The MixMaster of Mystery — History as Seen by a Millennial

I´m 36, and when Bill Gates gave us the PC in 1998, we lived in a house with an outhouse.

Most of World Literature was written before 1850. About that time public libraries started to become more common, and more accessible. I put that year because the populations in cities had grown to such an extent that I am willing to bet money that ordinary people were beginning to read unordinary books by this time — Gulliver´s Travels.. the Gallic Wars.. What have you? I make the point, because before that, any kind of public record would have to be corroborated by horse — France has 4.000 castles. It is no coincidence that the Vatican has all the power it does today. No, after the Renaissance happened, the literature made in northern Italy was so unusual, so magnificent, and so … humane, one might say, that Italian was the carrying language of knowledge, let alone literature for two centuries at least. This meant Latin felt out of favour, and so did what was read, because people wanted the popular stuff more than the dusty, old tales about Roman expansion. The same thing happened in the 1880s, when they closed down the Greek and Latin-schools across Europe..! One generation after the telegraph, one cold snap thanks to Krakatoa, and.. There you go, into the world of typewriter literature, which was now pouring out of 1874.

The Century of Self

Theodore Roosevelt was said to read 500 books a year, even in office. “If you don´t read, you have no advantage over the fellow who can´t read”. Well, I don´t want to press too dearly this unbelievable period of human anguish, and despair and destitution and.. What was happening, with increasing frequency, was that the secret world of priests and generals was being unleashed on the public, and for some it meant a beacon of hope in a dark, dank attic; for some it was the unravelling of everything they had worked to achieve. The asylums were being filled to the brim. We say over population all of the time, at present, and they sure did back then, when they were hosing loudmouths in between tea and cookies over talks about eugenics. Eu means good in Greek. What happened was the governments ran out of money. Perhaps abolition was a part of it, perhaps it was simply just being overwhelmed by all that was going on. I suggest the nobility was not just over-anxious, or over-zealous, or growing a bit too big for their breeches, but that they were growing few … as they closed down the asylums, and the streets “flooded with loons”.

A Brave New World

The heading is used a lot, I get it. I don´t get why, really, but there you go. What´s on my mind here is that all, or most, land was matriculated by about 1930, with a huge spike in the 1910s, absolutely unbelievably huge. Not just in America, but everywhere, in the northern hemisphere. They had begun using the sextant on land, and found this to be a fantastic contraption. Alongside this you had the stock market being expanded to include a percentage of your pocket money; in official capacity, and not just as when England won the Napoleonic war, and lost the peace. Rockefeller was taken down because of monopolization, and he swore revenge publically. Well, at about 50 years old, he had a great epiphany, of sorts, an awakening, and he felt giving back, which had always been a virtue of his, but only in terms of 2.5% of his income, was now paramount. He standardized medicine. He erected medical institutes all over the Western world. He also erected economic institutes. They say insurance agents are the happiest people, although how they measure this, I cannot say. This was going on in the 1930s, 20 years after the Titanic, and another big event, just before this, in the mid 20s, was that the WWI-veterans, what remained of them … were given a Bonus Cheque. They took out loans on this, and what do you think they bought? Wouldn´t you buy a truck from Mr. Ford?

One Size Fits All

Hermetics had been around, you know, decades, but going to the store and buying tins.. That was Outback-stuff. Unless you lived in a city. What was beginning to happen, in very dirty, smelly places, was that … the horses were beginning to disappear. Not only that, but the horse _man_ was beginning to disappear. Most people don´t realize, but the mafia had wireless car phones in 1945. There were about 50 channels, and you could use two of them at the same time. The old means of communication were still around, but they were starting to look like they belonged in a museum. Every day, going up and down the street, there was old Joey, the milk man, and he´s got the best jokes in town, because nobody talked about news anymore, since the newspapers were delivered right to your cookie cutter home on 5th Avenue. It was all Us and Them now; again. Liberating the slaves had shown us how fragile society is, and how rigid the human soul is. It was not the Indian anymore, or the slave, or the bishop, it was the politician, and the working man. You see, even in cities they had self-governed districts until Jack the Ripper. Noblemen in England would, in fact, appoint chief constables until the 1970s. In the late 1800s, mobsters would collaborate with city officials to create sort of Tea Houses, as they had in the Orient, and these would grow into more elaborate constructions of governance, and reverberate out in the city proper. The Five Point Gang in New York was lead by a short boxer who entertained only the finest of New York society. You could go on, but the point is — the Frontier was dead. There was no more “going west” to a completely different place, with no laws and land free for all. All was matriculated, claimed by the railroad barons, and the cities were policed by detectives who looked for finger prints, and had your picture if you were a felon. That´s why they had to have a Great Depression. So they did.

The Price of Pop

For a short period of time, fascism was cool. The buzz cut, and the square lawn, and Steamboat Willie, making fun of violence. Those were the days. To share your grapes of wrath in a crowd, that was no longer stirring up trouble, that was … living.. Living to the full extent of your predestined uniform. Look around you. Do you see tattooed people with buzz cuts who are holding speeches to the rest of us? I do. Glorifying violence. Yup, we´ve got that. Cookie cutter homes. What happened back then was a generation saying stop this. We can´t have a museum in our streets every day, taking our time and our livelihoods. We want to be part of this garage of Mr Ford’s. Something greater than ourselves. Stand on an assembly line, and watch as the next nylon stocking comes floating down from head office. The Chinese love sweat shops because it suits their culture. The western culture is more about sending some nylon stockings back up to head office, showing them new ways of placing the thread, new colours, new variations of shape, new materials, new everything. We have the means to make Africa a haven for module-based entrepeneurship — making generators and equipment for small power stations and desalinators, and for making cars, in particular. That would show we can too, but the idea is more important, that with open source modules, standardized modules, we can make heavy equipment without having to go to the International Trade Complex, for lack of a better term. Imagine, if you will, that you want to get a tractor, but if you buy one from John Deere, you are paying not only for shipping and materials, but … for Research & Development, design, the lighting bill, the Christmas party, political briiibes, insurance, the cleaning lady and the coffee machine. One experiment said there was a 90% difference in real-world cost of materials and the factory price. Think about that, if you will, as I close the curtains on my supercomputer here, how much 90% means when you multiply that by 269.000 a year (2019).

Stay safe.

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