You Should Really Be a Cat Person

In 1233, a priest by the name of Konrad von Marburg received reports that a group of heretics were operating in Germany.  Being a fairly proactive holy man, Konrad launched an inquisition to root out these supposed heretics, because if there was one thing God didn't like, it was being worshiped in slightly the wrong fashion.  This being the thirteenth century, launching an inquisition of course meant terrorizing random people, threatening to burn them at the stake, and torturing the shit out of them until they confessed to pretty much whatever Konrad wanted to hear.  Amazingly enough, Konrad discovered that not only were there heretics in Germany, but a full blown satanic cult.  According to Konrad's "investigation" members of the cult would kiss the asshole of a black cat before engaging in a wild homosexual orgy which upon culmination would result in the arrival of the devil, who would then apparently just hang out for a bit of satanic chit chat.  Flush with holy vigor, Konrad sent a letter describing his findings to the Pope in Rome.  However, he was soon after mysteriously murdered for reasons that can only be described as obvious given his habit of torturing random innocent people.

When Pope Gregory IX got Konrad's letter he freaked the fuck out, which may have been somewhat understandable if anything in the letter was true.  While other priests also wrote letters, most describing how Konrad was a torture happy asshat, the Pope decided to go with Konrad's by far much more interesting description of what was going on.  To be fair to Gregory, Germany was a long ways away, and as anybody who has ever seen German pornography can tell you, Germans are kind of weird people when it comes to such shit.  Anyways, thoroughly freaked out at the thought of a bunch of feline butthole kissing orgy loving cultists, Gregroy wrote a Papal edict commanding the nobles of Germany to hunt down and eradicate all signs of the supposed cult.

Gregory's edict left the German nobles in a bit of a quandary.  On the one hand, they wanted to prove they were good Christians by totally doing what the Pope told them to do, but on the other, the satanic cult they were supposed to eradicate totally didn't exist.  Luckily the nobles found a loophole.  The edict did mention that black cats were used in the cult's evil rituals, so if the nobles just wiped out all of the black cats, then the cult wouldn't be able to do the aforementioned rituals.  No black cats meant no buttholes to kiss which meant no cult.  What followed was exactly as ridiculous and stupid as you would expect.

Imagine you are a serf living in the Middle Ages.  Your entire life is pretty much toiling your ass off with no hope of bettering your position until you drop dead before your fortieth birthday.  You're illiterate, as are all of your friends, and you probably have livestock living in your house with you, if you're lucky enough to own livestock.  Now imagine that your local priest, the most educated person in town, gets up on the pulpit and commands you to kill all the black cats you see because they are totally the devil or something like that.  Now imagine how easily things get out of hand today via social media even though we’re all supposedly well educated.  So yeah, it’s not hard to see how the whole killing black cats thing quickly got out of control.  The idea that black cats were the devil soon spread across most of Europe, and then morphed from just black cats to pretty much all cats.  Over the next 110 years the people of Europe pretty much killed any cat they could get their hands on. 

Funny thing about cats.  They eat rats.  Funny thing about killing all the cats.  You end up with a lot of rats.  Throughout the Middle Ages, Italian trading vessels regularly plied the waters between Europe and the Middle East.  Starting in the mid-fourteenth century, they began bringing back not just delicious spices and the such, but also rats infested with fleas which in turn carried the Bubonic Plague.  Yeah, you can probably see where this is going.  Over the next decade, the rats, and hence the plague, spread across Europe, killing an estimated 30 to 60 percent of the continent's population, some 75 to 200 million people.  Sufficed to say, things did not go well.  Of course, the people of Europe, seeing the error of their ways, stopped killing cats soon after.  Wait, that's not right.  Actually they doubled down on the whole cat killing thing, resulting in several more rounds of plague over the next several centuries.  In fact, they didn't stop needlessly killing cats until the early nineteenth century, and to this day black cats are still considered bad luck.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_cat_IMG_1618.jpg

Why Don't You Fly It Right Up Your Ass

In 1903, two bicycle salesmen from Ohio made history on a sandy barrier island off the coast of North Carolina by carrying out the first successful airplane flight in history.  After years of experimentation and flying gliders, Orville and Wilbur Wright literally catapulted themselves into the history books.  There was just one little problem. Nobody gave a damn.

Soon after their historic first flight, Orville and Wilbur excitedly contacted the press to let them know about their amazing feat.  The press was less than impressed.  Most newspapers treated the brothers as though they were a pair of nut jobs.  The few periodicals that didn’t just straight up ignore them, buried the story in the back of their papers with the articles about waltzing dogs and random perverts taking poops behind the livery stable.  Sufficed to say, few if any people took notice.  A little less than pleased with the public reaction to actually flying through the air, Orville and Wilbur staged a demonstration for the press four months later in a shit filled cow pasture.  It did not go well.  Poor winds and engine troubles kept their technological marvel on the ground, resulting in the press collectively deciding that reporting on two screw job bike hucksters was probably not the best use of their time.

Orville and Wilbur, surprisingly undeterred by this whole chain of events, spent the next year and a half improving their flying machine to the point that they could keep it in the air for nearly an hour and literally fly circles through the air.  The only witnesses to these test flights were family members, several perplexed Ohio farmers, and one reporter who wrote about them in his beekeeping magazine.  By the time the newspapers finally realized something really cool was going on, Orville and Wilbur had realized that their invention could probably make them a shit ton of money, and so became much less willing to talk about it.  The two brothers spent the next two years trying to sell their idea to the American and various European governments, which proved difficult given that they were so afraid of people stealing their ideas that they wouldn't even show prospective buyers pictures of the damn thing.  It wasn't until 1908, after reporters got the scoop by spying on the brothers, that the world at large finally found out that two bicycle mechanics were flying around like birds.  This time the world lost its collective shit.

With the cat out of the bag, Wilbur and Orville won several contracts to supply airplanes to groups in the U.S. and France.  It seemed like riches were about to be had, but that same year another inventor, a fella named Glen Curtiss, began selling his own airplane, which looked very similar to the Wright plane, only better.  Wilbur and Orville sued Curtiss for patent infringement, but the lawsuit dragged on for eight years, stunting aviation development in the U.S. and leading to American plane designs falling far behind their European counterparts.  The stress of it all eventually helped drive Wilbur to an early grave, well that and the typhoid fever.  He died in 1912.  Things eventually got so bad that the U.S. government finally forced a settlement between Orville Wright and Glen Curtiss in 1916.  However, by then American airplanes were so far behind that the U.S. Army was forced to use French planes when the country entered World War I. 

Following the end of the so-called Patent War, Orville quit building airplanes, perfectly content with just collecting money from others whose designs just barely resembled the ideas he and his brother had originally come up with.  However, even in retirement Orville was unable to avoid getting into a feud.  The Smithsonian claimed that the Wright Brothers didn’t invent the first airplane, but that the honor actually belonged to a man named Elwood Doherty, who just so happened to also be a member of the Smithsonian’s Board of Directors.  As a middle finger to America’s largest museum, Orville gave the original Wright airplane to the London Science Museum in 1928.  This feud went on until 1942, when the Smithsonian finally agreed that the Wright Brothers were the inventor of the airplane.  As part of the agreement, the original Wright plane was to be given to the Smithsonian, but this did not occur until 1949 due to World War II just generally fucking things up.  Orville died nine months before the plane finally returned to the United States.   

Image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wright_Flyer_III_above.jpg

What About My Bonus?

In the spring of 1917, the United States decided to get up off of its ass and join the ruckus going on in Europe which we now call World War I.  By that time, most of Europe had been grappling with each other for three years in what was described as hell on Earth. 

With neither side able to break past the other, the conflict had collapsed into miles of mud filled trenches, barb wire, machine guns, poison gas, and the rotting dead.  Over four million Americans either volunteered or were drafted into the military, of which over two million were shipped overseas to Europe.  The sudden addition of these U.S. troops tipped the balance of the conflict in favor of the Allies, ending the war in November of 1918.  A good comparison for the U.S.’s involvement in World War I would be a guy leaning against the wall during a bar fight, who then jumps in at the last minute to knock out a guy who had already gotten the shit beat out of him, only to then start bragging about what a bad ass he was.  That’s pretty much how it happened, though of course the real world is a lot messier than analogies.  Though casualties were low compared to other countries, America did lose some 117,000 soldiers in the trenches, with an additional 204,000 wounded.  The rest of the newly created army was returned to civilian life, where they were free to find jobs, start families, and desperately pretend that they hadn’t seen some pretty fucked up shit.  In thanks for their service, Uncle Sam gave each a hearty handshake and what amounted to $975 in today’s money.   

The returning veterans were decidedly less than happy with this turn of events.  Figuring they deserved a little more for risking their asses, they formed the American Legion to lobby the government.  Congress, being exactly the way it has always been, got around to doing something about the problem six years later.  In 1924, they passed a bill granting veterans a larger bonus for serving, which was then vetoed by President Coolidge, who though having never served in the military, felt that a person really couldn’t call themselves patriotic if they had to get paid to fight for their country.  Luckily for the veterans, Congress decided that this was a bunch of bullshit and voted to override the veto, passing the bill into law.  Under the new law, each veteran would get paid for each day they had served up to $8,950 in today’s money.  However, given that paying off such bonuses would cost the government some $51.8 billion, the veterans wouldn’t receive them until 1945, when most would be around retirement age.    

While not perfect, the veterans generally accepted this arrangement.  That was, they did, until the collapse of the U.S. economy kicked off the Great Depression, putting thousands of veterans out of work.  In desperate need of some cash to keep their damn families fed, the veterans began demanding that they get paid their bonuses immediately.  Being rather nervous about a bunch of pissed off men with military training, Congress worked a little faster than normal, opening debate on a bill that would hand over the bonuses early in the summer of 1932.  To show their support for the bill, some 11,000 out of work veterans, along with 26,000 of their family members, marched on Washington D.C. in what became known as the Bonus Army.  When the bill failed to pass, the Bonus Army, rather mad about the whole thing, decided to stay in the capitol, building themselves a large hobo camp in the middle of the city. 

Things pretty much stayed this way for the next month and a half, a situation that nobody was really happy with.  President Hoover wasn’t happy because it was an election year, which though self-serving, made a lot of sense.  The U.S. Army wasn’t happy because they were convinced that the Bonus Army was part of some kind of planned communist uprising, which made absolutely no sense.  Regardless, the Army convinced Hoover that he needed to do something.  Tiring of all the shenanigans, Hoover sent the city police to clear the Bonus Army out of their camp.  It did not go well, what with the Bonus Army being made up of trained soldiers and all.  The police panicked and shot two veterans, which resulted in a riot and the police having their asses handed to them.  Hoover responded by sending in the infantry, cavalry (which was still a thing for some reason at the time), and several tanks.  In the ensuing violence over 1,000 veterans and their family members were injured, but the camp was burned to the ground and the Bonus Army was dispersed.  However, the whole debacle did little to help Hoover’s chances of reelection, and he was soundly beaten by Franklin Roosevelt that November.  Though if we’re being honest, he probably didn’t have a chance either way.  

In 1933, a second Bonus Army marched on Washington D.C.  President Roosevelt responded by sending his wife to promise them that they’d all be found jobs.  In 1936, Congress finally passed a bill allowing the veterans to get paid their bonuses early.  Roosevelt, apparently wanting to be a bastard that day, vetoed it.  Congress voted to override the veto and the veterans finally got paid.  To make sure such bullshit didn't happen again, Congress passed the G.I. Bill in 1944, giving returning World War II soldiers tuition for school, low cost mortgages, low interest business loans, and one year of unemployment compensation.   

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bonus_marchers_05510_2004_001_a.gif