Dave Barry's History of the Millennium (So Far)

by Dave Barry

  DAVE BARRY’S

  HISTORY

  of the

  MILLENNIUM

  (so far)

  ALSO BY DAVE BARRY

  FICTION

  The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog

  Cave of the Dark Wind (with Ridley Pearson)

  Escape from the Carnivale (with Ridley Pearson)

  Peter and the Shadow Thieves (with Ridley Pearson)

  Peter and the Starcatchers (with Ridley Pearson)

  Tricky Business

  Big Trouble

  NONFICTION

  Dave Barry’s Money Secrets

  Boogers Are My Beat

  Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway

  Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down

  Dave Barry Turns 50

  Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus

  Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs

  Dave Barry in Cyberspace

  Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys

  Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides

  Dave Barry Is NOT Making This Up

  Dave Barry Does Japan

  Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need

  Dave Barry Talks Back

  Dave Barry Turns 40

  Dave Barry Slept Here

  Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

  Homes and Other Black Holes

  Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage and/or Sex

  Dave Barry’s Bad Habits

  Claw Your Way to the Top

  Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead

  Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

  The Taming of the Screw

  DAVE BARRY’S HISTORY of the MILLENNIUM (so far)

  Dave Barry

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  New York

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Selections from this book first appeared in The Miami Herald.

  Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 by Dave Barry

  Illustrations by Jeff and Susie MacNelly, Chris Cassatt, and Gary Brooklins.

  Copyright © 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Tribune Media Services.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barry, Dave.

  Dave Barry’s history of the millennium (so far) / Dave Barry.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-1012-0723-9

  1. History—Humor. 2. History—21st century—Humor.

  3. American wit and humor. I. Title.

  PN6231.H47B37 2007 2007014131

  818'.5402—dc22

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  Y1KDAVE BARRY’S COMPLETE HISTORY OF THE MILLENNIUM, GIVE OR TAKE THREE CENTURIES

  2000GEORGE AND AL’S BIG CHADVENTURE

  2001

  2002AMERICA JUST WANTS TO FOCUS ON ITS SALAD

  2003ANYBODY SEEN ANY WMD?

  2004THE POLITICS, THE PASSION, AND PARIS

  2005WILMA, RITA, KATRINA: NO MATTER HOW YOU STACK IT UP, 2005 BLEW

  2006A BOLD NEW DIRECTION! OR, NOT!

  AFTERWORD

  FOREWORD

  As Abraham Lincoln once said, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.”

  Or possibly it was Thomas Edison who said that. I’m pretty sure somebody said it, because you often hear journalists quote it in an effort to explain how come they get everything wrong.

  We see this all the time. Journalists, rushing to get a story out under deadline pressure, will report—based on preliminary information—that a ship sank, and 127 people, many of them elderly, perished. Then, upon further investigation, it turns out that nobody, in fact, perished, although one elderly person was slightly injured by a set of dentures hurled by another elderly person in an effort to get the first elderly person to stop talking so loud. Then it turns out that this happened at a nursing home, as opposed to a ship, although the elderly people were watching a video of Titanic at the time, and although there were only four of them, as opposed to 127, the nursing home is located on Route 124, which is only three less than 127, which is not that much of an error when you consider the deadline pressure that journalists operate under.

  That’s what we journalists mean when we talk about “the first rough draft of history.”

  I was a practicing journalist for a number of years.1 I started in 1971 as a cub reporter at the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pa., and I can honestly say that at least 87 percent of the time when I produced a news story I had no idea what the hell I was talking about. For example, one of the beats I was assigned to cover was the Downingtown Area Regional Sewer Authority, which, as you might imagine, was an authority responsible for the regional sewage of the Downingtown area. I was an English major. I had learned, in college, to explain the difference between the metaphysical and Cavalier styles of British poetry.2 I had learned nothing about wastewater treatment, a topic rarely addressed in seventeenth-century British literature.

  Yet there I was, wearing a sport coat and taking notes in my official reporter notebook, as the members of the Downingtown Area Regional Sewer Authority discussed, at great length, matters pertaining to sewage, such as “sewer interceptors.” The Authority was always talking about these, and I wrote many long stories about them, but to this day I have no idea what they are or why anybody would want to intercept sewage. I’m sure that the stories I wrote made no sense; fortunately, as far as I could tell, nobody was reading them.

  I spent several years cranking out the first rough draft of Downingtown-area sewage history before moving on to other areas of journalism. Eventually, I became a columnist, which is the branch of journalism where instead of attempting to explain topics that you don’t know anything about you have strong opinions about them. Some columnists are really good at this. You can wake them up from a dead sleep and ask them: “Should the UN send troops to East Zambora?” Or: “Should the San Francisco city council ban nitrogen from the atmosphere?” Or: “Which is a better style of British poetry, the metaphysical or the Cavalier?” And these columnists will i
nstantly feel very strongly one way or another, and produce six hundred passionate words in support of their views. They can do this even though there is no such place as East Zambora. That is the opinion-generating power that your true columnist possesses.

  Me, I can’t do it. There are very few issues3 about which I have strong opinions; beyond those, I generally don’t get riled up. So I have spent my columnizing career writing mostly about “offbeat” topics such as the alarming decline of American capabilities in the field of accordion repair, or the man who came up with the idea—which I am not making up—of keeping turkey rectums shut with Super Glue.4 This kind of story is my bread and butter; I let the other columnists deal with the hard news.

  The exception is the “Year in Review.” This is my one effort to participate, as a journalist, in the writing of the first rough draft of history. Each year, along about Halloween, I start going through the headlines, month by month, summarizing the big stories that happened during that year. My deadline to finish the “Year in Review” is always early December, so I have to make most of December up, but that’s not a big concern as I also make up large chunks of the rest of the year.

  The book you hold in your hands contains my reviews of all the years of the Second Millennium so far. As a bonus, this book also includes my review of the First Millennium, covering the years 1000 through 1999.5 These two millenniums have not been picnics for the human race. But as you read this book and review the many tragedies that have befallen humanity over the years, I suspect that you’ll come to the same surprising conclusion that I did: No matter what challenges we face as a species—no matter what hurdles are placed in our way—somehow we always find a way, even in the darkest hour, to make things worse. It’s a miracle, really. You read about the events of one year and you think, “There is no possible way that human beings can get any stupider than that.” Then you read what we did the next year and darned if we didn’t pull it off!

  Anyway, I hope you enjoy the book. I could not have done it alone. I would like to thank the famous dead British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. I have never read any of his books, but I like the way his name sounds. Toynbee Toynbee Toynbee. I would also like to thank Aretha Franklin, for obvious reasons. Last but definitely not least, I thank the members of the Downingtown Area Regional Sewer Authority for all that they have done, and continue to do.

  Y1K

  DAVE BARRY’S COMPLETE

  HISTORY OF THE MILLENNIUM,

  GIVE OR TAKE THREE CENTURIES

  And so we stand together—the human race, plus the members of Limp Bizkit—poised on the brink of the year 2000.

  In a matter of days, we will find ourselves in a new millennium, facing exciting challenges and questions, such as: Why are we lying in a Dumpster naked? And when did we get this highly personal Pokemon tattoo?

  But this is not the time to think about our New Year’s Eve plans. This is the time to take one last, lingering look back at the millennium that is drawing to a close. For as the ancient Greek historian Thucydides often said, when he was alive, “History is a bunch of things that happened in the past.” His point was that human civilization is a journey, and only by retracing the steps of that journey can we truly come to know, as a species, where we lost our keys.

  And so let us now press the REWIND button on the VCR of time. Let us travel back together, back a thousand years, back to…

  JANUARY 1, 1000

  …This was the historic day that humanity celebrated the dawn of our current millennium. The occasion was marked by feasting, dancing, and the public beheading of a whiny, tedious group of people who would not stop insisting that, technically, the new millennium did not begin until January 1, 1001.

  But it was not all fun and games back in those days. It was a world of ignorance and fear; a world of pestilence and famine; a world of extremely high b.o. levels. Also there was “the Y1K problem”—an unforeseen manufacturing glitch that caused parchment to malfunction such that many words were turned inside out (OTTO, for example, became TOOT).

  Fortunately, back then almost nobody could read, so most people were able to continue doing their jobs under the popular economic system of the time, feudalism, which is sometimes called “the Internet of the Middle Ages.” Feudalism was based on a “ladder type” of organizational structure, similar to Amway. You started out on the bottom rung, in the position of serf. This was not an easy job, but if you worked hard, followed the rules, did not complain, and were a “team player,” after a certain period of time you fell off the bottom rung and died.

  This system freed the people higher up on the ladder to form noble families and create new empires, which began ebbing and flowing all over the place—in the words of the great British historian Thomas Carlyle—“like MoonPies on a hot sidewalk.” In Asia, the Chinese had just invented gunpowder, which would have made them the strongest military power in the world, except that they had not yet invented guns. Their tactic was to make a pile of gunpowder on the ground, try to trick their enemies into standing on top of it, and then set it off with sparks, thus blowing the enemy up. This tactic only worked against really stupid enemies, so the Chinese did not become a major power until the year 1083, when they developed both the cherry bomb and the bottle rocket, using plans apparently stolen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

  In western Europe, the two dominant cultures were the French and the English, who hated each other because of a bitter, centuries-old dispute over the right way to prepare food. The French, led by the French warrior Maurice LeBeurre, repeatedly attempted to invade England and forcibly introduce the use of sauces. The English, led by King Harold the Comically Monikered, resisted valiantly until 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest, so called because England became the sole possession of a man named Norman, who has owned it ever since.

  Another big conflict was started in 1095, when Pope Urban II (son of Mr. and Mrs. Pope Urban I) launched the Crusades to get the Holy Land back from the Infidels (so called because they wore jackets that said INFIDELS across the back). Over the next two centuries, courageous knights wearing gleaming armor suits would periodically set off from Europe, traveling by day and spending each night in a Motel VI, until finally, after years of hard journeying, they reached the Holy Land, where they instantly cooked like eggs in a microwave. The Infidels thought this was hilarious.

  “They wear METAL?” they’d say. “In THIS climate?”

  Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, Viking adventurers (or, as they called themselves, “Norsepersons”) were looking for new lands where they could loot, rape, pillage, and eat without utensils. The most legendary of these was Leif Eriksson, who was the son of the legendary Erik the Red, who was the son of the legendary Eric the Mauve, who was the first one to think of wearing a hat with horns. Leif and a hardy crew set sail from Greenland, and finally after many harrowing weeks at sea, during which they almost perished, discovered a new land. It turned out to be Canada, so they went home. After that things remained fairly quiet until the early…

  1200s

  …when a Mongol named Genghis Khan (son of Murray and Esther Khan) organized the rest of the Mongols into a fierce horde and took over China by thundering across it on big, scary horses that did not care where they went to the bathroom. Khan and his descendants created a vast empire that ultimately encompassed all of Asia, Asia Minor, Asia Minor Phase II, and the Shoppes at Asia Minor Plaza.

  The Mongol Empire had little contact with Europe until it was visited in 1271 by the Italian traveler Marco Polo, who stayed in China for seventeen years before returning to Venice with two thousand little packets of soy sauce. This led to increased trade between Europe and the East that ultimately came to involve soup, egg rolls, and any two dishes from Column B.

  Meanwhile, in England, the English noblemen had become involved in a big dispute with King John over the issue of whether or not he should be required to reveal his last name. This led to a big showdown in 1215 (known to English schoolchildren as “The Bi
g Showdown of 1215”) that resulted in the signing of the historic Magna Carta, which is the foundation of the modern legal system because it guaranteed, for the first time, that the noblemen had the right to habeas corpus (literally, “wear tights”).

  But the good times did not roll for long. In 1337, France, which was then under King Philip VI, was invaded by England, which was then under King Edward III, who had vowed to kill any monarch with a higher Roman numeral. This led to the Hundred Years’ War, which, because of delays caused by equipment problems, is still going on.

  Matters were not helped any by the arrival of the bubonic plague, or “Black Death,” which in the fourteenth century spread throughout Asia and Europe, in the words of the great historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, “like the plague or something.” In those ignorant times, it was believed that the plague was caused by evil spirits. Now, thanks to modern science, we know that the real cause was tiny germs, which were carried by fleas, which in turn were carried by rats, which in turn were eaten by cats, which are in fact evil spirits. The plague killed about one-third of the total European population. It was not covered by HMOs.

  Elsewhere in the world, important strides were being strode. In South America, the Aztecs had invented a highly sophisticated calendar; it consisted entirely of weekends, and that was the last anybody heard of the Aztecs. In North America, the indigenous peoples, who called themselves “Native Americans,” were building hundreds of mounds, and you will just have to ask them why. Meanwhile, way out on a tiny speck of land in the Pacific that we now call Easter Island, giant, mysterious stone heads were being erected. This was done by teenagers. They’d erect one and then hide in the bushes and wait for the homeowner to come out and see it and yell, “Dammit, Marge, those kids have erected a giant stone head on the lawn again! We’re moving off this island!” This led to the development of Polynesia.