History of the Twentieth Century (A Roadshow)

  The Sun's in its orbit,

  yet I feel morbid.

Act 1

Prologue

Ladies and gentlemen and the day!

All ye made of sweet human clay!

Let me tell you: you are o'kay.

Our show is to start without much delay.

So let me inform you right away:

this is not a play but the end of the play

that has been on for some eighty years.

It received its boos and received its cheers.

It won't last for long, one fears.

Men and machines lie to rest or rust.

Nothing arrives as quick as the Past.

What we'll show you presently is the cast

of characters who have ceased to act.

Each of these lives has become a fact

from which you presumably can subtract

but to which you blissfully cannot add.

The consequences of that could be bad

for your looks or your blood.

For they are the cause, you are the effect.

because they lie flat, you are still erect.

Citizens! Don't neglect

history! History holds the clue

to your taxes and to your flu,

to what comes out of the blue.

We'll show you battlefields, bedrooms, labs,

sinking ships and escaping subs,

cradles, weddings, divorces, slabs.

Folks! The curtain's about to rise!

What you'll see won't look like a Paradise.

Still, the Past may moisten a pair of eyes,

for its prices were lower than our sales,

for it was ruining cities: not blood cells;

for on the horizon it's not taut sails

but the wind that fails.

1900. A quiet year, you bet.

True: none of you is alive as yet.

The '00' stands for the lack of you.

Still, things are happening, quite a few.

In China, the Boxers are smashing whites.

In Russia, A.P.Chekhov writes.

In Italy, Floria Tosca screams.

Freud, in Vienna, interprets dreams.

The Impressionists paint, Rodin still sculpts.

In Africa, Boers grab the British scalps

or vice versa (who cares, my dear?).

And McKinley is re-elected here.

There are four great empires, three good democracies.

The rest of the world sports loin-cloths and moccasins,

speaking both figuratively and literally.

Upstaging "Umberto's" in Little Italy,

in the big one Umberto the Ist's shot dead.

(Not all that's written on walls is read).

And marking the century's real turn,

Friedrich Nietzsche dies, Louis Armstrong's born

to refute the great Kraut's unholy

"God is dead" with "Hello, Dolly."

The man of the year, though, is an engineer.

John Browning is his name.

He's patented something. So let us hear

about John's claim to fame.

( John Moses Browning )

"I looked at the calendar, and I saw

that there are a hundred years to go.

That made me a little nervous

for I thought of my neighbors.

I've multiplied them one hundred times:

it came to them being all over!

So I went to my study that looks out on limes

and invented this cute revolver!"

1901. A swell, modest time.

A T-bone steak is about a dime.

Queen Victoria dies; but then Australia

repeats her silhouette and, inter alia,

joins the Commonwealth. In the humid woods

of Tahiti, Gauguin paints his swarthy nudes.

In China, the Boxers take the rap.

Max Planck in his lab (not on his lap

yet) in studying radiation.

Verdi dies too. But our proud nation,

represented by Mrs.Disney, awards the world

with a kid by the name of Walt

who'll animate the screen. Off screen,

the British launch their first submarine.

But it's a cake-walk or a Strindberg play

or Freud's "Psychopathology of Everyday

Life" that really are not to be missed!

And McKinley's shot dead by an anarchist.

The man of the year is Signore Marconi.

He is an Italian, a Roman.

His name prophetically rhymes with "Sony":

they have a few things in common.

( Guglieimo Marconi )

"In a Catholic country where the sky is blue

and clouds look like cherubs' vestiges,

one daily receives through the air a few

wordless but clear messages.

Regular speech has its boring spoils:

it leads to more speech, to violence,

it looks like spaghetti, it also coils.

That's why I've built the wireless!"

1902. Just another bland

peaceful year. They dissect a gland

and discover hormones. And a hormone

once discovered is never gone.

The Boer War (ten thousand dead) is over.

Elsewhere, kind Europeans offer

railroad chains to a noble savage.

A stork leaves a bundle in a Persian cabbage

patch, and the tag reads "Khomeini". Greeks, Serbs, Croats,

and Bulgars are at each others' throats.

Claude Monet paints bridges nevertheless.

The population of the U.S.

is approximately 76

million: all of them having sex

to affect our present rent.

Plus Teddy Roosevelt's the President.

The man of the year is Arthur Conan Doyle,

a writer. The subjects of his great toil

are a private dick and a paunchy doc;

occasionally, a dog.

( Sir Arthur Conan Doyle )

"Imagine the worst: your subconscious is

as dull as your conscience. And you, a noble

soul, grab a Luger and make Swiss cheese

out of your skull. Better take my novel

about the Hound of the Baskervilles!

It'll save a handful of your brain cells

and beef up your dreams. For it simply kills

time and somebody else!"

1903. You may start to spy

on the future. Old Europe's sky

is a little dim. To increase its dimness,

The Krupp Works in Essen erect their chimneys.

(Thus the sense of Geld breeds the sense of guilt.)

Still, more smoke comes from London, from a smoke-filled

room where with guile and passion

Bolsheviks curse Mensheviks in Russian.

Speaking of Slavs: The Serbian King and Queen

are done by local well-wishers in.

Painters Whistler, Gauguin, Pissarro are gone.

Panama rents us its Canal Zone.

While bidding their maidens bye-bye and cheerio,

the tommies sail off to grab Nigeria

and turn it into a British colony:

to date, a nation's greatest felony

is if it's neither friend nor foe.

My father is born. So is Evelyn Waugh.

Man of the year, I am proud to say

is two men. They are brothers. Together, they

sport two heads, four legs and four hands-which brings

us to their bird's four wings.

( The Wright Brothers )

"We are Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Our name simply rhymes with 'flight'!

This may partially explain

why we decided to build a plane.

Oh there are no men in the skies, just wind!

Cities look like newspaper print.

Mountains glitter and rivers bend.

But the ultimate plane'd rather bomb than land!"

1904. Things which were in store

hit the counter. There is a war.

Japan, ever so smiling, gnashes

teeth and bites off what, in fact, in Russia's.

Other than that, in Milan police

crack local skulls. But more common is

the touch of the new safety razor blade.

The nuances of the White Slave Trade,

Mount St.Victoire by Monsieur Cezanne

and other trifles under the sun

including popular French disgust

with the Vatican, are discussed

in every Partisan cafeteria.

Radioactivity - still a theory -

is stated by Rutherford (when a particle

brings you a lordship we call it practical).

And as the first Rolls Royce engines churn,

Chekhov dies but Graham Greene is born,

so is George Balanchine, to upgrade the stage,

so too - though it's sin to disclose her age -

is Miss Dietrich, to daunt the screen.

And New York hears its subway's first horrid scream!

The man of the year is a Hottentot.

South-West Africa's where he dwells.

In a German colony. And is being taught

German. So he rebels.

( A Hottentot )

"Germans to me are extremely white.

They are white in broad daylight and what's more, at night.

Plus if you try to win minds and hearts

of locals, you don't call a black guy "schwarz" -

"Schwarz" sounds shoddy and worse than "black".

Change your language and then come back!

Fly, my arrow, and hit a Hans

to cure a Hans of his arrogance!"

1905. In the news: Japan.

Which means that the century is upon

us. Diminishing the lifespan

of Russian dreadnoughts to naught, Japan

tells urbi et orbi it's loathe to lurk

in the wings of geography. In Petersburg

those whose empty stomachs churn

take to the streets. Yet they won't return

home, for the Cossacks adore long streets.

A salesman of the Singer sewing devices greets

in Latvia the arrival of yet another

daughter, who is to become my mother.

In Spain, unaware of this clever ploy,

Pablo Picasso depicts his "Boy

With Pipe" in blue. While the shades of blonde,

Swedes and Norwegians, dissolve their bond.

And Norway goes independent; yet

that's not enough to turn brunette.

Speaking of things that sound rather queer,

E is equated to MC square

by Albert Einstein, and the Fauvists

(Les Fauves is the French for unruly beasts)

unleash Henri Matisse in Paris.

"The Merry Widow" by Franz Lehar is

the toast of the town. Plus Transvaal gets its

constitution called by the natives "the pits".

And Greta Garbo, La belle dame sans

merci, is born. So are neon signs.

The man of the year, our record tells,

is neither Strindberg nor H.G.Wells,

he is not Albert Schweitzer, not Oscar Wilde:

his name is obscured by his own brain-child.

( Camouflage )

"I am what gentleman wear in the field

when they are afraid that they may be killed.

I am called camouflage. Sporting me, each creature

feels both safer and close to Nature.

The green makes your simper's pupil sore.

That's what forests and swamps are for.

The planet itself wears me: the design

is as French as it is divine."

1906. Time stands at ease.

Having one letter in common with

his subject, Freud adds to our bookshelf

preparing the century for itself.

On the whole, Europeans become much nicer

to each other: in Africa. Still, the Kaiser

when asked of the growth of his navy, lies.

The Japs, for some reason, nationalize

their railroads of whose existence none,

save several spices, had known.

Along the same, so to speak cast-iron

lines, aping the rod of Aaron,

the Simplon Tunnel opens to hit your sight

with a smoking non-stop Vis-a-vis. Aside

from that the civilized world condemns

night shifts (in factories though) for dames.

Prime ministers are leapfrogging in

Russia, as though they've seen

in a crystal ball that the future keeps

no room for these kinds of leaps.

The French Government warily says "pardon"

to Captain Dreyfus, a Jew who's done

ten years in the slimmer on the charge of treason.

Still, this distinction between a prison

and a Jew has no prophetic air.

The U.S. troops have a brief affair

with the Island of Cuba: their first tete-a-tete.

Samuel Beckett is born. Paul Cezanne is dead.

The man of the year is Herr von Pirquet.

He stings like honey-bee.

The sting screams like Prince Hamlet's sick parakeet:

TB or not TB.

( Dr. Clement von Pirquet )

"What I call allergy, you call rash.

I'll give you an analogy: each time you blush,

it shows you're too susceptible to something lurid,

obscene and antiseptical to hope to cure it.

This, roughly, is the principle that guides my needle.

To prove you are invincible it hurts a little;

it plucks from your pale cheeks the blooming roses

and checks their petals for tuberculosis!"

As for 1907, it's neither here

not there. But Auden is born this year!

This birth is the greatest of all prologues!

Still, Pavlov gets interested in dogs.

Next door Mendeleev, his bearded neighbor

who gave the universe the table

of its elements, slips into a coma.

The Cubists' first show, while Oklahoma

becomes the Union's 46th

state. Elsewhere New Zeland seeks

to fly the Union Jack. Lumiere

develops the colored pictures ere

anyone else (we all owe it to him!)

The Roman Pope takes a rather dim

view of modernism: jealous Iago!

Having squashed (4-0) Detroit, Chicago

forever thirsting for Gloria Mundi

wins the World Series. In Swinemunde

Nicholas the IInd meets the German Kaiser

for a cup of tea. That, again, is neither

here not there, like Kalamazoo.

And Carl Hagenbeck opens his careless zoo

where walruses swim, lions pace, birds fly

proving: animals also can live a lie.

The man of the year, you won't believe,

is Joseph Stalin, then just a tried.

He is young; he is twenty-eight;

but History's there, and he cannot wait.

( Joseph Dzhugashvili, alias Stalin )

"My childhood was rotten, I lived in mud.

I hold up banks 'cause I miss my dad.

So to help the party, for all my troubles

one day I took four hundred grand in roubles.

Thus far, it was the greatest heist

in the Russian history after Christ.

Some call me eager, some call me zealous;

I just like big figures with their crowd of zeroes."

1908 is a real bore

though it provides a new high in gore

by means of an earthquake in the Southern part

of Calabria, Italy. Still, the world of art

tries to replace those one hundred fifty

thousand victims with things as nifty

as Monet's depiction of the Ducal Palace

in Venice, or with Isadora's galas,

or with the birth of Ian Fleming: to fill the crater.

In the World Series Chicago's again a winner.

In the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina

are taken by Austria (for what it took

it will pay somewhat later with its Archduke).

And the fountain pen is in vogue worldwide.

The gas of helium's liquefied

in Holland which means the rising of

that flat country a bit above

sea level, which means thoughts vertical.

The king and the crown prince are killed in Portugal,

for horizontality's sake no doubt.

Also, the first Model T is out

in Dearborn to roam our blissful quarters

trailed by the news that General Motors

is incorporated. The English Edward

and Russia's Nicholas make an effort

to know each other aboard a yacht.

The Germans watch it but don't react -

or do, but that cannot be photographed.

And the Republic calls on William Taft.

The man of the year is German scientist

Paul Ehrlich. He digs bacterias

and sires immunology. All the sapiens

owe a lot to his theories.

( Paul Ehrlich )

"The world is essentially a community

and to syphilis, nobody has immunity.

So what I've invented beefs up your arsenal

for living a life that's a bit more personal.

I've made Salvarsan. Oh my Salvarsan!

It may cure your wife, it may cure your son,

it may cure yourself and your mistress fast.

Think of Paul Ehrlich as you pull or thrust!"

1909 trots a fine straight line.

Three Lives are published by Gertrude Stein.

(On the strength of this book, if its author vies

for the man of the year, she sure qualifies.)

Other than that, there is something murky

about the political life in Turkey:

in those parts, every man has a younger brother,

and as Sultans they love to depose each other.

The same goes apparently in Iran:

Ahmed Shah tells Mohammed Ali: "I run

the show", though he's 12 years old.

In Paris, Sergei Diaghilev strikes gold

with his "Ballets Russes". While in Honduras,

screaming the usual "God, endure us!"

peasants slaughter each other: it's a civil war.

Sigmund Freud crosses the waters for

to tell our Wonderland's cats and Alices

a few things about psychoanalysis.

But David Griffith of Motion Pictures,

boggling one's dreams, casts Mary Pickford.

The Brits, aping the Royal Dutch

Shell Company, too, legalize their touch

on the Persian oil. The Rockefeller

Foundation is launched to stall a failure

and to boost a genus. Leaving all the blight,

glitter and stuff made of Bake light

(that heralds the Plastic Age) far below, the weary

bearded and valiant Captain Robert Peary

reaches the North Pole, and thus subscribes

virginal white to the Stars and Stripes.

Ah those days when one's thoughts were glued

to this version of the Absolute!

The man of the year is the unknown

nameless hairdresser in London Town.

Stirred either by its cumulous firmament

or by the British anthem, he invents the permanent.

( A London hairdresser )

"The Sun never sets over this Empire.

Still, all empires one day expire.

They go to pieces, they get undone.

The wind of history is no fun.

Let England be England and rule the waves!

And let those waves be real raves.

Let them be dark, red, chestnut, blonde

unruffled by great events beyond!"

1910 marks the end of the first decade.

As such, it can definitely be okayed.

For there is clearly a democratic

trend. Though at times things take an erratic

turn. Like when Egypt's Prime Minister, through no fault

of his, gets murdered. But the revolt

in Albania is the work of masses

(although how they tell their oppressed from their ruling class is

anyone's guess). Plus Portugal bravely rids

itself of its king, and as he's hugged by the Brits,

becomes a republic. As for the Brits themselves,

one more generation of them learns God saves

no king, and mourning the sad demise

of Edward the Seventh, they fix their eyes

on George the Fifth. Mark Twain and Tolstoy die too.

But Karl May has just published his Winnetou

in German. In Paris, they've seen and heard

Stravinsky-cum-Diaghilev's "Firebird".

That causes some riot, albeit a tiny one.

Whereas the twangs of the Argentinean

Tango do to the world what the feared and hailed

Halley's comet, thank heavens, failed

to do. And our watchful Congress

finds it illegal if not incongruous

to take ladies across state lines

for purposes it declines

to spell out, while Japan moves nearer

to Korea: a face that invades a mirror.

The man of the year is an architect.

His name is Frank Lloyd Wright.

Things that he's built still stand erect,

nay! hug what they stand on tight.

(Frank Lloyd Wright)

"Nature and space have no walls or doors,

and roaming at will is what man adores.

So, a builder of houses, I decide

to bring the outside inside.

You don't build them tall: you build them flat.

That's what Nature is so good at.

You go easy on bricks and big on glass

so that space may sashay your parquets like grass."

1911 is wholly given

to looking balanced albeit uneven.

In Hamburg, stirring his nation's helm

the German Kaiser (for you, Wilhelm

the Second) demands what sounds weird for some:

"A Place for Germany in the Sun".

It you were French, you would say C'est tout.

Yet Hitler is barely twenty-two

and things in the sun aren't so hot besides.

The activity of the sun excites

the Chinese to abolish pigtails and then

proclaim a republic with Sun Yat-Sen

their first President. (Although how three hundred

twenty-five millions can be handled

by a Parliament, frankly, beats

me. That is, how many seats

would they have had in that grand pavilion?

And even if it's just one guy per million

what would a minority of, say, ten percent

add up to? This is like counting sand!

For this democracy has no lexicon!)

Along the same latitude, the Mexican

Civil War is over, and saintly, hesitant

Francisco Madero becomes the President.

Italy finding the Turks too coarse

to deal with, resorts to the air force

for the first time in history, while da Vinci's

Mona Lisa gets stolen from the Louver - which is

why the cops in Paris grab Monsieur Guillaume

Apollinaire who though born in Rome,

writes in French, and has other energies.

Rilke prints his Duinese Elegies

and in London, suffragettes poke their black

umbrellas at Whitehall and cry Alack!

Man of the year is a great Norwegian.

The crucial word in their tongue is "Skol".

They are born wearing turtlenecks in that region.

When they go South, they hit the Pole.

(Roald Amundsen)

"I am Roald Amundsen. I like ice.

The world is my oyster for it's capped twice

with ice: first, Arctical, then Antarctical.

Human life in those parts is a missing article.

O! when the temperature falls subzero

the eyes grow blue, the heart sincere.

There are neither doubts nor a question mark:

it's the tails of your huskies which pull and bark".

1912. Captain Robert Scott

reaches the South Pole also. Except he got

there later than Amundsen. He stares at ice,

thinks of his family, prays, and dies.

Ice, however, is not through yet.

S.S. Titanic hits an iceberg at

full speed and goes down. The bell grimly tolls

at Lloyd's in London. Fifteen hundred souls

are lost, if not more. Therefore, let's turn

to Romania where Eugene Ionesco's born

or to Turkey and her Balkan neighbors: each

one of them feels an itch to reach

for the gun; on reflection, though, they abandon

the idea. It's peace everywhere. In London

by now there are five hundred movie theaters

which makes an issue of baby-sitters.

At home, after having less done than said;

Woodrow Wilson becomes the Prez. Dead-set

to pocket the dizzy with flipping coin

New Mexico and Arizona join

the Union. For all its steel mills and farms

the Union keeps currently under arms

only one hundred thousand men. That's barmy

considering five million in the Russian Army,

or four million in Germany, or the French

who, too, have as many to fill a trench.

This sounds to some like a lack of caution.

But then there is the Atlantic Ocean

between the Continent and the U.S.,

and it's only 1912, God bless,

and the hemispheres luckily seem unable

to play the now popular Cain and Abel.

The man of the year is both short and tall.

He's nameless, and well he should

stay nameless: for spoiling for us free fall

by using a parachute.

(Captain Albert Berry)

"Leaving home with umbrella? Take a parachute!

When it rains from below, that is when they shoot

down a plane and its pilot objects to die,

when you wand to grab Holland or drop a spy

behind enemy lines, you need parachutes.

O, they'll be more popular than a pair of shoes.

In their soft descent they suggest a dove.

Aye! it's not only love that comes from above!"

1913. Peace is wearing thin

in the Balkans. Great powers try their pristine

routine of talks, but only soil white gloves:

Turkey and the whole bunch of Slavs

slash one another as if there is no tomorrow.

The States think there is; and being thorough

introduce the federal income tax.

Still, what really spells the Pax

Americana is the assembly line

Ford installs in Michigan. Some decline

of capitalism! No libertine or Marxist

could foresee this development in the darkest

possible dream. Speaking of such a dream,

California hears the first natal scream

of Richard Nixon. However, the most

loaded sounds are those uttered by Robert Frost

whose A Boy's Will and North of Boston

are printed in England and nearly lost on

his compatriots eyeing in sentimental

rapture the newly-built Grand Central

Station where they later would

act as though hired by Hollywood.

In the meantime, M.Proust lets his stylus saunter

the Swann's Way, H.Geyger designs his counter;

probing nothing perilous or perdu,

Stravinsky produces Le Sacre du

Printemps, a ballet, in Paris, France.

But the fox-trot is what people really dance.

And as Schweitzer cures lepers and subs dive deeper,

the hottest news is the modest zipper.

Think of the preliminaries it skips

timing your lips with you fingertips!

The man of the year is, I fear, Niels Bohr.

He comes from the same place as danishes.

He builds what one feels like when one can't score

or what one looks like when one vanishes.

(Niels Bohr)

Atoms are small. Atoms are nice. Until you split one, of course.

Then they get large enough to play dice with your whole universe.

A model of an atom is what I've built! Something both small and big!

Inside, it resembles the sense of guilt. Outside, the lunar dig.

1914

Nineteen-fourteen! Oh, nineteen-fourteen!

Ah, some years shouldn't be let out of quarantine!

Well, this is one of them. Things get raw:

In Paris, the editor of Figaro

is shot dead by the wife of the French finance

minister, for printing this lady's - sans

merci, should we add? - steamy letters to

- ah, who cares!.. And apparently it's c'est tout

also for a socialist and pacifist

of all times, Jean Jaures. He who shook his fist

at the Parliament urging hot heads to cool it,

dies, as he dines, by some bigot's bullet

in a cafe. Ah, those early, single

shots of Nineteen-fourteen! ah, the index finger

of an assassin! ah, white puffs in the blue acrylic!..

There is something pastoral, nay! idyllic

about these murders. About that Irish enema

the Brits suffer in Dublin again. And about Panama

Canal's grand opening. Or about that doc

and his open heart surgery on his dog...

Well, to make these things disappear forever,

the Archduke is arriving at Sarajevo;

and there is in the crowd that unshaven, timid

youth, with his handgun.... (To be continued).