Transomed

OKLAHOMA CITY – A few days ago I attended a college football game in Norman between the Oklahoma Sooners and the Kansas State Wildcats. I am not a big college football fan, but I was able to get tickets that allowed me to stand on the field behind the goal posts – down amidst the action. Someone with me noted that country music superstar and Sooners fan Toby Keith was standing in front of us. And sure enough, he was. I could tell he was not too happy about his team’s lackluster performance.

I began to think back 20 years – to 2002 – when Toby Keith released the jingoistic hit “Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue (The Angry American)” where he was able to boil down the sentiments of many Americans in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. It was the opening song on his album Unleashed.

Back in the summer of 2002, when the album was released, there was a lot of hubbub about the song, which featured the line “we’ll put a boot in your ass, it’s the American way.” Too pro-war, cried some in the media. Even the Dixie Chicks (now known as “The Chicks”) chimed in, clearly annoyed with Keith’s belligerent attitude. But Toby Keith took it all in stride. It was a big hit and introduced his music to a lot of people around the country – and the world.

“Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July,” Toby Keith sings, noting that the perpetrators behind the attacks would be hunted down and destroyed. In this case, it was CIA asset Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

And then there’s this line:

“And it’ll feel like the whole wide world is raining down on you / Brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue.”

I thought about that song as I watched Toby Keith – gaunt, since being treated for stomach cancer - watch his Sooners flailing on the gridiron. As the war in Afghanistan kicked off in earnest and the military-industrial complex licked its chops, knowing that American blood and treasure was all worth it.

SOONER SUICIDE BOMBER

Three years later, in 2005, right before I moved to Oklahoma from Louisiana, some of my obscure online sources began reporting on an explosion at the University of Oklahoma’s football stadium. It was October 1, 2005. OU was playing K-State. It was 17 years ago this week.

A student from Colorado named Joel Henry Hinrichs had blown himself up on a bus bench after being denied entry into the stadium. It is believed that Hinrichs was waiting for the bus to arrive so he could detonate his backpack bomb there. Thankfully, the suicide bomber blew up before that could happen.

I had friends and family at that game. They heard something, not knowing what it was. OU President David Boren made sure the story “went away.” The housing where Hinrichs lived with foreign students, was bulldozed and Hinrichs and the event was effectively memory-holed.

But when I moved to Oklahoma a few months later I tracked down an independent journalist and Boren critic named Michael P. Wright. He had been doing some digging into the Hinrichs case as well as OU being where some of the 9/11 hijackers had worked and lived. And then there was Nick Berg, the Pennsylvania “businessman” who was kidnapped in Iraq and had his head cut off by jihadis. Berg had spent time at OU in the 2000-01 time period, doing what, it remains unclear.

Anyway, Wright became a friend over the next year, as he took me around OU campus, pointing out strange things Boren had done while president of the university. Recall that Boren was having breakfast with CIA Director George Tenet on the morning of 9/11.

Anyway, Wright would not live much longer. Clearly suffering from anxiety, which he shared with me, he would be found – dead – on a bench on the campus of OU in 2009. I suspected foul play and wrote about it, while also attending a memorial service with family members in Norman.  

TRANSOMED

These are very uncertain and perilous times. War seems just over the transomed horizon. Dark forces are holding humanity for ransom. A battle of good vs. evil is taking place on this plane and in realms just beyond our ability to see. I feel and sense and "see" this every day and in my swirling, dust-devil dreams at night. They are growing more vivid and intense, after some time of relative quiet in my jostled dreamscape.

Since 2014, I have written about the Russian/Ukrainian situation. And it was brought upon by dreams and synchronicities I was experiencing at that time, not unlike Carl Jung’s synchronistic dreams prior to the outbreak of World War I.

They tapered off as things quieted down – more or less – in the Donbass region and Black Sea areas. But in early 2022, things ramped up again and have been concerning ever since Russia has invaded in Ukraine and a war has been fought there, with billions of American tax dollars funding the corrupt government in Kiev.

So … we have a potentially globe-impacting event take place yesterday. The destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline from Russia to Northern Europe, via the Baltic Sea.

Methane bubbles in a swirling froth nearly a mile in size could be seen near an island not far from Polish territory. 

I was curious about the word “Nord Stream” or “Nordstream.” An anagram of that word is “transomed.”

1. While a transom is used in relation to architecture, it is also a nautical term meaning: “a flat termination to a stern, above the water line. Or ..,
2. framework running athwartships in way of the sternpost of a steel or iron vessel, used as a support for the frames of the counter.

MEANWHILE, 28 YEARS AGO … ALSO IN THE BALTIC SEA

Twenty-eight years, to the day, before the Nord Stream pipeline was sabotaged by person or persons as yet unknown, a passenger ferry called the MS Estonia.

On Sept. 27, 1994, the MS Estonia left Tallinn, Estonia for Stockholm, Sweden. Winds and waves were strong during the Sept. 27-28 crossing, and approximately 22 miles south of the Finnish island of Uto, the Estonia rapidly sank, with 852 passengers and crew drowning and 137 survivors.

A cloud of suspicion hung over the joint Estonian-Swedish-Finnish investigation, which concluded in 1997, with the cause of the disaster – the second worst peacetime maritime disaster in Europe since the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 – was the ships bow door locks had failed in a storm.

But that conclusion had numerous critics. With Estonia having been free of the iron grip of the Soviet Union for three years, there was speculation that Soviet-era arms and such were being secretly spirited away in the hull of the Estonia. And something happened midway between Sweden and Estonia. Did it hit a submarine? Did a bomb explode? After all, in 2019, a Discovery TV crew sent robots down to the site of the sunken ship and revealed a large hole in the hull that had been previously unreported.

In fact, this month, two of the Discovery filmmakers were fined by a Swedish court for allegedly desecrating a marine grave where the Estonia lies on the seabed.

THE SEA IT IS SAID, NEVER GIVES UP HER DEAD ... 

But that still does not explain what they found. Why was there a large hole in the ship’s hull. Some suggest it was when the ship hit the rocky seabed. Others aren’t quite convinced.

It is said the Estonia was a cursed ship. A murder had taken place in the ship a few years before the sinking. It had also been renamed three times. Renaming ships, in nautical circles, is considered bad luck.

On a site about the Estonia, writer Chloe Wells noted that late on the 27^th or early 28^th, passengers were enjoying karaoke when many heard a “heavy, metallic-sounding bang that vibrated through the ship’s structure. ‘Ha! Now we have sailed against an iceberg!’ joked a passenger.

But the joking would morph into terror as the situation rapidly deteriorated as a gale blew in the autumn night in the middle of the Baltic. Like the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior nearly 20 years earlier, the Estonia was doomed. 

And so, a couple of hundred miles across the Baltic to the southwest, the Nord Stream pipeline is leaking natural gas into the sea and air – that is methane, which causes problems for the environment. Was it sabotage in the way some have suggested the Estonia was sabotaged while transporting sensitive Soviet-era military cargo in two Volvo station wagons and a van? The truth will likely never be known.

But with this new incident – on the 28^th anniversary of the sinking of the Estonia in the Baltic Sea – it is very worrying. The Russians admit the damaged pipeline is of grave concern. RT.com reported: “(On) Wednesday, Kremlin
spokesperson Dmitry Peskov explained that the damage to the pipelines posed a “big problem” for Russia as it had essentially lost its gas supply routes to Europe.

 

“Both lines of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline were pumped full of gas and were prepared to deliver it to Europe at the time of the alleged explosion, said Peskov, adding that “this gas is very expensive and now it is all going up in the air.”

Wars have started over less.

EDITOR'S NOTE: And don't forget: anagram of Nordstream is transomed. In the painting of the sinking of the Estonia in the stormy Baltic, at the top of this post, the ship's transom in the stern is clearly visible.