[Oe List ...] Fwd: Monday OpEd from Jaime

Sat Apr 20 16:20:09 PDT 2013

The usual caveat: interested, welcome; not, see you at the bend.

 j'aime la vie

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all, Celebrate!

-----Original Message-----
From: Jaime R Vergara <jrvergarajr2031 at aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera at saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago at saipantribune.com>; editor <editor at saipantribune.com>
Sent: Sat, Apr 20, 2013 9:12 pm
Subject: Monday OpEd from Jaime

Temarlan & Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

With the reporteddeath of 26-year old suspect number 1 and the capture of 19-year old suspectnumber 2 of the recent Boston bombing blasts, the speculative field is ripewith both blooming spring flowers and wilted winter leftovers.  

Our interest is anarrow one, purely etymological in the attributive sense.  

14th century “Timur” to the Wiki crowd, “Temarlane”is the Mongolian scourge of Central Asia, known in China as “Timudgin”.   History is replete with his influence, atonce, artistic and destructive, from the Urals to the Himalayas, the Caucasusto the Khinggan Range of Heilongjiang.  ChechnyanMoslems, forced to move to Kyrgystan when Stalin still cast his shadow on Moscow’scobblestones, named their offsprings in honor of the Mongol leader of mixed Turkicethnicity.

Such was the case of suspectnumber 1, named Temarlan, reportedly a 2nd year Med student married to a Rhode Island girl, and father to a3-year old daughter.  A media outletcould not help but blare a headline that Temarlan’s wife was from NK.  Given the prominence of North Korea in recentnews, it immediately caught our attention. NK turned out to be North Kingstown in RI south of Boston.

On his namesake forthe history buffs:  Timur wanted to restore Genghis Khan’s  Mongol empire.  A devout Muslim, he called himself theSword of Islam. He wasgenerous in sharing war booty to members of his multi-ethnic armies. He became themost powerful ruler in the Muslim world, defeating rulers of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans, and aDelhi Sultanate.  He defeated Christianknights at Smyrna, and attempted to restore the Yuan dynasty inChina.  Known for leading the GoldenHorde against the Cossacks, he is dubbed a “terrorist” in western history books.

Younger brother suspect number 2was caught hiding and bleeding on a backyard parked boat in Watertown, MA,where the town literally had to shut down and stay indoors to accomplish thetask.  He was named “Dzhokhar” at birth, presumablyafter the first President of independent Chechnya, himself meeting a violentdeath by laser-guided satellite missile in a 1996 assassination while he was onhis cell phone.

Checknya’s desire to separatefrom the Russian Federation of States after the dissolution of the Soviet Unionmet with the strong-willed objection of Vladimir Putin who headed the KGB atthe time.  Putin now presides overRussia.  Other than setting a bad exampleto other States who might be inclined to seek secession from the Federation,Chechnya was also a hub for the Russian oil industry, an asset Russia couldhardly give up.  It was also caught inbetween the definition of Georgia-Russian relations, and in an oil rich region,it can hardly avoid the violence that now mars north and south of the Caucasus mountainrange between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The brothers’ family name is Tsarnaev.  “Tsar” of the first syllable is to theByzantine what “Ceasar “was to the Romans, and “Kaiser” to the Germans.  If one has not gotten the picture yet thatthe brothers might carry highly “political” consciousness just by their names,we’ve missed the billboard for the weeds.

Of course, just because one isnamed Mohammed or Abdullah does not automatically stereotype one to a definite corner. Is our musing pertinent to figuring out the“why” of the Boston bombing?  Nope.  But the Press coverage, henceforth, willcover a lot of historical terrain unfamiliar to the regular reader.

Four analytical results havealready emerged.  

There is the jihadist foreignintervention strain, the brothers being of the moralistic bent now ragingacross Arab Spring, beyond and distinct from the traditional division of theSunnis and the Shiites.

Then there is the rightist/leftistdichotomy, irrelevant from our view, but dear to diehard ideologues.  Given the suspects’ names, this is a difficultminefield to traverse, but there will be those who will find a way to mark thevarious blasts.

We have the emotional stabilitycrowd that will armchair us to endless psychoanalysis till kingdom come.  Culturally integrated and acculturated guys onregular baseball caps and backpacks have to be extremely schizophrenic to meritthe psychoanalyst’s attention.

The fourth is the fraud claim,already aired by an aunt who testifies to the innocence of her nephews, andstudents at Dzhokhar’s school who swear that the Chechnyan was in school whenthe blasts went off.

News that the White House isdeporting a Saudi Arabian is allegedly being espoused by no less than GlennBeck.  The finger pointing, the smear onthe foggy mirror, is multi-directional and the media field day has alreadybegun.

I’ve lit candles for theconfirmed dead: 8-yr old Martin Richard, 29-yr old Krystelle Campbell, and theBoston U graduate student Lu Lingzi of Shenyang. Their innocence reminds us ofthe global complicity of victimhood in our time.  

A fourth big candle goes to theWaco, Texas fertilizer plant explosion victims. A fifth is for those affected this week by the tremor that revisited thesame Sichuan area quaked in 2008.  

The tail end of winter is stillwith us.  Our heart keeps company withthe cold.

 j'aime la vie

Yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today, participate.  In all, 
Celebrate!

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