It was the 19th of June, 1865. The blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico glittered in the brilliant sun. The sand was white as sugar on the barrier island. Major General Gordon Granger, late of the Army of the Cumberland, read General Order #3 to the people of the former Confederate city of Galveston, Texas.

Granger had arrived by sea, and his credentials as a liberator were impeccable. He was credited with saving General Thomas, the Rock of the Chickamauga, in the pivotal battle that could have ended the Union Army in the West.

Granger’s beard was wild as a jihadi and his eyes were fierce when he read the Order. The words went this way: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

There was more to the General Order, including the admonition that the new Freedmen remain where they were, and not collect at the military posts of the conquering Union Army, and not to expect welfare from the Yankees. As the revisionists among us would quickly point out, the General Order only applied to those in involuntary servitude in areas not previously controlled by the Unites States, and was intended as a weapon against those states in rebellion against the Union.

At least it had been. The General Order was a couple years late in delivery. The Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, where there were sensibilities to be accommodated in the divided Border States that stayed in the Union. Much as Mr. Lincoln might have liked to end slavery once and for all, the Emancipation Proclamation was only the first step on a journey that is not yet complete.
It finally arrived in Texas with General Granger, better late than never.

The people who were liberated in Texas began to call the day of Granger’s address “Junteenth,” and to celebrate it annually. It is a holiday that is below the radar screen of much of the nation, though it is gaining in popularity. It is already considered the equivalent of the Fourth of July in some quarters.

I am not aware that is here, in the polyglot former Confederate state adjacent to the District of Columbia. I heard no mention of a parade over the weekend. It is another Monday, and the start of a busy week that will usher in the start of the real summer. The longest day will be Wednesday, when the sun will hang over the aqua waters of Big Pink’s pool until closing. Then we start the long march back into darkness, ending it by swimming once more in the dark.

That is already in progress, elsewhere. I first took note of Juneteenth back a decade or more ago. It is interesting to see what else was going on then. My old adversaries in North Korea have erected a multi-stage rocket that we have named the Taepo-dong 2. It is one of those odd technological devices that is actually a political thing.

The secretive Northerners had last fired one of these things in 1998, three years after a June that saw me sitting in an uncomfortable chair in Pyongyang and chatted with the Chairman of the North Korean Workers Party. I fond him to be a jolly fellow, for an implacable hermit communist. I left Korea with the certainty that he would do anything short of national suicide to preserve his regime, just as I would have, if our back was against the wall and it was the Constitution at stake.

The reports coming in this Junteenth say that the Koreans have filled the rocket with liquid fuel.

The fuel is a highly corrosive substance, and most difficult to remove. That is why we stopped using it on our ICBMs. It is thus my assessment that they will hurl their political statement toward the heavens within the next day or two, certainly by the solstice. There is an imperative that begins when the fuel is in the tank, and begins to attack the nozzles of the engines.

Orbital mechanics being what they are, the launch will cross Japan, headed up and to the east. In 1998, the political rocket worked, and no one got hurt. As we know by long and painful experience, even the best-prepared space launches can sometimes come to grief.
As the Iranians attempt to duplicate the Korean’s nuclear inoculation against Western military action, the Northerners want to remind us that they can loft one of their hypothetical nuclear weapons across the Pacific and all the way to America.

I certainly can’t blame them. The chance of the Koreans hitting anything in particular here, hypothetical or not, is relatively low. The US nuclear counter-force is so massive that an exchange seems improbable, given the prevailing winds. All the debris would blow eastward cross Japan.

Being under both arcs, Tokyo is understandably quite agitated.

It would be nice if the modern equivalent of General Granger could land at the East Sea port of Wonsan, wading up out of the surf to read a General Order freeing the peasants from their coldly calculating rulers in Pyongyang.

But we tried that after the North snapped at us, and the result was a long and ugly stalemate.

Now there is the idea of nuclear weapons, atop a symbolic rocket that has real moving parts.

The count-down is beginning on this Junteenth, and I do not think it can be stopped. The only question is what the North thinks is at the end of it. They can’t think this is real, can they?

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com