Saturday, October 1, 2016

The History of the World (Part Three)

In our last episode, we covered the history of the world from the invention of agriculture to the year 1776. In 1776 the world caught a major break.

In Great Britain's North American colonies a bunch of folks got together and invented the United States of America. In Scotland, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, invented modern economics, and taught the world how free markets would eventually lead to the need for a weight loss industry. These two events occurred while the industrial revolution was picking up steam.  A trifecta!  

Sound of screeching tires in a panic stop. I must here throw in a few paragraphs from the Reality Checks, Caveats & Premises department before proceeding. First, the three events mentioned in the previous paragraph didn’t happen by magic. The Greeks dabbled in democracy, the Romans ran a republic (sorta/kinda), the English managed to make a Magna Carta, etc. Mr. Smith wasn’t the first person to consider how economies worked and we had obviously been producing and selling stuff to each other for thousands of years before the industrial revolution came along and we got really, really good at it. But the trifecta served to usher in the modern world and made it possible for so many of us to become the spoiled, whiny, overfed ingrates of the first world and inspire the lean and downtrodden third world to aspire to someday have their own obesity epidemics.   

Second, in my semi-humble opinion, the American experiment can be defined by quoting the most important passage of the Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” If you accept that statement as a fundamental given (whether or not you believe in a creator), perhaps the most fundamental of givens… Well, If you don’t accept that statement, I fear it’s time for us to go our separate ways, you can have the dog but I’m keeping most of the DVDs.

And third, (still here?) I freely acknowledge that the next sentence in the declaration could have been, “Assuming, of course, that you are caucasian and male.” That was undeniably the way America worked at the time and it was undeniably flawed. However, it was the local version of how much of the world worked at the time, a version of reality that lives on in not a few places. Sexism and racism are unfortunately not rare phenomena. However, I maintain that some dramatic progress has been made in the last 250 years or so, particularly when compared to however many gazillions of years it was considered normal for a given caveman to club a cutie down at the waterhole to keep his cave clean while he and the boys raided other tribes for booty and slaves.

When my mom and dad got together, roughly 75 years ago (chronologically speaking a drop in the bucket), they believed that a man’s job was to bring home the bacon and a woman’s job was to be a domestic engineer. Period. In light of the way many folks look at things today, including me, they were wrong. I’m inclined to not only forgive them, but to also say thanks. They weren’t evil, and incidentally, they were part of the generation that survived the Great Depression and won World War Two. While they were busy saving the world they didn’t know that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow would be an era of unprecedented prosperity for the USA, the one that lasted from just after WW2 to the late 1970s. Things started getting weird after that, which I’ll get into later.

Finally, let us acknowledge the elephant skulking in the corner of the room. Homo sapiens will be Homo sapiens. While I’m profoundly grateful for the dumb luck of being a product of, and living in, a country that’s a product of Western civilization, I’m slightly smarter than I look. My gratitude is based on two things. Although I think Western civilization in general, and the USA in particular, is the best we’ve done so far, both are as flawed and imperfect as the H. sapiens that somehow came up with them. Therefore a -- We’re number one! We’re number one! -- overheated sports fan attitude can be as tacky as wearing socks with sandals. Let us be quietly smug. The coolest kid doesn’t have to tell people he’s cool, that’s part of his, um, coolness.  Also, an economic implosion here, an epidemic there, a bus-sized meteorite over there and the Dark Ages Digest will experience a sudden, dramatic increase in circulation.

Have an OK day.

[Dana, perpetually grumpy imaginary gentlereader, speaks. Wait just a minute, Sparky! yer gonna stop there? Posit that 1776 marked some sort of global game changer, then insert a "caveat" (whatever the hell that is) and then leave off? Marie-Louise (my drop dead gorgeous muse, who has finally returned from Quebec) is looking at me dubiously.]

Well, I'm running low on words. Think of it as a cliffhanger. Cliffhangers are cool, right?

[No, they're not, they're annoying. Who do you think you are, James (short, breathless chapters ending often as not with a cliffhanger) Patterson?]

Well, he is a best-selling author, and a gazillionaire.

[This ain't no suspense novel! It's a weekly column...

... With mini-posts on Tuesday and Thursday now, don't forget!

[Bonkercockie! exclaims Marie-Louise with a French accent (Bon-care-cok-E!). I'm going back to Quebec! She storms out of the room. Dana and I stare at each other in stunned silence -- for half a second.

Now look what you've done! Now look what you've done! Yikes! simultaneous exclamations. We're degenerating into a second-rate sitcom. I gotta go. Marie! I'm sorry! Come back, baby!]

© 2016 Mark Mehlmauer 

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