Drafts at November 2024 | A SciFi History of the 21st Century

Introduction

Why Skip the 22nd Century?

This is not an attempt to write a chronological recounting of World History or like "The Outline of History" by H.G.Wells, which chronicled the history of the world from the origin of the Earth to the First World War. It is an essay hopefully illustrating that tumultuous, near apocalyptic century (whose second-half eventually turned out okay, and provided a smooth transition into the (by comparison) rather boring 22nd Century and our own even more boring (from a sensationalist, book-selling standpoint) 23rd. No, of all the centuries H.G. Wells covered up to 1920 nothing beats the 21st. Even the later commercial resurrections of Wells's masterpiece to include the events of theSecond World War, still doesn't hold a candle to the 21st.

Historical nit-pickers will point out that the 21st century didn't really start until the 20th was completed on December 31, 2000. But a thing in the news called "Y2K' (a meme for a short-sighted goof by early computer engineers to provide enough memory allocation for computers' internal-clocks t0 count beyond 1999. The solving of the "Y2K' puzzle kept the public's attention revited, causing the confusion as to when the 21st Century actually commenced. But Y2K also created some beautiful software-engineering busy-work for which the software-engineering companies were handsomely paid. Well, more than "handsomely," it was more like, Fort Knox-monumentally-paid.

This egotistical (I admit it) historian cannot help but make an interesting little comparison between the giddy, optimistic turn of the 20th Century with America winning a war against Spain (the second of the three great colonizing nations of Europe that America had defeated) and all of the Western-Hemisphiric former colonies that Spain turned over.

Here's an exercise for the serious student of history: dredge up old music files of John Phillip Sousa marches, and turn-of-the-century Ragtime music — especially that of Scott Joplin. This was the theme-music of the 1890s and early 1900s, played on RCA Victrolas, Edison Gramaphones, Piano-rolls ... even the mechanical "bands" at the center of amusment park carousels, and from sheet-music played by musically-literate citizens on home pianos. It was bouncy, optimistic and mercifully devoid of any knowledge of gagging deaths in muddy trenches carved out ot the European Continent.

Compare the world's public-mood as the 20th came to an end: as December 31, 1999's fireworks-shows — carried in sequence via the Internet, across time zones — each one reporting no ill-effects from the Y2K bugaboo. The mood was just as bouncy, optimistic and was mercifully devoid of any knowledge of flaming, collapsing, twin-towers which ground over 3,000 innocent people to death (except the ones who chose to be splattered on the pavements of Battery Park rather than burn to death.)

From that grim beginning proceeded the grim first half of the 21st Century.

The First Half:

Domninated by Historically Ignorant Megalomaniacs

I could posit my own prejudicial opinion at this pint (at the risk of my reputation as a serious historian) : But I will anyway: Curiously, some of these little "Napolians" were born about the time World War Two was ending. Those, like Donald J. Trimp, Benjamin Netanyaho and Vladimir Putin, were around when the news what happened to dictators like Hitler and Mousellini, ev en later oners like Moamar Ghadafi and Sadam Hussein. 1. Suicide by Luger, 2. Hanging upside down in a public sqare, 3. Assasinated by pistol shot 4. Decapitated by a botched haninging, in that order. One cannot fault those 21st Century dictators, having been fed in their youth by Television shows which glamorized the acquisition of thrones of power by bloody violence. Does one believe Television or the History Books? One believes that which fits one's pre-conceived notion of the way things should go.

But men raised by the "boob tube" as it was called, cannot be expetected to know about Lous XVI's experience at the Guillotine, nor the picture of Czar Nicholas and family standing before a firing-squad.

Does it take two centuries before some historically-ignorant grown man with a childish desire to rule the world, build an empire, like in the story books, and be the center of adulation and absolute obedience, like they show on Television. Oh what fun. And oh what a troubling start for our subject Century, and what pain for the millions of innocent people caught in their path, and mowed down by their "toys." both in collapsed cities, (not just two twin towers) and by being squashed by tank-treads.

Ironically, too, so much of this carnage was blamed on God. "God told me to do it." "The 'Bible' told me to do it." Judging by the documentation and the articacts still existing, today, none of these "dictators" really believed the religions (Judaism, Islam and extremist Christianity ) nor the "holy books" that their trained attack dogs believed. These "tin pot" dictators (to use a term then current) the professing of belief was enough to satisfy the masses who got their entire knowledge of "history" from those holy books. Don't believe the scholars, believe the "holy men," and the "God" who wrote the "holy books" with a finger dipped in blood.

"It's the only way the math works."

How the aid of "scientists," (physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians) was enlisted.

String Theory and extra-dimensions curled-up. One Universe, one symmetry, and one "perfect" Universe spawning and spinninbg-off "unpopulated ,rejected and discarded" Universes. to support the "one" powerful, authoritarian, paternalistic "God" of the holy books, in order for the secret government to keep the vast numbers of humans in line and the "designed-economic-system" humming. Why do the rich need ever-more sums of money? It's a petty game of more childish megalomaniacs engaging in what was called "pissing contests" to see sho could accumjulate the most wealth. One can only use so many cars, so many mansions, so many yachts. And when those yachts exceed the size of a cruise ship, who needs a bigger one. Childish industrialists do as simply poker chips or, what was still called "monopoly money," after a popular 20th cetury board-game. "Ego." The word in Greek meant "I." First-person singular. The big "I."

Keep following VernonMilesKerr[dot]com for updates to "A SciFi History of the 21st..."