Koro

In 1967, hospitals in Singapore were inundated by hundreds of panicking men.  Hundreds of panicking men with their genitals hanging out.  That’s right, their genitals.  People were literally desperately gripping their dicks, fearing to let go.  They held onto their dicks with anything at hand; including strings, clamps, rubber-bands, chopsticks, laundry pins, and even their hands.  Imagine yourself as the poor schmuck of a doctor on duty that day, facing down the dreaded disease known as koro.

Koro was not a new thing in 1967.  In fact, outbreaks of koro had been noted since as early as the late nineteenth century.  The most common area to be struck by the terrible condition was southern China, which suffered significant epidemics in 1948, 1955, and 1966.  The primary symptom of koro is shrinking male genitals, which as you can probably imagine, is a rather terrifying thing to have happen, only made worse by the knowledge that once your genitals disappeared into your body you died.  As most men could probably agree, dickless and dead is no way to go through this world.

The first case of koro reported in the Singapore outbreak was a sixteen year old boy, brought to the hospital by his parents, desperately tugging on his shrinking wang.  The boy had noticed the shrinkage earlier that day, and luckily his parents were of Chinese descent so knew exactly what they were dealing with.  Luckily, the doctors knew exactly what to do as well.  They gave the boy a shot of chlordiazepoxide and sent him home.  Unfortunately, it was too late.  Within hours more people started showing up at hospitals with similar symptoms.  People began to panic.  Rumors began to spread that the disease was being spread by pork tainted by the improper use of a vaccination for swine flu.  Pork prices plummeted.  The government released a notice stating that neither swine flu nor the vaccination could harm humans, this only made things worse.

After about a week of the pandemic spreading unabated, the head of Singapore’s Ministry of Health decided that he had to do something.  In times like this, people needed a leader.  Using all of his power and influence, he got permission to make an announcement across all of the country’s TV and radio stations.  His message was simple and to the point.  If people wanted to stop the spread of koro, they needed to stop panicking, literally, because koro didn’t exist.  Now this might come as a bit of a surprise to about half the world’s population, but male genitalia are actually amazingly elastic.  They constantly change shape and size dependent upon temperature, activity, and emotion.  This constant re-shaping is why so many men are often re-arranging things.  Koro is not some terrible disease, it’s simply an overactive imagination, spurred on by panic induced shrinkage.

The koro epidemic in Singapore ended soon after the nationwide tongue lashing by the Minister of Health.  However, it was not the last time a koro pandemic would occur.  In China, further epidemics occurred in 1974, 1984, and 1987; affecting thousands and not stopping until the government carried out a widespread mental health campaign.  Outside of China, it was reported in Thailand in 1976, and in Thailand and India in 1982.  The dreaded condition even made its way to West Africa in the late 1990’s, spreading across the region in a series of outbreaks lasting into the early 2000’s.  In one instance, five people were lynched by a mob of vigilantes because it was believed the five were purposefully spreading the imaginary disease.  The most recent outbreak occurred in India in 2010.  Happy peeing.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CarsonConnaughtDrive-Singapore-196009.jpg

The Weird Cycle of History

The U.S. presidential election of 1876 was possibly one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history.  Widespread cases of fraud in several states led to both parties declaring victory, sparking a constitutional crisis.  Eventually, a compromise was hammered out wherein Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate, was declared the winner.  Unfortunately, to get this end, the Republicans had to agree to end the occupation of the former Confederacy, giving them back the full right to govern themselves without the federal government looking over their shoulders.  Luckily, the Democrats who controlled these states of course continued the Reconstruction policies that ensured equal rights for all regardless of race.  Wait, that’s not right.  They actually wrote countless laws forcing racial segregation and guaranteeing anyone not White would never get their fair share of the pie.

Now it’s probably worth mentioning here that racial segregation was a thing across the United States throughout the era of the 1870’s to 1960’s.  However, for most of the country it was more of an informal system of personal biases and bureaucratic fenangling.  The South was more blatant about the whole thing.  The moment they were able, Democratic led state legislatures passed a series of bills that became known as the Jim Crow laws.  These laws mandated racial segregation at public schools, public places, public transportation, restrooms, restaurants, drinking fountains, and pretty much everything else you can think of.  They also made interracial marriage illegal, made it as difficult as possible for non-Whites to vote, and gave individual racists all sorts of opportunities to be just as racist as they could possibly be.  It was pretty much a terrible cluster fuck of ways to keep people separate and deny them opportunities, thus making it easier to treat them like shit.  So yeah, you know, not exactly the best time in American history.

Anyways, in 1932, far across the Atlantic, a somehow less controversial election led to the nation of Germany getting a new Chancellor.  You’ve probably heard of him.  When Adolf Hitler came to power, he set out to fulfill his campaign promises, which unfortunately mostly revolved around turning the country into a dictatorship and doing everything in his power to segregate and destroy Germany’s Jewish population.  Now at the time, Jewish people were not only pretty well integrated into German society, they were also doing pretty well for themselves, two things that just set Hitler’s anti-Semitic blood to boiling.  Not really knowing the best way to go about undoing these things, he and his fellow piece of shit Nazis began looking around for a similar system upon which to base their own.  You can probably guess the one which most caught their attention.  That’s right, the U.S.’s fucking Jim Crow laws.  We all know what happened next.  The Jewish people of Germany, and then conquered Europe, found themselves facing harsher and more restricting laws, eventually leading to the ghettos, and then the horrors of the Holocaust.  This all started in the 1930’s, with a series of laws that disenfranchised Jewish people and barred them from certain jobs, civil and academic positions being top of the list.  Not really being down with this whole turn of events, and sensing the coming trouble, many Jews chose to flee Germany, many to the United States.

Now at the time, the U.S. didn’t really have a refugee policy, just a super restrictive and racist immigration policy which only allowed in so many of each “type” of person each year.  As a result, only so many Jewish people fleeing from Germany were able to get into the U.S., with priority given to those who were seen to have valuable skills, such as university professors.  Now some of the more famous of these professors, such as Albert Einstein, found the U.S. to be a very welcoming place.  Unfortunately, this was not true for the not so famous professors, who upon arriving, found that anti-Semitism was totally a thing in the United States as well.  Despite many having some pretty fantastic credentials, the major American universities wanted nothing to do with them.  As a result, most of these Jewish academics ended up getting whatever teaching jobs they could get, with many ending up in the South teaching at various colleges set up by the disenfranchised Black community.

Thus it was that the strange flows of history created a situation where the severely underfunded Black colleges of the American South were given access to professors who would have seen such positions to be beneath them if conditions had been different.  Thousands of students were taught by these professors over the proceeding decades, gaining access to a level of education that they might not have otherwise had.  This led to better trained African-American academics and more members of the Black community clawing their way up into the American middle class, which in turn helped foster the growth of the Civil Rights movement, which eventually resulted in the desegregation of schools in 1954, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; ending the Jim Crow era.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ernst_Borinski1955.jpg

Rastafarians

In 1930, Haile Selassie was crowned the 85th emperor of Ethiopia, a line that claimed direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.  It was a pretty big deal, what with at the time Ethiopia being the only original African kingdom not to have been conquered by European powers.  The coronation of the new king was welcomed with great celebration in his new kingdom. It was seen as such a big deal that Time magazine plastered it all over the cover of their periodical, including the various ostentatious titles that all emperors are required to have; king of kings, lord of lords, the conquering lion of the tribe of Judah, elect of God, etc.  It was these titles that attracted the attention of a poor street preacher in Jamaica, a man named Leonard Howell.  Now if you don’t know much about street preaching, the key is to get people to actually stop to listen to you, it’s kind of the whole point.  To get this done, you have to have some kind of a shtick, something like being a very flamboyant speaker, or maybe saying something so crazy that people would stop just to try and figure out how crazy you actually were.  Leonard went with the latter, for whatever reason declaring that the new Emperor of Ethiopia was totally the second coming of Jesus Christ.

At the time, Jamaica was home to some 900,000 people of African descent and 100,000 people of British descent. This being the 1930’s, you can probably guess who was running the country and what methods they were using.  All in all it was a pretty shitty situation.  Now for Leonard, though preaching that Haile Selassie was Jesus did totally get the attention of his disenfranchised fellows, it didn’t really keep it for very long.  After all, if you’re poor as shit, Jesus living on the other side of the world is only oh so interesting.  To spice things up a bit, Leonard began adding on to his sermons, claiming that not only were people of African descent better than Europeans in the eyes of god, but that god wanted them to return Africa where they would be rewarded with the riches being currently denied them.  The promise of a possible better life held people’s attention much better, and Leonard began to attract a following.  Now at the time, the idea of the descendants of former slaves returning to Africa was not a new one.  In fact, a famous Jamaican named Marcus Garvey and his Back to Africa Movement had been espousing such a belief for the past thirty years.  Leonard just kind of co-opted it and spiced it up a bit, even going as far as claiming that Garvey was totally a prophet of god or something like that.  Garvey, living in London at the time, had no idea that apparently he was now god’s voice on Earth.

Eventually, Leonard’s street preaching caught the attention of the British authorities, who really not wanting any competition in the royalty department, locked him up for two years for sedition.  However, as soon as Leonard was released, he led about a thousand of his followers into the mountains and founded a commune where he and his followers could live the lives they believed they should be living if they were still in Africa.  For Leonard, this involved eating only organic and vegetarian foods, having multiple subservient wives, and growing a shit ton of pot to smoke and sell.  It was this selling of pot that attracted the attention of the British authorities again, well, that and the stockpiling of weapons for an eventual revolt, and Leonard was thrown into jail again, but was released two years later.

The early years of what became known as the Rastafarian movement were difficult ones, what with Italy invading Ethiopia and overthrowing Halie Selassie in 1936, but when he returned to power in 1941, the movement found new popularity.  For many of the poor of Jamaica, it provided a hope that they had never felt before.  For their part, the British raided Leonard’s commune again and again, eventually completely destroying it and locking Leonard up in a mental institution in 1954.  However, it was too late.  Rastafarianism had already spread across the Caribbean and into the U.S and U.K.  In response to Leonard being locked up, the more militant members of the new religion tried to seize control of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, in 1958.  Another violent incident in 1963 led to a major police crackdown.  Hundreds of Rastas were arrested, with many tortured or killed while in custody.  This caused such a political backlash, that the Jamaican government decided that perhaps it would just be best to try and find ways to get along.

In 1966, the Jamaican government invited Haile Selassie to visit Jamaica.  When he arrived, the confused emperor found thousands of Rastas cheering and praising him.  Not being one to refuse adoration, he just kind of went with it.  Over time the Rastas became less militant as members of the growing middle class joined the movement and subsequent political figures courted their approval.  In the 1970’s, the reggae music of Bob Marley and his contemporaries spread the ideas of the Rastafarians around the world, though often just the hair and clothing styles, which angered a lot of the religion’s actual practitioners.  It would be kind of like if rebellious youths started wearing crosses and Catholic priest robes.  During this period, the Rastas also attempted to start a community in Ethiopia, but they were met with hostility by the locals who considered them a bunch of foreigners.

In 1974, a terrible famine in Ethiopia resulted in Emperor Haile Selassie being overthrown and imprisoned by a military coup.  A year later, he was strangled to death in his bed.  This was a bit of a problem for the Rastafarian movement, what with them believing that the second coming of Jesus could not killed.  Many members left the movement over the proceeding decades, joining the evangelical Christian sects that were becoming all the rage.  Many of the remaining Rastafarians refused to believe that Haile Selassie actually died, even when his body was eventually found buried under his bathroom in 1994.  Today there are an estimated million Rastafarians worldwide, and the movement has been credited with creating a sense of collective sense of cultural consciousness amongst the African diaspora.  Not bad for a street preacher and a copy of Time magazine.

Image": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie#/media/File:Haile_Selassie_in_full_dress_(cropped).jpg