Weekend Assignment #12: Thanks to time travel and invisibility, you can be on the spot for any important event of the last 100 years (1905 onward). Which important historical event do you choose? As a twist, if you actually were at an important historical event, you can't pick that one. Why? Because you were there already. What, you want to be there twice? Think of the paradox!
Extra Credit: Think of a piece of now-dated slang that should be brought back into circulation. Make it reasonably clean slang, please.
I've been reading some of the other entries in this assignment, and there are some good/noble/cute ones:
Materializing in the "Texas Book Suppository Building" to give Lee Harvey Oswald a little bump as he zoomed his scope in on the Presidential dome-piece.
Right away, this brings up ugly images from "The Terminator." Ending/lengthening a life that ends up touching everyone. Imagine if JFK finished out his term? What would have become of the Cold War, Civil Rights, Vietnam? It would be a whole new world.
Two things come to mind, though...neither being that pretty.
1) Bumping Oswald's arm means that bullet(s?) is going into the crowd. Maybe it hits Zapruder's camera, neatly tying up all the loose ends of the paradox. Maybe it hits the next Jesus, the next Jim Brown, the next who knows? The sad part- we'd never know what we lost.
2) Oswald's shot(s) plunk harmlessly into the walls of the buildings along the street, and Kennedy is whisked off to safety. This is ominous for two reasons:
A) JFK is PISSED, and he wants blood. Cuba goes up in a poof of irradiated smoke about 3 hours later, and half of Europe is laid to waste in the ensuing World War. To keep it sports (as my journal professes to do), among the dead are famous future sports names such as Beckham, Tretiak, Nowitzki, Sabonis, Kournikova...
B) Presidents continue to ride in open limos until Nixon is waxed 8 years later. Vice President Agnew then ruins the country, or we get a Law And Order President who makes us all wear little yellow stars that note our political reliability
- Sitting beside Walt Disney at some seedy town fair as he gets the idea for Disneyland.
-"Hey Walt,,,,put it somewhere that's 98 degrees all summer, with humidity so thick that you have to shove air aside as you walk."
I've never been that into parks. A lot of it has to do with the squalid town fairs that so motivated Uncle Walt. Carnivals have several facets that turn me off:
A) I'm small, and I don't like crowds. Anytime I go for fried dough or cotton candy, I always lose whoever I'm with...and then spend the entire time standing on benches looking for them. Anyone who saw me crying at the 1986 Marshfield Fair would be not at all surprised to see that I grew up to marry a 6'6" guy.
B) I would make a sad astronaut, because I have absolutely no ability to tolerate heights or centrifigual force. You know that ride, It's A Small World? Even that made me want to hurl. I've been overwhelmed by faster-than-average escalators.
I no longer speak to the girl who bullied me onto Space Mountain as a kid....and if I saw her now, I'd drop the gloves and slowly skate a circle around her, like a hockey goon.
Fairs are chock full of that business, and when my daughters get to be carnival-ride-age, I do hope that my sister has a lot of fun going on Superman: The Ride with them.
C) Shady dudes abound at any type of fair. Not only are they in your town, but they actually build and maintain rides one could easily be killed on.
Few American children grow up saying "I want to clean vomit off Space Mountain." Most people sort of fall into that kind of job, after failing to be competent at other professions. MIT doesn't have "Roller Coaster Design And Maintenance 101." Until they do, I won't be confident riding on (or standing near) any carnival ride.
While Disneyworld is tough to haul up and carry from town to town, I can't shake the association with that and those squalid travelling circus/fairs of my youth. Much like the Marshfield Fair, it is run by people who are either desperate for a job, or who could have been Senators but instead chose to run the Skee Ball game at the arcade.
My students and I went to the Topsfield Fair, and I spent the entire day with a kid who comes to my school from a small farming town in central Massachusetts. We fed ducks for an hour, looked at bears, met the Massachusetts Honey Queen, and ate fried dough. I think he sensed my aversion to rides, and was enough of a gentleman as to not let a small woman get lost in a crowd by herself. I also had all the lunch money on me, but I like to think he was more noble than that.
Every now and then we'd see other students stumbling off the Batman ride to vomit into a waste barrel, or we'd watch the Pitch-Til-You-Win guy take $20 off people who eventually won a small stuffed snake that you could block a window draft with.
He was a dumb kid, and I only gave him an A for the term because he was a gentleman that day...and he and I thought alike.
- Sitting down with Truman and talking him out of using the atomic bomb to decide WWII.
When FDR died, Harry Truman didn't say "Woo Hoooo, I'm the boss, now!!" He did the proper thing....he sought out Elanor Roosevelt, asked if she was all right, and asked if there was anything he could do for her.
Elanor sensed pity, and she responded with pity. "Harry....is there anything I can do for you?" FDR told Elanor almost everything (save the Mistress), and Elanor knew that a whopper of a decision was about to fall into Harry's lap.
America's Manhattan Project had yielded an atomic weapon. A bomb used to knock down the building it hit....this bomb knocked down the city it hit. When he decided to use it, he was essentially saying "Pick a city, and I'll kill everyone in it."
There are several facts about WWII that would shock someone who doesn't study history. Everyone knows about the people who suffered more than anyone else in that war...but few know that it wasn't the Jews. 6-7 million Jews died in WWII....barely a third of the 20 million Russians who perished during Hitler's Drang Nacht Osten.
Likewise, Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't the worst bombings of the war. Tokyo, with it's old wooden buildings, went up like a drunken smoker's Christmas Tree when firebombed by American planes...with the loss of about 100,000 lives. Dresden in Germany also caught fire during a US/British raid, and the city burnt to the ground. This took another 30,000 lives....and if Germany won the war, FDR and Churchill would have answered War Crimes Trial questions about it.
Regardless, these things happen. Whenever wartime cruelty occurs, I always think back to General Sherman. In the US Civil War, he decided to abandon his supply wagons and let his army live off the land as he campaigned in the US South. This would also bring the war home to the Confederacy, and illustrate the inability of the Reb armies to stop a marauder on their home turf.
It was all about destruction. Pure, brutal, Clausewitzian total war- waged on the innocents for maximum psychological effect. "I will make Georgia howl " bragged Sherman in a letter to his bosses.
So he made his move through Georgia, killing, burning, raping, eating, stealing....the whole 9 yards. Atlanta, the beautiful Southern city, was burnt to ashes. Scarlett O'Hara got dumped. The man simply cut a 60 mile swath of destruction through the Deep South, and although the war wasn't over when he finished, it kinda was.
When beseeched to spare Atlanta, Sherman made people talk to the hand. "Warfare is cruelty, and there is no need to refine it. The more cruel it is, the sooner it will be over."
Sure, we took an atomic bomb and turned 175,000 Sanyo employees into ashes. It had several positive effects.
- If Japan got out of a US invasion with less than 175,000 dead, they'd have won.
- Japan got good terms, and quickly became a world power after the war. Had we been forced to chase them from the bushes, we'd have been less generous at the peace table.
- Only a month stood between the time we bombed them, and the time it would have took Stalin to be all over Northern Japan. Hop across to Korea to see how that turned out.
- You know how many Americans died when we invaded Japan itself? None, because we didn't have to invade. We had lost 10,000 conquering places like Midway...which is the size of a rich person's back yard. How many would have died if we had to fight our way onto the home islands?
Keeping it sports, I'd like to present the event that I wish I were present at.
The Jose Canseco/Madonna fling in NYC.
A fortunate paparazzi is lying in wait outside of Madonna's New Yawk residence, and he snaps a great shot of Canseco leaving at like 4 AM.
Why would I want to be there?
A) Jose is a buff Latino baseball god, a member of the 40/40 club, and is so full of steroids that he occasionally stops and beats children and puppies.
B) Madonna is a 1980s MTV icon, with a dancer body. If there was a Sex Queen of that era, it was the Vogue girl
C) Had Jose sown his seed in America's Uterus, the child - in my humble opinion- would grow to rule this great land as a King. Hollywood meets Cooperstown, and the buff baby would march on a road of bones to world dominance.
Outdoing the Magi, I would see history at it's very conception.
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