by Dave Barry
In 1825, a British company came up with the idea of attaching a steam-powered locomotive to a train of passenger coaches. Tragically, this did not float any better than the steamboat did.
In 1834, a mechanical “analytical engine”—the great-great-grandparent of today’s computers—was invented by English mathematician Charles Babbage. He died in 1871, still waiting to talk to somebody from Technical Support.
In 1844, American inventor Samuel F. B. Morse demonstrated that if he sent an electrical current along a wire, he could cause a magnetic device at the other end to make a series of clicking noises. These noises made no sense to him, so, following the common practice of the time, he attached his device to a steam engine. The rest is history.
But even as these advances were being made, the United States was like a luxury cruise ship drifting toward a hidden iceberg of war, soon to erupt with a bitter brew of hatred that would spill over onto the white linen tablecloth of the nation’s consciousness like a slap in the face with a dead flounder. The trouble began in 1836, when legendary frontier figures Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and Roy Rogers were killed while defending the Alamo, a horse-rental agency, from an army of irate Mexican businessmen protesting what they perceived as outrageous refueling charges. This led to the Mexican War, which ended in 1848 with the United States getting Texas, California, and all future rights to Salma Hayek.
But the ensuing peace was to be short-lived. The issue of slavery was tearing the United States apart, fanned into flames by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which told the dramatic story of evil slave overseer Simon Legree’s obsessive hunt for a giant albino whale. In 1858, two Illinois candidates for the U.S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, held seven historic debates moderated by Regis Philbin, who declared Lincoln the winner when he correctly answered the question “When did Johann Strauss compose ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz?” (Lincoln’s answer: “Not yet.”)
In 1860, Lincoln ran for president (slogan: “He’s Taller Than You”) and was elected, only to see the nation rent asunder in 1861 by the Civil War, starring Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. America descended into a long, dark nightmare as brother fought against brother. As you can imagine, this drove their mother crazy.
“You boys stop fighting RIGHT NOW!” she would yell.
But they would not listen, and the nightmare continued until 1865, when the South surrendered, and the slaves, after so many years of bondage and oppression, were finally free to get beat up a lot. The bruised and battered nation was running on a wobbly treadmill, and matters were only made worse when Lincoln, while attending a play, was fatally shot by an actor named John Wilkes Booth. This tragedy led to the passage of a federal law, still in effect today, requiring actors to use blanks.
But despite the disrupting influence of war, progress continued:
In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking work Origin of Species, in which he theorized that life evolves, through natural selection, from lower and cruder to higher and more sophisticated levels, except in Kansas.
In 1869, the Suez Canal was finally completed, which meant that for the first time ships could go from wherever the Suez Canal started to wherever it ended, something that had not been possible before.
In 1876, inventor Alexander Graham Bell spoke into his new invention, the telephone, and transmitted history’s first voice message over a wire to his assistant in another room: “Watson, hold my calls.” The modern business era had begun.
In 1877, inventor Thomas Alva Edison leaned over a device and recited “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in a loud and clear voice. Nothing happened, because the device was a pencil sharpener. Embarrassed, Edison vowed that one day he would invent an electric light so he could see what the hell he was doing.
In 1896, inventor Guglielmo Marconi patented the wireless telegraph and set up the world’s first broadcasting station, which began transmitting a format advertised as “Easy Listening Morse Code.”
But then, just when everything seemed to be going great, bang, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up and sank in Havana Harbor in what became known as “The Shot Heard ’Round the World,” and the Spanish-American War broke out. The U.S., determined to liberate Cuba from Spanish control, dispatched the famous “Rough Riders,” who were led by Theodore Roosevelt in the legendary charge up San Juan Hill, only to enjoy a hearty laugh at their own expense when they realized that San Juan was in Puerto Rico. Historians believe this is the first known instance of the Central Intelligence Agency in action.
And speaking of action, things REALLY started heating up for humanity in general once we entered the…
1900s
…which had historic events occurring left and right, starting in 1901, when Queen Victoria died, although nobody noticed this until 1907. Meanwhile, in the United States, Theodore Roosevelt became president and began building the Panama Canal, which would one day connect Panama with Albany, N.Y.
But an even more important thing happened on December 17, 1903, in Kitty Hawk, N.C.: two bicycle mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright Brothers, who as boys had dreamed of building a flying machine so they could drop bombs on the kids who laughed at them for being named “Wilbur” and “Orville,” successfully tested the first airplane. It took off with Wilbur at the controls and a flight attendant named Nancy clinging to the undercarriage with one hand while using the other hand to fling packets of honey-roasted peanuts, one of which struck Wilbur in the eyeball, causing him to dive and crash into the first commercially successful automobile, which coincidentally was being tested at Kitty Hawk by Henry Ford. The Transportation Age had dawned.
It was also an Age of Exploration, as bold adventurers ventured to the far corners of the Earth to check it out. In 1909, Robert E. Peary reported that he had reached the North Pole; in 1911, Roald Amundsen reported that he had reached the South Pole; and, in 1913, Walter M. Fleemotz of Decatur, Ga., reported that he had discovered the West Pole in his basement.
Yes, these were exciting times, but it is important to remember that the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) was, in the words of historian James Mill (1773–1836), “not a weenie roast.” The same can be said for the maiden voyage of the British ocean liner Titanic, which, while crossing the North Atlantic in 1912, struck an iceberg, which sank to the bottom with all aboard. This tragedy led to strict new laws against carrying passengers on icebergs.
But even that was not enough to prevent Europe from plunging into World War I, which caused so much bitterness that traces of it still linger in certain European waiters. At first, the United States was not involved, but in 1916 Woodrow Wilson was reelected to the presidency with the popular slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” leaving him with no option but to get us into it. Finally (we are skipping some parts here), the war ended, and the League o’Nations was formed to make sure that the world would never, ever, ever again go to war until everybody had acquired bigger weapons.
On a more upbeat note, the Russians, after centuries of oppression, finally got rid of the Czar System of government and switched to the Communist Dictator System, epitomized by Joseph Stalin, who came to power with the popular slogan “He Wants to Kill Pretty Much Everybody.”
Important governmental changes were also taking place in the United States, which in 1919 and 1920 passed two historic constitutional amendments:
The 18th Amendment, which banned alcoholic beverages. This worked liked a charm. All of a sudden, bang, everybody stopped drinking alcoholic beverages! And there was no crime! This paved the way for the War on Drugs.
The 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote (for men).
In the arena of scientific progress, a German-born physicist named Albert Einstein was thinking up things that were so amazing they made his hair stick out. In 1915, he developed his General Theory of Relativity, which holds that the equivalence of gravitational and inertial mass in the space-time continuum contributes to the quantum perihelion Brownian
motion of submolecular particles, which is why eating cheese makes you get stopped up. This knowledge was to prove vital in making the atomic bomb.
The years 1920 through 1929 are often referred to collectively as the “Roaring Twenties” because the name of each year has “twenty” in it. And it is not hard to understand why when we look at some of the events that occurred during this tumultuous decade:
The great American writers F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway threw up about five thousand times apiece.
Not to mention Babe Ruth.
A lanky young aviator named Charles Lindbergh astounded the world when he took off from New York and landed, fourteen hours later, back in New York, because he had to go to the bathroom. And that is why today we have toilets on planes.
Al Jolson starred in the first “talking” motion picture, The Jazz Singer Strikes Back, also featuring Charlton Heston as the young Yoda.
Yes, the nation was riding high, but in 1929 it came apart, in the words of the French economist François Quesnay, “like a club sandwich without toothpicks” when the stock market crashed because of rumors that there would be no such thing as the Internet for more than fifty years. The nation was plunged into the Great Depression, which resulted in joblessness, homelessness, poverty, hunger, and literally millions of Shirley Temple movies, traces of which can still be seen today. In desperation, the nation turned to Franklin Delano “Teddy” Roosevelt, who, in 1933, started the New Deal, a group of massive government programs designed to guarantee Americans that they would never again be without massive government programs.
But there was trouble ahead, and it spelled its name “Adolf Hitler.” His evil treachery at Pearl Harbor forced America into World War II, and when it was finally over, there was dancing in Times Square until somebody said, “Hey! Stop dancing! The Cold War has started! Also, somebody took my wallet!” And it was true. The two great superpowers—the United States of America and the Union of United Soviet Socialism Godless Red Communists of Russia—were staring eyeball-to-eyeball through an Iron Curtain in a nuclear confrontation that pitted brother against brother. It was only a matter of time before “Korea” became a household name.
And yet, at the same time, there were bright spots. In 1947, a courageous young athlete named Jackie Robinson became the first African American to break the sound barrier and the Space Age dawned. There was also hope in the Middle East, where the state of Israel was born in a happy celebration highlighted by festive artillery fire that is still going on in some areas.
By the 1950s, America had entered a period of conservatism and conformity under the administration of its grandfatherly war-hero president, Ed Sullivan. But all that was to change when a young Mississippi truck driver named Elvis Presley appeared on national TV, wiggling his hips and wowing the nation’s youngsters with a revolutionary new trend that was to become, over the next five decades, the dominant cultural force in the world: the hula hoop. In response, the Russians launched a satellite named Sputnik (Russian for “I spit on your knickers”), which flew into space and shot down an American U2 spy plane piloted by a promising young actor named James Dean. Shocked and confused, the American voters turned to younger leadership in the form of John F. Kennedy, and what happened next was, to quote the eloquent historian Thomas B. Macaulay, “bad.”
Assassinations. Vietnam. Civil rights. Woodstock. Watergate. Romilar brand cough syrup. These are words that took on new meaning as the era that became known as “the sixties” engulfed the nation in a tidal wave of events that occurred. But finally it was over, and the nation entered an exciting new era, which became known as “the seventies,” during which nothing happened. Then came “the eighties,” which lasted until 1989, when the people of East Berlin, fed up with decades of oppression and deprivation, tore down the Berlin Wall in response to rumors that it contained DoveBars.
This caused the Soviet Union to collapse, leaving the United States as the world’s only superpower. And in the nineties, this nation has become even more dominant under the leadership and guidance of President Monica Lewinsky. Today, as we stand on the brink of the year 2000, we are a nation of almost unimaginable wealth. Everywhere we look, we see rich people: millionaire athletes, billionaire dot-com Internet geeks, people on TV quiz shows becoming millionaires by answering questions so easy that they would not stump a reasonably alert stump. And although this makes us want these people to get hit by cement trucks, it also makes us realize that we have come a long way in the past thousand years.
And so this New Year’s Eve, when the clock strikes twelve, raise a glass to toast the millions of our ancestors who went before us, paving the way for the safe and secure civilization that we enjoy today. Then, when the clock strikes thirteen and the lights go out, start your generator and load your gun.
2000
GEORGE AND AL’S BIG CHADVENTURE
Looking back on the year 2000, we have to say that, all things considered, it was pretty good.
No, hold it! We just received some late returns in from the 159th manual recounting of the ballots of Palm Beach County, and it turns out that, by a slim margin, it was actually a bad year. So we’re glad that it’s finally…
Whoops! Hold it! We have just been informed that a Florida court has reversed a ruling overturning an earlier court ruling that upheld a previous ruling that rejected an appeal of a ruling that overturned an earlier reversal of an upheld rejection of the decision to count ballots marked only by drool, which means that the year 2000 was…
OK, to be honest, we’re not sure what kind of year it was. We’re not sure of ANYTHING anymore, except that we never, ever, ever want to have another presidential election like this one. We think that everybody who had anything to do with this election, including the entire state of Florida, should be banned from the political process for life. We especially think that all the lawyers involved should be marooned on a desert island, surrounded by man-eating sharks, from which the only escape would to be to build a raft out of severely dimpled chads.
But setting aside the Election from Hell, there were some bright spots in the year 2000:
NASDAQ went deep into the toilet, which meant we heard a LOT fewer stories about twenty-two-year-old dot-com twerps making $450 million for starting companies that never actually produced anything except press releases.
The federal budget surplus got so huge that experts believe it could take Congress as long as eighteen months to blow the entire thing on comically unnecessary pork-barrel projects such as the Museum of Ketchup.
Toward the end of the year, most people finally stopped thinking that it was clever to say “Is that your final answer?” and “Whassup!”
You also heard almost nothing about Dennis Rodman.
So, on balance, we’re feeling pretty uncertain, in an undecided kind of way, as we take a reflective look back at 2000, which began—as so many years seem to, lately—with…
JANUARY
…which opens with the entire world braced for the impending Y2K disaster, a story that had received more media hype than global warming and Britney Spears combined, with experts warning the public that the electricity could go out, planes could crash, the economy could collapse and renegade ATMs could roam the streets, viciously attacking pedestrians who were unable to remember their PINs.
As it turns out, the only technology that is actually affected by Y2K is the George Foreman Grill, which, at precisely midnight on New Year’s Eve, suddenly starts ADDING fat to foods. Other than that, nothing bad happens, and on New Year’s Day, all the “experts” admit that they were wrong and refund all the money they received for giving flagrantly incorrect advice. And the Backstreet Boys win the Rose Bowl.
Meanwhile, the dawn of the twenty-first century is celebrated around the world with extravaganzas in all the great cities, most notably Paris, which uses the Eiffel Tower as a framework for the most spectacular light show ever seen; London, which turns the Thames into a mighty river of fire; and Warsaw, which unveils
the “Millennium Kielbasa”—a nineteen-hundred-foot-long sausage stuffed with more than fifty thousand pounds of high explosive that, when detonated, causes chunks of smoked meat to rain down festively all over central Europe.
In other foreign news, Vladimir Putin takes over as president of Russia, replacing Boris Yeltsin, who is forced to resign on New Year’s Eve when the Kremlin runs out of vodka. In his inaugural speech, Putin, a former KGB agent, pledges to work for international understanding and maintain peaceful relations with the United States “until we can refuel our missiles.”
The United States turns ownership of the Panama Canal over to Panama. Maritime experts quickly became concerned when Panama, seeking to boost revenue by transforming the aging waterway into a Disney-style tourist attraction, installs a “log flume” section. Pieces of disintegrated freighters are soon washing ashore as far away as Costa Rica.
In South America, the War on Drugs, now entering its thirtieth successful year, gets a nice boost when the United States announces that it is giving $1.3 billion more in aid to Colombia, which ducks into the bathroom eight times during the announcement ceremony.
On the domestic political front, Hillary Rodham Clinton makes the extreme personal sacrifice of actually moving into a house located in the state that she has selected to represent in the U.S. Senate. She pledges to “be a good neighbor for the people of whatever the hell this town is.” But the big news is in the Iowa caucuses, from which Al Gore and George W. Bush emerge as winners, despite strong objections from Palm Beach County election officials, who announce that they are not aware of any state named “Iowa.”
President Bill Clinton orders a do-it-yourself “Build-a-Legacy” kit via the Internet.
The big story in Miami is the intensifying legal battle over whether six-year-old Elián González will return to his father in Cuba or be allowed to stay in the United States and enjoy the precious, constitutionally protected freedom to be displayed on network television every time he burps. In another South Florida development, state agriculture inspectors learn that eight lime trees in South Florida have been infected with citrus canker. As National Guard troops and tanks pour into the area, a state official states, “We are not ruling out napalm strikes.”