Happy birthday, dear world
By Herb Drill
Did you realize how significant this new year is?
The Americans in Florida get to play the “chad” game again, have another chance to be disenfranchised from electing a President and having him not serve thanks to the U.S. “Supreme” Court, and maybe re-elect a man who hse ben said to be “blind in a room filled with the deaf” – thank you, Paul O’Neill.
Want a war with Canada, perhaps?
Actually, 2004 on the Chinese Calendar is the Year of the Monkey, so I can have lots of hot and sour soup and spring rolls and Mr. and Mrs. Fastow can “rat” on the bigger rodents at Enron.
In other business news, we could imagine being Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and clean house - such as sending a former Texas Rangers owner back to the ranch, where he can have a few drinks with his daughters.
On the print front, this year inks the 300th anniversary of the Boston News-Letter, America’s first continuously-published newspaper published its first issue on April 24, 1704 and lasted through the 18th century. That will be longer than we recall Britney Spears or “American Idol.” It’s the 200th anniversary of Lewis and Clark’s expedition into the uncharted Northwest, where it was already raining in Seattle and Bugsy Segal was cashing in in Las Vegas.
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s On Walden Pond – and if corporate chiefs don’t read the message on the bathroom stall wall they’ll all be living lives of more than “quiet desperation.”
Muggers will rejoice at the 100th anniversary of the New York subway system, and Brits will hear the century mark of the London Symphony Orchestra. Happy 100 to the teddy bear, the telephone answering machine (I hate voice mail!), and the flat-disk phonograph record. Enrico Caruso sang on those things?
Giving business a cheer 90 years ago was the gun shot start of World War I, the opening of the Panama Canal (Royal Caribbean is still tooting over that one), the Federal Trade Commission, the red-and-green traffic light, and Tarzan. It’s the 80th anniversary of IBM (make mine a Dell), the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (there’s that fat guy in the red suit again!), Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (he left us much too soon).
It will be the 75th anniversary of Vatican City (I wouldn’t touch that with a 10-foot abuse code), penicillin, Einstein’s unified field theory (huh?), CBS (thank you, NFL) and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. We will see the 70th anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power (I’ll send some of my forefathers’ striped “pajamas” they wore at “camp”), the Dionne quintuplets, the Securities and Exchange Commission (Ivan Boesky, where are you?), and the Federal Communications Commission.
Sixty years ago were D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the discovery of DNA, and the invention of the first digital computer (or I’d be doing this in my illegible handwriting and you wouldn’t be suffering though it).
It marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools (they took too long even then), the polio vaccine (I prefer my Muscular Dystrophy derivative, thank you), the first nuclear submarine (what a shame for Russian sailors on the Kursk), Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (can you hear me now?), and Godzilla (what a segue).
This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the Warren Commission’s report concluding Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (where did LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover hatch that one?), Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changin’, the Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show (yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah) and Mary Poppins. It’s the 30th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution in China (watch Communism implode again , Patricia Hearst’s kidnapping (is Symbionese a cuisine?), Nixon’s resignation (years too late) and subsequent pardon (bull), People magazine, and Blazing Saddles (hands up, Mel).
It’s the 25th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island (I was sweating bullets in Philly), the 20th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Beat It (the possibilities there are endless), the 10th anniversary of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tanya Harding Olympics and O.J. Simpson’s arrest (those two belong together), and Friends (MY friends are worth $1 million).
Just think, 50 years from now you won’t have to read my words.
Jacksonville, Fla. resident Herb Drill edits www.notaccessible.com and is a charter member of the now international Society of American Business Editors and Writers. His e-mail address is herbdrill@notaccessible.com, or herbertdrill@cs.com.