(Who, incidentally, were busy cracking a code of their own: "Purple," an Enigma-like code used by the Japanese. It was no small task -- the lead researcher on Purple suffered a total nervous breakdown -- but it yielded very positive results. Thanks to cracking Purple, an American fighter planes "just happened" to shoot down a plane carrying Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of Japan's naval forces. He was the guy who suggested attacking Pearl Harbor, you know, so there was probably very few tears shed over what was, in fact, a bald-faced assassination by aeroplane.)
It's not an exaggeration to say that the need to crack the Enigma code expanded human knowledge considerably. Much of this expansion took place in the rarified field of mathematics -- by the time of WWII, cryptanalysis was indistinguishable from higher-order math, and today it's even more so -- but other fields also got their share. The first programmable computer was not constructed in the United States after the war as is generally presumed, but in Bletchley Park, home of the Ultra project. The computer, called "Colossus" (because it was) was designed to crack codes quicker than any human could. You're reading this on the spiritual descendent of that first computer, "spiritual" because the machine, secret during the war, was destroyed just as secretly afterwards -- the Brits were nothing if not paranoid, and by extension, thorough in covering their sneaky little tracks. The world didn't find out about Enigma or Ultra until the 1970s. At which time, the Argentine air was filled with the sound of former Nazis smacking their foreheads in aggravation.
As mighty an intellectual feat as cracking the Enigma and Purple codes were, the tale is also an example of how when it comes down to it, people with big brains often have to rely on people with teeny brains making really dumb mistakes. The Enigma code was broken partially because German army soldiers, confident the code was invincible, got sloppy and used simple "initial" codes -- a three letter code at the beginning of a transmission that allowed the guy at the other end to "tune" his machine to receive the message -- that allowed the Brits a window of opportunity (The German navy was more circumspect with codes and who sent messages -- as a result, the naval codes were cracked years later than the army codes). It's proof that the biggest problem with any perfect system is the imperfect humans who use it.
Best Mass Hysteria of the Millennium.
The Death of Rudolph Valentino. Because it was a "Chick Thing," and so was hysteria -- or at least it was assumed to be.
I mean this literally. The word "hysteria" is directly related to hystera, the Greek word for "uterus." Seems the Greeks (who despite their large, meaty brains, had this penchant for presenting theories without the observational data to back them up) believed that hysteria was a condition of mental agitation brought on by "vapors" from the uterus. Show me a freaked-out woman, said the Greeks, and I'll show you someone with a belching womb.
You think someone would have figured this one out eventually, but, eh, no. Well into the 19th century, "hysteria" was frequently diagnosed in women, and often the treatment was, shall we say, rather intimate. It involved "massaging" a particular nerve-filled area on a woman's body to "calm" her (men, if you can't figure out which area I'm talking about, you now know why you're so often alone on a Saturday night).
In the 20th Century, the word passed into more general usage, and men were finally allowed to get just as "hysterical" as the gals, even without the previously-required womb. Just think, fellows -- every time you get hysterical, you're in touch with your feminine side!
The etymological derivation of "hysteria" seems to imply that men never work themselves up into an irrational lather. This is of course patently false, otherwise we would not have televised wrestling. I suppose it's more to the point that men were allowed a whole range of reasons to get stupid, whereas women were not; look at a crowd of yowling, chuffing men, and it's just men being men; you don't immediately attribute it to their gonads (well, you do, but you don't call it "testeria").
Also, frankly, hysteria as a psychological condition is associated with ignorance, sexual and social inhibition, and an authoritarian family structure, a situation which conveniently describes your average woman's life for most of the millennium (and still is, in some places -- thank you Taliban!). Hysteria was not a natural part of a woman's character, it was pretty much thrust upon her. Let's face it, if you were kept dumb and down, you'd go a little nuts, too. It was, if nothing else, a change of pace.
Valentino's death could probably be described as the last "pure" instance of mass hysteria in the classic "female" sense. There were a number before it -- the Salem witch trials come to mind, as does the celebrated female obsession with the famed 18th century castrato Farinelli (although in that particular case, it was quite obviously wasted effort) -- but if you want real mass hysteria, it's hard to beat Rudolph. He was the right man at the right place at the right time with the right death.
Valentino was Hollywood's first real male sex symbol, a swarthy Italian fellow with sensuous lips, dark eyes, and the ability to dance (he was a professional dancer in New York before he headed west to fame). He rose to prominence in the 1921 feature The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and in the next five years cranked out a dozen mostly successful films. Thanks to the widespread reach of film, women everywhere knew his face; thanks to relaxing sexual mores of the 1920s, for the first time a woman could openly swoon for someone who wasn't her thick, idiot husband. The public, meaning women, couldn't get enough of him (and as a bonus, Valentino was by all accounts actually one hell of a gentlemen).
And so when he died in 1926 at age 31, due to complications from abdominal surgery (surprise! No antibiotics in the 1920s!), women went nuts. And not just a little nuts -- we're talking out of control wacko-ness on a scale heretofore unimagined. Unable to consider to world without Valentino in it, dozens of women committed suicide. At a private memorial service in New York, 15,000 women tried to get in to have one last moment with the man they never knew, but, you know, knew. That crowd was peanuts compared to the 100,000 that surrounded the funeral home; those folks rioted outright, and the mass of human bodies filled the streets for 13 city blocks. Finally laid to rest in Los Angeles, his crypt was visited yearly by a mysteriously veiled "Lady in Black," and sometimes more than one (in 1939, there were three). It still is, although the most recent Lady in Black is more or less just carrying on the franchise, not unlike a mall Santa.
What was it about Valentino? Well, in a very real sense, it was nothing about him -- Almost none of the tens of thousands of women who became dramatically verklempt over his death actually ever met him. He was just an ideal, a first glimpse into a new world, where women were allowed to lust, and brooding men were there to satisfy their needs. There's not been a hysteria quite like it since, precisely because you can never have more than one first love, and women (at least in the part of the world where we live) have moved beyond that sort of thing. Women still have idols they get irrational about, of course, a fact that everybody from Ricky Nelson to N'Sync has taken to the bank. But, honestly. It's just not the same.
Ask yourself: if the Backstreet Boys were to suddenly expire, en masse, from acute peritonitis, would there be widespread rioting and hysteria? (From grief, I mean.) I don't think so. However, I'm willing to sacrifice them to find out. Eager, even.
Best Thing We Should Probably Never Do Again of the Millennium.
Use a nuclear bomb on people. This one's pretty obvious. The bumper sticker says "One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Whole Day," but that's really only true if you're a couple of miles or more from the point of detonation. Everyone inside of that radius has, at best, a fraction of a second of puzzlement as to why they can suddenly see all their bones before their atoms are freed from their bonds. The rest of their day isn't ruined. It isn't anything.
Having said that, let me express my opinion that nuking someone is not actually the worst thing you can actually do to them on a person-to-person level; ask a survivor of a genocide (there have been a few this century you may have heard about) to confirm
this.
Let me further suggest that dropping the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki might not even have been the worst carnage visted upon the Japanese during the final months of World War II. Compare them to when U.S. forces flattened a quarter of Tokyo, using conventional bombs, over two nights in March 1945. Those bombing runs killed 80,000 and left more than a million homeless -- and were followed by similar bombing runs over Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama, and Toyama. The main difference (in the short term, at least) between these bombing campaigns and the two nuclear events was the shocking economy of the nuclear weapon. It was the ratio of one bomb, one city that shook the Japanese into unconditional surrender.
The salient point to make about nuclear weapons, as opposed to all the other truly terrible ways that humans have used to dispatch each other off this planet, is that we've only done it once (well, twice). After Fat Man and Little Boy (the winsome names of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), there have been no more nuclear weapons used directly on human beings. We've bombed the hell of out iguanas, gecko lizards and several other reptile species that happened to exist on various atolls or desert landscapes before we fused them into glass (and thus Godzilla was born!), but we haven't directed any to where people might habitually be found.
This is an astounding bit of restraint on the part of the human race, which is not known to resist temptation when it comes to these sort of things. The genocides of the Armenians and the Jews certainly didn't seem to hinder subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia; the horrors of gas warfare in World War I meant very little to the Iraqis who gassed the Kurds. It's not that humans can't or don't learn from previous horrors, mind you. It's just that we don't particularly seem to think the lessons apply to us. Ask a Serb who participated in the slaughter of his Muslim former neighbors whether there are any parallels between his actions and the actions of the Nazis, and he'll look at you like you've slapped him. It's entirely different, you see. He's not a monster.
Of course, it's giving the human race as a whole entirely too much credit for not having nuked anybody else to this point. Unlike genocide, which requires only, say, a mob and a more or less equal number of machetes and stones, a nuclear explosion actually requires a nuclear bomb. Historically, these have been difficult to come by, and those who have them have been reluctant to use them. First off, they're expensive. Secondly, they make rather a large statement. After all, their only previous use was to end the largest armed conflict in the history of the world. Using one for anything less seems a bit...overly dramatic. People would talk.
Finally, there's the matter that by the time anyone thought to use these sorts of weapons in another armed conflict, other people also had nuclear capability; the Soviets in 1949, followed by the British, the French, the Chinese, and so on down the line until you've got folks like India and Pakistan waving their uranium around. Others could make the bombs if they wanted to, thanks to sufficient infrastructure and know-how; for example, Brazil (take that, you lousy Amazon!).
As much as it pains any vaguely liberal person such as myself to say it, the specter of mutually assured destruction probably did more to keep humanity from making mushrooms than any other reason, certainly more than any sort of touchy-feely sentiment about how, you know, nuclear war was, like, bad. If nothing else, touchy-feely types generally weren't given launch codes. Because, really. It's not like they would do anything with 'em. Don't take out the car if you don't want to drive.
People don't think much about nuclear war anymore, and there's a good reason for that: A nuclear war, in the classic look-out-here-come-the-ICBMs-over-the-pole sense, is wholly unlikely to happen. Russia doesn't want to bomb us anymore. If they did, where would their mafia launder their money?
To the extent that people worry about it, they're more concerned about a lone terrorist walking into Central Park and detonating a bomb out of his knapsack. Even the most brain-dead terrorist organization, however, has to realize that's the sort of thing that the United States would feel obligated to respond to, and not in a dainty fashion. The universally recognized ability to peel the planet's surface like it was an orange is, in fact, a dandy deterrent.
No, the next nuclear bomb that goes off around people is going to go off like the first one did: Against a people who won't have any possible way of responding in kind. Will it actually happen? I actually think the odds are against it: Them bombs are still hard to come by, and we do have people looking to make sure they don't pop up where they shouldn't. And the one thing that such a bomb was able to provide in World War II -- a definitive ending -- is the one thing that certainly won't happen the next time one goes off.
But you never do know. If it does happen, don't expect it near where you are. Expect it on or near the equator, in a hemisphere that is not your own.
Best Hideously Inbred Royal Family of the Millennium.
That'd be the Hapsburgs. And here you thought inbreeding (or, as I like to call it, "fornicousin") was just a low-rent sort of activity. In fact, it's the sport of kings: All your royal families of Europe have participated in a program of inbreeding so clearly ill-advised that it would disgust Jerry Springer's booker. They paid for it, of course (how many royal families are left any more) but not before polluting their bloodlines to an intolerable degree. Any little girl who dreamily wishes to marry a handsome prince on a white steed is advised to marry the horse instead. The horse probably has better DNA.
You'd think that the royal families of Europe would have figured out that a recursive family tree was not the way to go; at the very least, when you'd go to a royal function and everyone was married to a relative, you'd clue in that something was amiss. But royalty are different from you and me, and not just because all their children were still drooling well into the teenage years. Royalty wasn't just about kings and queens, it was about families and dynasties -- single families ruling multiple countries, or in the case of the Hapsburgs, most of the whole of the continent. You can't let just anyone marry into that sort of thing. There had to be standards, genetically haphazard as they might be.
The Hapsburgs, based in Austria, carried this admonition to the extreme, even for the royal families of Europe. Take the case of Archduke Franz Ferdinand (you may remember him as the nominal cause of World War I, when the poor fellow was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. What, you don't? Ah, the glories of our educational system). Long before his assassination, Franz fell in love with Sophia von Chotkowa und Wognin, who was a Duchess of Hohenburg. For you and me, linking up with a Duchess of Hohenburg would probably be a step up in the grand scheme of things, certainly something to brag about at the family reunion at the municipal park ("You married Cindy? How nice. I married nobility. Look, here come our dukelings now.")
Franz's family, on the other hand, was horrified. Franz was an heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire! He couldn't marry any shameless duchess who just happened to bat her hereditary lands at him! It was a scandal! Franz eventually married Sophie, but he was made to renounce all claims of rank for their offspring (i.e., no little emperors for Franz and Sophie). As a final insult, Sophie, the hussy duchy, was not allowed to ride in the same car as her husband during affairs of state. In retrospect, this may not have been such a bad idea; Sophie was in the same car as Franz in Sarajevo (presumably not a state function) and she got assassinated right along with him. But at the time, it probably just came across as mean.
No, in the grand scheme of things, the Hapsburgs figured it was better off to marry a Hapsburg when you could (and one of those degenerate Bourbons if you couldn't). On a territorial level, this worked like a charm; at the height of the Hapsburg influence, the family ruled the Holy Roman Empire and the Iberian Peninsula, and had good and serious claims on a large portion of what is now France. The family had initially achieved much of this, interestingly enough, by marrying people who were not them; after a particularly profitable spate of marriages arranged by the family in the late 15th century, it was sai
d of the Hapsburgs, Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube ("Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry"). Once lands were assimilated, of course, it was first cousins all the way.
In the short run, the interbreeding caused some noticeable but essentially minor physical distinctions: the famed "Hapsburg lip," in which a full lower lip jutted out in front of a somewhat less lavish upper lip. This is distinction was on par with other royal families, who had (and have) their own physical distinctions; the Bourbons, for one, had a distinctive nose (it was huge), while today, the English House of Windsor is known for its Dumbo-like ears. Proof that there were worse things than to have big lips.
Here's the thing, however. It's one thing to marry, say, your cousin. Not the smartest thing you can do, but so long as you move to another state and don't talk much about your family, you can get away with it. But if you marry a cousin, who was him or herself the product of cousins, who were themselves products of cousins, and so on and so forth -- and you're all in the same family -- well, you don't have to be Gregor Mendel to see what's coming. Alas for the Hapsburgs, what was coming was Charles II, king of Spain from 1665 through 1700.
With Charles, the question was not what was wrong with him, but what wasn't wrong. To begin, thanks to all that cousin cuddling, the Hapsburg lip stopped being a distinctive facial characteristic and became a jaw deformity so profound that Chuck couldn't chew his own food. This would depress a person of normal intelligence, but since Charles was also mentally retarded, he might not have minded. Anyway, it wasn't the most depressing deformity Charles had; let's just say that generations of inbreeding kept Charles from breeding new generations. It was bad enough to have a sick freak ruling Spain; it was even worse that there were no more sick freaks coming.
For lack of a better idea, Charles willed his possessions to a relative. Unfortunately, it was a relative who was also a Bourbon. Enter the War of Spanish Succession, at the end which Spain would lose most of its European holdings (such as the Netherlands), and the Hapsburgs would begin their long decline, which would end with the First World War and a final dismemberment of the family's territorial holdings.