Yap Cash

Yap is a small island in Micronesia, some 1,100 miles north of Papua New Guinea in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.  Most likely you’ve never heard of it.  First settled around 1500 BC by Polynesians who were miraculously navigating their way across thousands of miles of ocean at a time when most Europeans were barbarians living in huts, the Yapese developed a distinct culture from other neighboring islands, which was not uncommon given the neighboring islands were several hundred miles away.  One interesting part of their culture was the constant feuding and intrigue between villages and individual families, which involved a complicated and constantly fluctuating caste system wherein those on top were given special privileges, like harvesting the more desirable fish from the ocean.  Another interesting part is the fact that their money was rocks.

Now the Yapese used several things for money, including lengths of loincloth and ten feet long shell necklaces, but by far the most valuable were large chunks of quartz carved into discs with holes through the middle called rai.  Now quartz does not naturally exist on Yap, which is probably why it was seen as being so damn valuable.  The nearest source of quartz was the island of Palau, some 280 miles away.  Yapese who wanted to get their hands on it had to sail there via outrigger and either barter for or steal it.  If this sounds weird to you, right now would be a good time to remember that our entire monetary system used to be based on gold, which is just a rare shiny metal, so you know, pretty much exactly the same thing.  Anyways, the value of the rai was based upon its size and how cool the story of getting it happened to be.  Many of the rai were quite large, some three or four feet in diameter, hence the holes cut in them so they’d be easier to lug around.  However, rather than constantly moving heavy rocks around for big transactions, the Yapese instead went with a system where everybody just kind of remembered what rocks belonged to what people.  Again, this might sound weird, but this is pretty much how the modern banking system works, so if anything, the Yapese were ahead of their time.

Anyways, the first official contact with Europeans came when Spanish ships sailing to the Philippines from Mexico stopped at Yap in 1543.  However, this was probably not the first contact given the Spanish were greeted by a Yapese speaking fluent Spanish.  The Spaniards claimed the island for Spain, and then just left it alone, mostly because the Yapese weren’t all that welcoming.  Numerous missionaries who visited the island to convert the Yapese to Christianity were either killed or forced to leave in a hurry. This was the state of affairs in 1871 when David O’Keefe became shipwrecked on the island.  David was an Irishman who had emigrated to Georgia and was in the middle of captaining a voyage to China when his ship sank in a storm and he got washed up onto the beach.  Now for whatever reason, the Yapese did not kill David, probably because he wasn’t spouting off about why his god was so much better than their gods, and instead they nursed him back to health and let him hang out until a passing ship could pick him up.  During this time, David became quite intrigued by all the big chunks of quartz just lying around.

Now David might not have been much of a religious fellow, but he most certainly was a businessman who recognized an opportunity when he saw one.  Soon after being rescued and taken to Hong Kong, David purchased himself a schooner and sailed to Palau, where he used modern tools, something the Yapese lacked, to cut a rai thirteen feet in diameter weighing some four tons.  He then took it to Yap where the astounded Yapese more than happily traded a shit ton of coconuts and sea cucumbers for it, which he in turn took to Hong Kong where such things were considered delicacies, selling his cargo for a huge profit.  David quickly became very wealthy, both in terms of his growing bank account in Hong Kong and as a man who could get as much damn quartz as he pleased on Yap.  Building himself a large house on the island, he declared himself king, married two local women, and started pumping out children left and right.  It’s worth noting that while all this was going on he had a wife and child in Georgia whom he never visited.

Over time, David’s scheme began to cause inflation on Yap.  With so many very large stones becoming available, each successive stone delivered became worth less and less.  However, David remained fat and happy in his personal kingdom until 1899 when Spain sold the island to Germany.  The Germans, opting for a more hands on approach, set up a military barracks on the island and put David under house arrest in 1901, because if anybody was going to be making money off of a monetary loophole, it was going to be the Germans damn it.  The Yapese did not like this turn of events, threatening a mass uprising unless David was released, which the Germans did after a tense standoff.  Not feeling exactly safe, David fled with his favorite children soon after, but drowned when a typhoon struck his ship sailing back to Georgia.  The Germans meanwhile, forced the Yapese to abandon pretty much all the cool parts of their culture, including the use of rai.  In 1914, the Japanese took over the island and then in 1945 it was occupied by the United States.  It later became part of the independent Federated States of Micronesia in 1986.  Though superseded by modern paper currency, the rai continue to be exchanged for traditional and ceremonial purposes, such as marriages, land sales, or compensation for damages.

Halley's Panic

For a good chunk of human history, comets were widely seen as an omen of either bad things or good things soon to happen.  Nobody ever really seemed sure exactly which, but by god, if you saw a comet in the sky, you could bet your ass that something was going to happen.  A big reason for this was because comets were the only thing in the sky which didn’t make a damn bit of sense.  The stars tended to always stay in the same place and while planets tended to move, they did so in a predictable manner.  However, comets just kind of appeared seemingly at random.  Plus they had tails, which was definitely pretty weird too.  Now despite these predictions of doom, or maybe good things happening, overall comets weren’t a very good harbinger of anything.  However, occasionally the law of probability resulted in comets appearing at just the right time, such as Halley’s Comet appearing right before the Norman invasion of England in 1066, which of course were the moments people remembered, keeping the myth alive.

Luckily, the European Renaissance began to put to bed such ignorance.  Using a little something called actual science, the great thinkers of the day began to understand how the universe worked, which meant they figured out that comets were just big balls of ice floating through space.  This march of scientific progress culminated in 1703 when an astronomer by the name of Edmund Halley theorized that many of the comet sightings in history were actually the same comet, one with an orbit of only around 76 years, which was pretty unique given at the time scientists were beginning to understand that many comets had orbits of hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Having viewed said comet in 1682, Halley predicted it would return around 1758.  Halley never found out because he died in 1742 at the age of 85, but the comet did return in 1759, proving once and for all that comets weren’t random harbingers of doom, so of course they named it after him.  Anyways, thanks to Halley’s work and the spread of knowledge around the world, the 1835 passing of Halley’s Comet was pretty humdrum, mostly just a bunch of astronomers and randos who like staring at the sky getting all hot and bothered by it.  Unfortunately the same could not be said for the 1910.

By the time Halley’s Comet came around again in 1910, science had progressed to the point that we were not only able to predict its route with great accuracy, such as the fact that this time around the Earth would pass through the comet’s tail, but also use spectrometry, measuring how it reflected light, to gain a pretty good understanding of its chemical composition.  One interesting tidbit from these studies was that the comet’s tail included a highly toxic chemical called cyanogen.  Now most astronomers didn’t really give a shit about this, because comparatively the Earth was very big and the comet was very small, meaning there was absolutely zero danger.  However, one astronomer, a crazy French son of a bitch named Camille Flammarion, went the opposite way with it, declaring that the Earth was about to get a bath in toxic gas that would surely kill all living things.  For whatever reason, the New York Times found the ravings of this lunatic funny, so funny that they printed an article about it, sure everybody would be in on the joke.  They were wrong.  Once the article appeared in the New York Times, one of the most venerable papers of the day, it quickly spread to other papers around the world, where many readers missed the fact that it was supposed to be funny.  So started the comic panic of 1910.

If there’s one thing that must be learned from human history, it’s that an uncomfortably sizable chunk of the human race is always ready to go into hysterics at the drop of a hat.  The other thing that must be learned is that there are always people ready to take advantage of such things.  People began buying up gas masks and making efforts to make their houses air tight, such as plugging up keyholes.  Charlatans sold people anti-comet pills and religious revivals found parishioners stirred to nearly frantic levels of devoutness.  The comet was in the sky, and it was only a matter of time.  In response, pretty much every astronomer in the world declared Flammarion to be a dumbass, even Percival Lowell, the guy who was claiming Mars was crisscrossed by canals.  In response, Flammarion kicked it up a notch, pointing out the tail also contained nitrous oxide, meaning not only would everyone die, they would die laughing.  Other nuts also began to get in on the game, one upping each other on whatever crazy ass theories they could get anybody to believe. As the comet grew bigger in the sky, thousands around the world refused to go to work, waiting for the end of days.  Others took a more proactive approach, such as suicide.  However, for every story of someone actually panicking, there were probably a dozen or more hoaxes claiming extremely bizarre behaviors, such as a cult in Oklahoma attempting a virgin sacrifice.  While many people definitely panicked on their own, the media of the day printed just about anything they thought might sell more newspapers, which of course made more people panic, which led to newspapers printing more garbage, in a self-sustaining cycle of bullshit.

Of course, the comet passed and exactly fuck all happened.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  King Edward VII of England died, which many believers attributed to the comet, as did the American author Mark Twain, though nobody seemed take the opinion that the comet was to blame.  As well, many peasants in China, after falsely believing the comet would poison their water, instead went back to old habits of believing the comet was a portent for major change, leading many to support a rebellion the following year that resulted in the end of thousands of years of Imperial rule.  However, overall most people just went back to their normal lives, doing their best to pretend they were never worried in hopes of their friends and neighbors forgetting what dumb asses they were.  When Halley’s Comet returned in 1986, people pretty much went about their business as they always did.  Halley’s Comet will return again in 2061.

Summer of '77

New York City was not a fun place in July of 1977.  For the past decade, the city had been experiencing a sharp economic downturn which resulted in ridiculous levels of poverty, the shuttering of thousands of businesses, and the near collapse of many city services.  Crime rates were climbing every year and many business owners were turning to arson in order to collect insurance benefits.  New York was a graffiti covered burnt out shell of its former glory.  To make matters worse, the city was mired in a record heatwave, with temperatures remaining over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius for the rest of the world) for two weeks.  Oh yeah, a serial killer was also on the loose.  The Son of Sam, acting on directions given to him by his neighbor’s dog, was shooting random people and sending taunting letters to the police and newspapers.  So yeah, things weren’t exactly all that great in the Big Apple, by which I mean things were ready to fucking explode.

On the night of July 13, lightning struck an electric power substation near the Hudson River.  Now of course, people who design such things plan for such eventualities, so of course the power just flickered a bit and stayed on, at least until a second lighting strike hit the exact same sub-station and a third lighting strike hit another sub-station, causing a cascading overload that within half an hour cut power to the entire area.  New York City descended into chaos.  People just went insane.  Looters started going from store to store, breaking down doors, shattering windows, and tearing away protective metal grates by tying them to cars with ropes.  At one car lot, looters made off with fifty new Pontiacs.  Insurance fraudsters and random firebugs began lighting cars and buildings on fire.  People who dared to venture outside faced muggings and other random acts of violence.  With the underfunded police completely overwhelmed, neighbors and business owners formed impromptu militias armed with baseball bats, handguns, chains, and anything else that could be used as a weapon.  By the time the power came back on the following evening, some 1,600 stores had been looted, 1,000 fires started, 4,000 people arrested for looting, and 550 police officers injured.  Damages totaled some $1.3 billion in today’s cash.

While New York City rotted away during the 1970’s, one of the most negatively affected was its African-American population.  Already faced with the long-term negative effects of systemic racism, the economic downturn turned predominantly Black neighborhoods in New York into veritable ghettos.  With the power of the Civil Rights movement collapsing into infighting due to a lack of a unifying message following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, not to mention the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior in 1968, there was little hope of significant change via politics.  Desperate people began turning to crime, gangs, and drugs to get by, things got worse, and nobody in power gave two shits aside from trying to keep such things contained to poor neighborhoods.

It was during this period in the early 1970’s, that a new music genre known as hip hop first began to appear in the Bronx.  Early practitioners utilized DJ equipment and two record players to extend the percussion breaks of funk music, the easiest parts to dance to, speeding up and slowing down the beat to pump up the crowd.  At first only seen at house parties, this new genre became more popular, with aspiring DJ’s carting around their equipment to block parties and impromptu get togethers in parks, wiring into streetlights to use the electricity.  Over time an entire culture began to form around this scene, with DJ’s attempts to rev up the crowd evolving into rapping and energetic dancers creating breakdancing.  However, by 1977, the hip hop craze was still largely limited to the Bronx.  DJing equipment was expensive, and not easy to obtain.  You can probably see where this is going.

Following the 1977 New York City Black Out, DJing equipment suddenly became much more available to many aspiring DJ’s.  With many new DJ’s hitting the scene, hip hop took off, shifting from something barely heard of outside of the Bronx to a music craze across the city, then the country, and finally the world.  By the early 1980’s, hip hop music and culture was fully ingrained into the urban landscape.  In addition, with many rappers mainly focusing on social issues, it became a primary avenue for mainstream America to learn about the hardships faced in the ghettos.  Over time, an established hip hop record industry coalesced, allowing the more successful artists to begin making millions off of their art.  This really took off in the mainstream in the 1990’s with the development of gangsta rap, which was marketed heavily to white males.  As they say, the rest is history.