THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS

by John Scalzi

  More on that in a minute. Right now, let's concentrate on the actual longbow itself. Historians debate on the original length of the longbow, but it was generally considered to be no less than five feet. Ideally, the bow was as tall or maybe just a little taller than the person wielding it, and made from the yew, a type of wood known for its elasticity. The longbow was not an easy weapon to master; it's not like a TEC-9, which any idiot can swing in an indiscriminate arc and release a hail of death. The "pull" of a longbow, the amount of force needed to stretch the bowstring back to where it needed to be, was between 80 and 110 pounds; it's a hell of an aerobic exercise, a fact which I'm sure generations of English longbowmen appreciated. Back in the 14th century, stair-stepping to the oldies was not considered manly.

  You put your whole body into being a longbowman, and I don't mean this metaphorically. Skeletons of lowbow archers show signs of deformation consistent with the use of the bow: A spine curved in the direction the pull arm, arm bones thick with compression, and coarsened bones in the three fingers used to yank back the bowstring. It wasn't just a weapon, it was a way of life.

  The good news was that all that work paid off in the long run. An experienced longbowman could hit a target with killing force 200 yards out. He could fire 6 to 10 times in a minute, a rate of fire that no practical weapon would match well into the 19th century. A longbow arrow wouldn't just bounce off a knight's armor -- it would go right through, killing the knight inside like a crab impaled on a pick. Get a couple of thousand longbowmen together, point them at an equal or greater number of knights in armor, and what you've got, friends, is a massacre.

  Thus the French learned -- or more to the point, didn't learn -- in three major battles that defined the Hundred Year's War. The first of these is the Battle of Crécy, in 1346. The English came to the party with 10,000 archers and 4,000 men-at-arms (or, in modern terminology, "grunts"); the French had 12,000 men-at-arms and backup from cavalry. In this battle, the French kept driving up the middle of the English forces with their horse and knights; the bad news was that the English longbowmen were on the sides, picking them off as they came. It was a slaughter. The French lost 1,500 knights and King Phillip VI himself was wounded. The lesson: Watch out for those longbowmen, they'll get you bad.

  Flash forward 20 years to the Battle of Poitiers. The French had the numbers, but the English had the archers and the terrain (thickets and marshes) on their side; when the stoopid French lumbered in with horses and heavy armor, the longbowmen picked them off like wolves going after crippled sheep. This time the French king wasn't wounded, he was taken prisoner. Whoops.

  Leap another 60 years or so to perhaps the greatest single example of the superiority of the English longbowmen and the incredible military incompetence of the French in dealing with them: The fabled Battle of Agincourt, October 25, 1415. You know the setup. King Henry V of England, with 5,000 sick and wounded troops, is desperately trying to drag his ass back to England, when he runs smack dab into 30,000 French, fresh and spoiling for a fight. He and his exhausted crew are in deep foie gras, and would have been -- should have been -- brutally slaughtered, had not the stupid French made an amazing tactical blunder.

  Which was: Picking the field of Agincourt to fight on. The field is more or less a narrow channel between two stands of forest; in order for the French to get at the English, they'll basically have to funnel their vast forces into a bottleneck. This loses them both the advantage of their huge number of troops, who are unable to perform any large-scale maneuvers, and of their cavalry, who have to wade through throngs of their own men-at-arms (as an added bonus, long rains in the days before the battle have made the field of Agincourt a mudpit -- not optimal cavalry ground). The bottleneck serves the English longbowmen admirably as well: By concentrating their forces, the French have made them incredibly easy to hit with longbow fire.

  You know the rest. The French funneled into Agincourt and died by the screaming thousands, arrows in their chests from 5,000 English longbows. And while the English losses were not so light as Shakespeare indicated in his play of the events (in which the dead were tallied at 25, not counting the occasional nobleman), they were nevertheless spectacularly low -- something on the order of 500 compared to the French tally of at least 6,000, 1,500 of which were knights in armor. The reason they were so low, of course, is that the longbowmen did all the heavy lifting; by the time Henry V ordered his men-at-arms into the fray, the French were already decimated and in chaos. Agincourt won the French crown for Henry, and rightfully so.

  As for the longbow, its military service came to an end at the end of the 16th century not because it was obsolete as a weapon -- in the late 1500s there was still no weapon that could beat its combination of power, accuracy and rate of fire -- but because there were too few people taking up archery as a profession. The longbow didn't fail us, we failed it.

  Far as I know, there's not another weapon that can hold that claim. For that fact, and its own merits, it's the weapon of the millennium. And if the world collapses on January 1, 2000 (they could be lying to us about all those bug fixes, you know), it could very well be the weapon of the next millennium, too.

  Best Emotion of the Millennium.

  Angst. And I'm pretty bummed out about that.

  Let us stipulate that "angst" is one of those words that people use a lot but which they don't really understand; in today's nomenclature, it is a trendy synonym for fear or even annoyance (e.g., "I went to Starbucks and my latte was mostly foam. I was filled with angst." Aw, poor baby). This dreadful misuse of the word is problematic, but in one way it's indicative of the fundamental nature of the concept of “angst," which is, like diet-related obesity or supermodels, a leisure society's affliction. Poor, ill-educated serfs didn't know from angst. They didn't have the time, or the inclination.

  Which is not to say that didn't have fears, of course. To a poor, ill-educated serf, the world is full of fear: Fear of one's feudal lord. Fear of the Plague. Fear of the that witch down the lane, you know, the one with all the cats. Above all, a fear of God, He who could squash you in this life and the life everlasting, thank you very much. The point here is: Fear had direction. It was like a sentence; there was an subject (you) and an object (the thing that was gonna get you), and the verb "fear" was adequate to describe what your typical serf had going on in his brain, such as it was.

  Angst is something else entirely. If fear is hard working and has a goal, angst is like fear's directionless cousin, the one that has a trust fund and no freakin' clue what he wants to do. Angst by definition has no definite object; it is formless and ubiquitous, and it just sits on your head and freaks you out. Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote the book on angst ("The Concept of Dread," 1844), believed that dread was a desire for that which you fear. This led to sin; sin leads to guilt, and guilt leads to redemption, preferably (at least from Kierkegaard's point of view) through the good graces of Christianity. God always gets you, sooner or later.

  Martin Heidegger took angst even further, suggesting that dread is fundamental for a human being to discover freedom, as dread can lead to a man to "choose himself" and thus discover his true potential. When you're full of angst, you see, you tend to concentrate on yourself and not to sweat the little stuff -- say, everything else in the entire universe (to say this is a massive simplification of Heidegger's work is to say you can get a cup of water out of the Hoover Dam). Embracing oneself brings one closer to embracing nothingness, and thus full potentiality of authentic being.

  Confused? Join the club. Heidegger's writings are so famously impenetrable they could be used by SWAT teams in place of Kevlar; to the uninitiated, he sounds a little like the self-help counselor from the third circle of Hell ("Love your Dread! Embrace the Nothingness!"). Left unsaid is what happens after one has in fact embraced the nothingness; one has the unsettling feeling that it's difficult to get cable TV. Also, there's the question of what happens when one has reached a state of authentic being, only to discover one is auth
entically an ass. Heidegger is unhelpfully silent on these matters; he himself embraced the nothingness in 1976 and will have nothing more to do with us inauthentic beings.

  Angst is probably best described not through words but through pictures, and fortunately we have a fine illustrator of angst in Edvard Munch. Munch knew all about dread; first off, he was Norwegian. Second, he was a sickly boy whose family had an unfortunate tendency of dying on him: His mother when he was five, his sister when he was 14, then his father and brother while he was still young. His other sister? Mentally ill. Munch would write, quite accurately, "Illness, insanity and death were the black angels that kept watch over my cradle and accompanied me all my life." They weren't no bluebirds of happiness, that's for sure.

  Munch's art vividly showed the nameless anxiety that Munch felt all around him. The most famous example of this, of course, is "The Scream," in which a fetal-looking person of indiscriminate sex clutches its head and emits a wordless cry. The weird little dude is Munch himself:

  "I was walking along the road with two friends," he wrote, "Watching the sunset - the sky suddenly turned red as blood - I stopped, leant against the fence, deadly tired - above the blue-black fjord and the town lay blood and tongues of fire - my friends walked on and I was left, trembling with fire - and I could feel an infinite scream passing through the landscape."

  Perhaps the infinite scream was the knowledge that one day his painting of the event would become such a smarmily iconic shorthand for angst that it would lose its power; its hard to feel dread when the screaming dude is on some VP of Advertising's tie. More's the pity.

  Fortunately, there is other, less exploited, Munch work which still packs a punch. "The Scream" is just one element in Munch's epic "Frieze of Life," a collection of 20-odd canvases jam-packed with angst: One of the four major themes of the work, in fact, is "Anxiety." But even the more supposedly cheerful theme of "Love," features paintings swaddled in depression and dread: check out "Ashes" or "Separation," and angst leaps up and hits you like a jagged rock. Don't even view the "Death" pictures if you've skipped your Xanax for the day. Viewing any of the pictures, you immediately grasp the concept of angst; it sits on your chest like a weight, pressing the air out of you. Edvard Munch himself suffered a nervous breakdown, a fact which anyone who has spent any time with his work would find entirely unsurprising.

  The irony about naming angst as the emotion of the Millennium is that at the moment, most everyone who can read this is living in almost entirely angst-free world. The economy is booming, people are well-fed and cheerful, most of us are safe and content. This is surely a switch from most of the 20th Century, the Century of Angst, which opened up with the perhaps the most dreadful war of all time, World War I, and then hunkered down under two decades of global depression, followed by a genocidal holocaust, a cold war, the cultural malaise of the 70s and the unvarnished capitalist ugliness of the 80s. Ask anyone then what the 90s would be like, they would have suggested more of the same, but without trash service.

  Instead we have Britney Spears, SUVs and 28-year-old stock millionaires; our most difficult decision is whether to buy a DVD, or just stick with the VCR until we go and get an HDTV. Oh, sure, we think we feel angst on occasion, but closer examination reveals it to be irritation, pique or annoyance. I wouldn't suggest that this is a bad thing -- nameless dread can really crap on your whole day -- but I might suggest that the absence left by angst ought to be filled by something more than the luxurious malaise of sated comfort. What that something might be, I'll leave to you. Hint: It's not a "Scream" coffee mug.

  Best Accidental Discovery of the Millennium.

  Penicillin. The closest competitor is the discovery of vulcanized rubber, which led to our ability to sit around during the hottest part of the day in 5-mile-long traffic jams, listening to radio personalities with the brain capacity of hypoxic stoats. But as much fun as that is, not dying a terrifying, stench-filled death at the microbial hands of some bacteria is even better.

  Make no mistake, a stench-filled bacterial death was a serious possibility for just about everyone well into the 20th Century. Serious strides had been made in the general sanitation of the planet in the 19th Century (thank Joseph Lister, who among other things, convinced doctors that wearing a perpetually bloody smock as a badge of competence was actually helping to kill patients), but sanitation only goes so far. Bacteria are teeny little things, and they can get into places they're not supposed to be with surprising rapidity, where they are happy to procreate until they kill you. This isn't very smart on the part of the bacteria (killing one's host tends to cause the food supply to tap out), but it's not like bacteria have brains, and anyway, they live for about 20 minutes. What do they care.

  Come with me now to the battlefields of the First World War. Nasty little war, that one, with lots of soldiers wallowing in mud and getting shot or bayoneted or gassed every now and again, just for variety. If they were lucky, they'd die right there in the mud; if not, they ran a very good chance of dying in the hospital -- not from their wounds directly, but from the infections those wounds inevitably bred (War isn't just Hell, it's Hell without maid service). Doctors knew bacteria were the culprits to so many soldiers' deaths, and so researchers were assigned to discover antibiotics. Scotsman Alexander Fleming was one of them.

  Fleming wasn't much help on the antibacterial front during World War I (neither was anyone else), but in 1928 he noticed an odd thing in one of his petri dishes, which had been swabbed with Staphylococcus, the nasty little bug that can cause everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. One of the petri dishes had been contaminated -- some sort of airborne something had managed to get into the dish before Fleming sealed it off -- and whatever it was that was in there with the staph was killing it off something fierce. Now, if Fleming had been a bug-eyed drone, he would have tossed the sample; contaminated samples were supposed to be ditched. But Fleming was a scientist, thank God, and he knew he had found something.

  He had found a fungus among us: Penicillium notatum. The penicilli were releasing some sort of chemical (which Fleming, in a burst of stunning originality, called penicillin) that killed bugs dead, and not just a few bugs -- we're talking all sorts of bacteria. Deader than Marley's ghost. How? By screwing with the bacteria's assembly process. In order to bacteria to survive, they have to build a cell wall as they reproduce; penicillin keeps the bacteria from building these walls. The bacteria die, exposed to the elements. It'd be sort of sad if they weren't in fact trying to kill you.

  (Incidentally, this is how antibiotics work -- by messing with the assembly process. Penicillin attacks cell walls, erythromycin inhibits protein formation, rifampin goes after RNA replication. The best way to keep bacteria from using your body as real estate is never to let them lay down their subdivisions in the first place.)

  The catch -- and there's always a catch with these things -- is that naturally-occurring penicillin (known as Benzylpenicillin or penicillin-G) isn't very stable and thus isn't very useful. Fleming has found the wonder drug, but he can't do anything with it. Frustrated, Fleming shelves his penicillin research in 1931. Penicillin has to wait until Oxford researchers Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain manage to synthesize a stable form of penicillin. It performs as promised and in 1940, penicillin debuts and starts kicking microbe ass. Fleming, Florey and Chan get the Nobel in Medicine in 1945. They were all also knighted. Fungus was very good to them.

  Fungus has been very good to all of us, in fact -- not too many of us die from sore throats anymore. However, don't get cocky. Human beings, convinced as we are that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, have spent the better part of the last 60 years wantonly misusing antibiotics in lots of really dumb ways. We use antibiotics for viral infections, which is pointless (you use antivirals for viruses, dummies). We feed antibiotics to animals to who aren't sick to make 'em bigger and fatter. We take antibiotics only until we feel better instead of following the directed medication course (if you feel better, you
are better, right?).

  The result is that we've bred some amazingly drug-resistant strains of bacteria. We've got some TB bacteria running around these days that is, in fact, resistant to every single antibiotic we can throw at it, even the incredibly toxic antibiotics that hurt you as much as they hurt the bug. This may be fine with some of you -- if tuberculosis was good enough for John Keats, you say, it's good enough for me -- but let's see how you feel about it once you actually hork up a lung.

  And it's not just TB, of course: Streptococcus, Staphylococcus, and Pneumococcus, heck, all the really popular coccuses, all of them have virulently drug-resistant strains out there. Enterococcus faecalis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are just waiting to poison your blood. And here's a thought for you: streptomycin-resistant e.coli has been found in the diapers of today's infants. Thing is, streptomycin hasn't been used to treat much of anything for three decades. It's evolution, baby. Anyone who doesn't believe in the process is going to be mighty surprised when an ear infection sends them to the morgue. But what can I do about it? Well, for one, stop using that stupid anti-bacterial soap. You're just making things worse, you know.

  This is perhaps the great irony of the millennium's best accidental discovery -- that all the benefits that we have gotten from it could be wiped away because of our own quite deliberate actions. It'd be like Prometheus giving man fire, and then, after watching man burn down a forest or two, just to see the pretty lights, deciding that maybe he should take it back. It's an accident we got antibiotics, but when we lose them, it'll be our own damned fault.