bomb, mind you, but the old rule from the Customs people is that they are lucky to stop ten percent of the illegal stuff coming into the country. Oleg Khinsagov, the man they busted, claimed it was just a teaser for much more.

At that rate, there could be plenty of enriched material floating around.  The Nagasaki weapon, the prototype of the popular implosion-style device, had a fissionable core about the size of a softball.

Thankfully, there is more to it all, though a scientist at the Department of Energy once told me it was not much more complex than a color television set. You remeber those, don't you?

Considering where Armenia is located, it is enough to make you think. There is a considerable market for nuclear things in the neighborhood, and an agenda to use them once acquired.

It makes one long for the days when things were more of a human scale, though as a species we have a history for tailoring the horrid to fit any situation, and utilizing only selective memory to account for it.

One recent example was the swearing-in ceremony for the new Congress. It was tinged in mild xenophobia; I say the word “mild” with some trepidation, since I do not know the sting of discrimination except vicariously.

The closest I got was living in Hawaii, and being a minority in America. My Dad didn't even recognize when he visited once, and a clerk ignored him at the department store.

He though he had been a victim of random rudeness, and I had to explain that it was because we were H'aolis, the word that describes The Breathless Ones, and representatives of the oppressor class that seized those in lovely islands for the American empire.

Dad still thought it was rude, and I had to agree.

I don't walk around burdened down with guilt, though some do in these painfully correct times. Empires rise and fall, great cultures interact and clash. In the lesser Britain of today, there are those to whom the great Empire is a racialist embarrassment. There are those here who are convinced the American economic equivalent must be brought low.

I don't feel that way, but I do believe that the curse of slavery is the worst and most pervasive institution that was ever permitted to exist on these shores. I also feel that my great-great grandfather's service in the war of liberation gets me a golden asterisk, at least.

Life goes on.

The controversy over the swearing-in ceremony was fomented by a fellow named Ted Sampley. He was outraged by the use of a particular copy of the Muslim Holy Book, the Qu'ran, to swear in the first follower of the True Faith to be elected to the Congress of the United States, the Hon. Keith Ellison.

Representative Ellison was sent to the House by the people of the 5th District of Minnesota. It is their choice, and certainly we have sent people to Congress who have believed all manner of things, some of them legal.

What got Mr. Sampley going was not the fact that Rep. Ellison is an African-American. It couldn't be. It is the issue of Mr. Ellison's faith, and the book on which he took the oath of office.

As is the ancient practice, members of Congress can request the loan of certain volumes from the Library across the street they established to serve the needs of that institution.

The Quran that Rep. Ellison borrowed once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, and who has an imposing monument on the Tidal Basin here in town.

That is where things start to go high and to the right on the matter. For his part, Rep. Ellison seemed to be harking back to a golden era of enlightenment, in which the Founding Fathers considered the works of the world in an egalitarian manner.

Others pointed out that the Mr. Jefferson was studying the book to get an idea of what made the Bey of Algiers tick, since he seemed to be of the habit of enslaving American sailors and holding them for ransom.

Still others asked about Mr. Jefferson's complex moral system, in which he deployed military might overseas to free slaves, while he had some right in his own house he could have started on.

I don't know about that, though I have some thoughts. There is a lot to the issue, and may in fact connect us to a struggle that continues today, and now has added nuclear weapons to the mix.

But it is a work day, and I am afraid you are going to have to wait till tomorrow for more on the chains that link Rep. Ellison, Mr. Jefferson, the Bey of Algiers and the White Slaves of the Maghreb.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com


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