MODERN HISTORY
Shakespeare’s
plays describe about 155 deaths, less than half onstage, involving 13 suicides,
33 stabbings, seven poisonings, five beheadings, three dismemberments, a host
of gruesome ends, including two men baked into a pie and fed to their mother,
all told in plots involving jealousy, greed, fighting for power, vanity,
dishonesty, cruelty, arrogance, vengefulness, delusion, rage, hypocrisy, and
paranoia—the entire range of human iniquity. The Bard is celebrated today as
one of the foremost exponents of Renaissance humanism, and we are right to
wonder why.
Coming
across Martin Luther eating a hearty breakfast of two sausages, five barley
loaves, three scrambled eggs, and a pitcher of milk, John Calvin quoted Philippians
3:19, “Their god is their stomach.” Luther responded with Proverbs 13:4, “The
diligent soul is amply satisfied,” adding that it was the Doctrine of
Justification.
The
Spanish conquest of the Americas led to the fusion of cultures and in many ways
to the mutual enrichment of disparate peoples. Mixed populations of the Spanish
and Portuguese empires adopted the dominant religion of the
Europeans—Christianity?—no, soccer.
Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, who published his calculus in 1684, claimed that Isaac
Newton’s calculus was derivative,
based on their exchange of letters and notes. Newton retorted that he started
working on his calculus in 1666, that is, it had long been integral to his physics.
James
Watt made groundbreaking improvements to the steam engine in 1776, and for the
first time, in contrast to the politics of the preceding centuries, the
inventor put hot air to good use. He jumpstarted the Industrial Revolution in
Great Britain so that the world was changed forever—harnessing cheap, plentiful
power, factories output buttons, pins, textiles, and all sorts of products in
huge volumes, with the side effect that human beings in assembly lines were
transformed into robots in almost the same quantities.
The
French Revolutionary calendar divided the year into four seasons of three
months each and the months into three weeks of ten days each, which proved to
be too revolutionary for the hardworking French. It reduced weekends from four
to three per month, inciting Napoleon Bonaparte to execute the calendar by
guillotine on January 1, 1806, to the cheers of millions.
Abraham
Lincoln, the architect of the abolition of slavery in the U.S., had a difficult
relationship with his wife, Mary Todd. Historians agree that he showed himself
to be a steadfast man of principle—when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation
on January 1, 1863, he did not include his marriage.
The
advent of photography coincided with the rise of Impressionism, not only in the
visual arts, but in all aspects of Western culture. Claude Debussy, who led
this trend in music, displayed the proverbial artistic temperament—he flitted
between women, some married, in relationships that were temperamental,
dissonant, experimental, unpredictable, emotional, moody, and
free-spirited—interestingly, just like his music itself.
When
Lenin attacked the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg on October 25, 1917, ousting
the Provisional Government of Kerensky, he promised the Russian people, “Peace,
Land, and Bread.” What they got was Stalin.
Medical
records from 1923 confirm that Adolph Hitler had only one descended testicle.
Widely attested, what has not been verified is that he had only half a brain.
In
August 1946 the Americans dropped atomic bombs on a wartime enemy for the first
and only time in history. Massively destructive blue-white flashes exploded
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, giving unexpected new meaning to the Japanese term
Shōwa or the era of “Radiant Japan.”
During
the late forties, a struggling American artist refurbishing his New York City
apartment spilled yellow paint on a large canvas he had laid out on the
floor—liking what he saw, he decided to do it again, this time with red paint.
Thus was born the legend of Jackson Pollock, master of Abstract Expressionism.
Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, hero of Indian independence, switched to wearing a poor
man’s clothes and often walked barefoot. He came to be known as “Great Sole.”
Communist
China hailed Mao Zhedong as “The Great Helmsman” of what at times appeared to
be a sinking ship. History revised his revolutionary slogans—“Great Leap
Forward” became “Great Leap Forward into the Pit of Famine,” and “Let a Hundred
Flowers Bloom” turned into “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom and Rot in Jail
Afterwards.”
The
Cold War saw the success of spy novels like Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958), Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), and Tom
Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October
(1984). Ghost writers in the former Soviet Union sought to cash in with
knockoffs—Our Hottie in Havana, The Spy Who Loved McDonald’s, The Hunt for Red Borscht—for some
reason, they didn’t catch on.
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| Forging Ahead in Wind and Waves (1974) |
