Hanford is the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere. In 1855 tribes such as the Cayuse signed a meaningless treaty with the United States government that granted them the right to hunt, gather and graze livestock on reservations in what would become the mother of all superfund sites. Delicate networks of treaties maintained the balance of power among European nations for the greater part of their histories. It is only possible to sign a treaty at a particular moment and in a particular place with no intention of honoring it, if the event is a tiny island in a sea of time.
Without history, a people, a nation can exist in an amoral political universe, acting out of the naive ignorance of the very young child: The grown-ups will clean up the mess, hand out bandaids, make it all better. Unintentional cruelty born out of limitless self-absorption and an innate sense of entitlement define the world of the child and the American Corporate Experiment. But what happens when the ‘children’ lock the grown-up’ out of the room? Now that dr. Walter Tamosaitis has been let go by Hanford’s feral ‘children’, I guess we’ll find out. The good doctor and all-round ‘grown-up’, Walter Tamosaitis will be back tomorrow with the story on Air Cascadia.
- KBOO