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@aol.com>
To: jayvee_vallejera <jayvee_vallejera@saipantribune.com>; mark_rabago <mark_rabago@saipantribune.com>; editor <editor@saipantribune.com>
Sent: Sat, Apr 20, 2013 9:12 pm
Subject: Monday OpEd from Jaime

Temarlan & Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
 
With the reported death of 26-year old suspect number 1 and the capture of 19-year old suspect number 2 of the recent Boston bombing blasts, the speculative field is ripe with both blooming spring flowers and wilted winter leftovers. 
 
Our interest is a narrow 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, at once, artistic and destructive, from the Urals to the Himalayas, the Caucasus to the Khinggan Range of Heilongjiang.  Chechnyan Moslems, forced to move to Kyrgystan when Stalin still cast his shadow on Moscow’s cobblestones, named their offsprings in honor of the Mongol leader of mixed Turkic ethnicity.
 
Such was the case of suspect number 1, named Temarlan, reportedly a 2nd year Med student married to a Rhode Island girl, and father to a 3-year old daughter.  A media outlet could not help but blare a headline that Temarlan’s wife was from NK.  Given the prominence of North Korea in recent news, it immediately caught our attention.  NK turned out to be North Kingstown in RI south of Boston.
 
On his namesake for the history buffs:  Timur wanted to restore Genghis Khan’s  Mongol empire.  A devout Muslim, he called himself the Sword of Islam. He was generous in sharing war booty to members of his multi-ethnic armies. He became the most powerful ruler in the Muslim world, defeating rulers of Egypt and Syria, the Ottomans, and a Delhi Sultanate.  He defeated Christian knights at Smyrna, and attempted to restore the Yuan dynasty in China.  Known for leading the Golden Horde against the Cossacks, he is dubbed a “terrorist” in western history books.
 
Younger brother suspect number 2 was 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 the task.  He was named “Dzhokhar” at birth, presumably after the first President of independent Chechnya, himself meeting a violent death by laser-guided satellite missile in a 1996 assassination while he was on his cell phone.
 
Checknya’s desire to separate from the Russian Federation of States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union met with the strong-willed objection of Vladimir Putin who headed the KGB at the time.  Putin now presides over Russia.  Other than setting a bad example to 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 could hardly give up.  It was also caught in between 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 mountain range between the Black and Caspian Seas.
 
The brothers’ family name is Tsarnaev.  “Tsar” of the first syllable is to the Byzantine what “Ceasar “was to the Romans, and “Kaiser” to the Germans.  If one has not gotten the picture yet that the brothers might carry highly “political” consciousness just by their names, we’ve missed the billboard for the weeds.
 
Of course, just because one is named 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, will cover a lot of historical terrain unfamiliar to the regular reader.
 
Four analytical results have already emerged. 
 
There is the jihadist foreign intervention strain, the brothers being of the moralistic bent now raging across Arab Spring, beyond and distinct from the traditional division of the Sunnis and the Shiites.
 
Then there is the rightist/leftist dichotomy, irrelevant from our view, but dear to diehard ideologues.  Given the suspects’ names, this is a difficult minefield to traverse, but there will be those who will find a way to mark the various blasts.
 
We have the emotional stability crowd that will armchair us to endless psychoanalysis till kingdom come.  Culturally integrated and acculturated guys on regular baseball caps and backpacks have to be extremely schizophrenic to merit the psychoanalyst’s attention.
 
The fourth is the fraud claim, already aired by an aunt who testifies to the innocence of her nephews, and students at Dzhokhar’s school who swear that the Chechnyan was in school when the blasts went off.
 
News that the White House is deporting a Saudi Arabian is allegedly being espoused by no less than Glenn Beck.  The finger pointing, the smear on the foggy mirror, is multi-directional and the media field day has already begun.
 
I’ve lit candles for the confirmed dead: 8-yr old Martin Richard, 29-yr old Krystelle Campbell, and the Boston U graduate student Lu Lingzi of Shenyang. Their innocence reminds us of the global complicity of victimhood in our time. 
 
A fourth big candle goes to the Waco, Texas fertilizer plant explosion victims.  A fifth is for those affected this week by the tremor that revisited the same Sichuan area quaked in 2008. 
 
The tail end of winter is still with us.  Our heart keeps company with the cold.
 
 
 
 
 

 j'aime la vie

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