Wampum

Two texts

One thing that stands out when looking at the decade after the applications of fission in a foreign policy context, is the re-invention of fission in a domestic policy context. The inventions of the 1914-1918 War, such as poison gas, were not re-invented in a domestic policy context, with the exception of Die Enloesung der Judenfrage. By 1955 the US had even issued a postage stamp with the slogan "Atoms for Peace". The slogan that stuck however, the slogan that pre-existed the "Atoms for Peace" marketing campaign, and that after a half-century of marketing continues to stick, particularly in the North American and Western European markets where the original slogan has lost value due to counter-marketing, is one that originates from a text. A text that was committed to writing between 750 and 735 BCE. I'm not going to bother my partners and friends for whom this is their mother tongue, errors are therefore mine, and corrections are happily accepted.

וְשָׁפַט בֵּין הַגּוֹיִם, וְהוֹכִיח לְעַמִּים רַבִּים; וְכִתְּתוּ חַרְבוֹתָם לְאִתִּים, וַחֲנִיתוֹתֵיהֶם לְמַזְמֵרוֹת, לֹא־יִשָּׂא גוֹי אֶל־גּוֹי חֶרֶב, וְלֹא־יִלְמְדוּ עוֹד מִלְחָמָה

More familiarly, this text is:

LSG (1910) Esaïe 2:4 Il sera le juge des nations, L'arbitre d'un grand nombre de peuples. De leurs glaives ils forgeront des hoyaux, Et de leurs lances des serpes: Une nation ne tirera plus l'épée contre une autre, Et l'on n'apprendra plus la guerre.

KJV (1611) Isaiah 2:4 And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

There it is. When the slogan "swords into plowshares" (or hoes) is presented in the context of the marketing campaign of re-invention of fission in a domestic policy, it is operating as a religious text. A consumer engaged by the marketing message is engaged at the same level of intellectual discourse as a consumer engaged by "Allahu akbar" (I'll be happy to get correct Arabic too) or "suffer not a witch to live".

But there is another textual tradition, one closer to the reality of plutonium held as state military assets intended for fission-fusion devices and dispersed as commercial fuel. The shattering of swords into scores of sharp shards, the knives of the needy. This textual tradition was committed to writing in about 475 BCE by Pindar in the 4th Pythian Ode.

́ρχει* ναός*, ἐμοὶ τελέσαις ἄφθιτον στρωμνὰν ἀγέσθω, κω̂ας αἰγλα̂εν χρυσέῳ θυσάνω

More familiarly, this text is:

Let your king, whoever commands the ship, complete this work for me; then let him carry off the immortal coverlet, the fleece gleaming with its golden fringe.

The plot was reworked and expanded until this -- he sowed the drakon-teeth, and armed men did rise up from the earth in Apollodorus 1.127. I first caught it from the 1963 re-working, with the stop-action by Ray Harryhausen. I don't think there is a better expression of what the MOX experiment means than the Pindar's working of the Dorian domestic memory, itself committed to writing before 700 BCE by Hesiod.

If any think Bush the equal of Herakles, and capable of killing the nine-headed and self-healing Lernean Hydra, in the proximal future, or that even the modern nation state is the equal of King Aeetes, who peers at us from the Late Bronze Age, and held fleece, dragon, and earth-born men, for the rest of the Age of Plutonium (half-life 24,000 years), drop me a line.

If after reading this little note, you are aware that "swords into plowshares" is more at home at the Bob Jones University than at the DoE, then half the author's purpose has been achived. If you find the other half of the author's purpose, keep it and use it.

I learned more researching this note than the writing of it would suggest. And vitrification is the only answer, for a span of time greater than the post-Holocene partition of humanity into its agricultural and free, and domesticant and slave divisions.

Posted by EBW at October 8, 2004 05:58 AM | TrackBack