Part 20 (2/2)

_04:: Papa Doc, the Frustrated Doctor Unlike Doc Holliday (brilliant gunfighter and amateur dentist) and Elmer Fudd (inept gunfighter known to Bugs Bunny as Doc), Francois ”Papa Doc” Duvalier was, in fact, a doctoralthough we can only imagine his bedside manner. Favoring hypocrisy to the Hippocratic oath, the dangerous dictator was first a physician in Port-au-Prince for nearly a decade before immersing himself in politics full-time in 1943. Even more surprising, he actually rose to power in a legitimately democratic election. And though he was voted in as president in 1957, Duvalier promptly showed his grat.i.tude to the Haitian nation by killing anyone who expressed the slightest opposition to his government. By the mid-1960s, Duvalier had established himself not only as President for Life but also as a quasi-divine manifestation of Haiti's greatness (he claimed to have supernatural powers; Papa Doc even said he placed a curse on John F. Kennedy that resulted in Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination). Incidentally, his son, ”Baby Doc” Duvalier, who ruled from Papa Doc's death in 1971 until 1986, was not a doctor. Just a dictator.

_05:: Castro, the Angry Ballplayer?

Persistent rumors would have you believe that old Fidel was a talented baseball player who once tried out for a major-league team in America...which is completely untrue. The fact is, Castro did play a little ball back in school: he seems to have been the losing pitcher in a 1946 intramural game between the University of Havana's business and law schools. But the point here is that he was in law school not so much to win ball games as to study law. Castro graduated and practiced in Havana between 1950 and 1952, when he failed miserably in his first attempted coup d'etat. After a brief stint in prison and a few years exiled in Mexico and the United States, Castro and his army finally took control of Cuba in 1959. Just goes to show you, there's more to life than sports!

War, What Is It Good For? Well,

3 Things, Actually

War gets a bad rap. Sure, it's often fatal and frequently unnecessary. But if war is so terrible, why do we keep on trying it? Hoping to shed some rosy light on the fog of war, we've collected a few possible, if minor, benefits to starting one.

_01:: Medicine It seems like nothing brings about a good medical breakthrough like a solid war. Antibiotics, anesthesia, and countless advances in surgery were all discovered or perfected during wartime. In fact, one of the most interesting war-related medical breakthroughs came from Dr. Charles W. Drew, an African American doctor in World War II, who helped pioneer technology allowing the preservation and transfusion of blood plasma. Drew worked from 1940 through the end of the war, and his efforts saved the lives of thousands of soldiers who otherwise would have bled to death. Drew himself, however, was not so fortunate. After falling asleep at the wheel in North Carolina years after the war, Drew sustained ma.s.sive trauma and bled to death. A persistent rumor claims that Drew was given poor treatment at the hospital because of his race, but friends with him that fateful night vehemently deny it.

_02:: Engineering War can also bring technological advances. Believe it or not, the phrase ”civil engineering” wasn't coined until the 19th century because before that ”engineering” had been exclusively a military endeavor. It's common knowledge that math and science have both civilian and military implications, but one prominent example of the type is cybernetics, the mathematical field pioneered by the unfortunately named Norbert Wiener. Cybernetics is the study of control within complex systems, and our boy wonder (Wiener actually got a Ph.D. in math from Harvard when he was just 18) began by applying it as a World War II tool. Amazingly, he used the science to figure out how best to aim artillery fire at speeding airplanes. But he didn't stop there. Wiener went on to write about the nonmilitary political and social uses of cybernetics in his best-selling The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). Today cybernetics helps thermostats antic.i.p.ate rising and falling temperatures. Do better artillery fire, finely tuned air-conditioning, and one good book make a war worthwhile? Well, that brings us to...

_03:: Literature Peace just doesn't have the same ring as War and Peace. And quite frankly, it couldn't get All Quiet on the Western Front until after things had gotten awfully loud. From The Iliad to Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, good yarns have often used war as their setting. It's good for visual art, too. Pica.s.so's Guernica and Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People would have been impossible without the Spanish Civil War and the French Revolution, respectively. Sometimes, in fact, good art is all that emerges from a battle. Kurt Vonnegut wrote the best-selling Slaughterhouse-Five about the firebombing of Dresden, an utterly superfluous attack that Vonnegut witnessed as a prisoner of war in 1945. Of the bombing, Vonnegut once wrote: ”Only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed.”

4 Angry Authors and Even Angrier Critics Nothing sours a literary friends.h.i.+p quite like a bad review. The Irish playwright Brendan Behan once said, ”Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.” Whether warring writers keep their feud on paper or let things escalate to physical violence, a great literary feud is always entertaining.

_01:: Amis v. Amis You'd think that the father-and-son dynamic duo of contemporary Brit lit would stand by one another, but Kingsley Amis (19221995) was awfully hard on his son, Martin (1949). Kingsley, most famous for Lucky Jim, once told The Guardian, ”If I was reviewing Martin under a pseudonym, I would say he works too hard and it shows.” (Kingsley received his own bad reviewsthe novelist Robertson Davies called his work ”an awful bore.”) But Kingsley's critique was nothing compared with attacks on Martin since. In one of the snarkiest reviews of all time, author Tibor Fischer wrote that reading Martin Amis's Yellow Dog (2003) was akin to ”your favourite uncle being caught in the school playground, masturbating.” Martin responded by calling Fischer ”a wretch.” So much for British politeness.

_02:: Keats v. Quarterly Review Before he became a central figure in British Romantic poetry, John Keats apprenticed with a surgeon. When he published the now-cla.s.sic Endymion at the age of 23, one critic wrote that Keats ought to go back to medicine, arguing that it's better to be ”a starved apothecary than a starved poet.” The widely respected Quarterly Review was even harsher, using adjectives like ”absurd” and ”unintelligible.” Keats seemed largely unaffected by the criticismthe following year, he wrote his most famous poems, including ”Ode on a Grecian Urn.” But fellow Romantic Percy Bysshe Sh.e.l.ley later claimed that the bad reviews hadn't just angered Keats; they'd killed him. That led Lord Byron to write in Don Juan that Keats had been ”snuffed out by an Article.” Nice rhetoric, but in reality, Keats was snuffed out by tuberculosis. Immune to the critics, he remained a poet to the last. His entire last will and testament, in fact, was a single line of perfect iambic pentameter: ”My chest of books divide amongst my friends.”

Profiles in Carnage PRINCESS OLGA OF KIEV.

Olga the Widow: In 945, Prince Igor of Kiev took an army to the land of the Derevlian tribe. The Derevlians weren't exactly amused by Igor's demands for tribute so they defeated his forces and murdered him. In a great display of chutzpah, they then suggested that his widow, Olga, marry their ruler.

Olga the Agreeable: Surprisingly, Olga consented and invited the Derevlian leaders to Kiev to discuss the arrangements.

Olga the Hostess: Arranging a ceremonial steam bath for her guests, Olga had them burned alive inside. She then led an army against the Derevlian capital. When the Derevlians offered her tribute to leave, Olga showed her magnanimity by only asking for three doves per household.

Olga the PETA Nightmare: Their relief turned to horror when she had the birds set on fire (PETA not being around at the time); the doves returned home and set the town ablaze. The survivors were enslaved.

Olga the Saint: As for the Kievan princess, she had a fairly happy ending. She later converted to Christianity and is venerated today as Saint Olga.

_03:: Voltaire v. Freron In spite of his so-called pa.s.sion for rationalism, Enlightenment stalwart Voltaire held ferociously unreasonable grudges. He once published a pamphlet claiming Rousseau had abandoned his children, and he even called Shakespeare ”a drunken savage.” But Voltaire's greatest literary feud was with elie Freron, founder of the literary journal Annee litteraire. Freron virulently attacked both the underlying philosophies of the Enlightenment and Voltaire's writing. Not one to take it lying down, Voltaire quickly fought back, penning the play L'ecossaise to ridicule Freron. ”A serpent bit Freron,” Voltaire said. ”But it was the serpent that died.” (Incidentally, the play is widely regarded to be one of Voltaire's very worst.) The rivalry didn't exactly die down. In fact, the bitterness seemed to last a lifetime: for example, Voltaire kept a painting in one of his dining rooms depicting a bunch of demons horsewhipping elie Freron. How's that for rationalism?

_04:: Gore Vidal v. Norman Mailer While Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were serving as commentators for ABC at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, their private feud became fairly public when Mailer called Vidal a ”queer.” Of course, he had his reasonsafter all, the openly gay Vidal had just referred to him as a ”crypto-n.a.z.i.” End of round one. Three years later, Vidal (most famous for his historical novels) compared Mailer's view of women to that of Charles Manson in the New York Review of Books. Mailer, whose gritty The Naked and the Dead established his reputation, was a misogynisthe once remarked, ”I don't hate women, but I think they should be kept in cages.” Even so, he didn't appreciate the Manson comparison. Just how much didn't he appreciate it? In the d.i.c.k Cavett Show greenroom a few months later, Mailer headb.u.t.ted Vidal, who cleverly responded with a punch to Mailer's gut. The show itself was a disaster, with Mailer insulting both Vidal and Cavett while Vidal stared blankly like, well, like someone who'd just been headb.u.t.ted.

Touch of Evil After e. e. c.u.mmings' poetry collection was rejected 14 times, he borrowed $300 from his mom and printed it himself. t.i.tled No Thanks, the book's dedication listed all the publishers that had turned him down, arranged on the page in the shape of a funeral urn.

When Nature Is a Real Mother:

6 Natural Disasters Explained

There's nothing quite as frightening as when Mother throws one of her temper tantrums. Mother Nature, that is. And while there's some comfort in knowing that at least there's a little science in her madness, the explanations are enough to keep you up at night.

_01:: Krakatoa's Really, Really Big Bang The terrible tsunami that devastated Indonesia in December 2004 wasn't the first time nature had vented its fury on the South Asian nation. At 10:02 a.m. on August 27, 1883, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa, in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, erupted. More accurately, it exploded. The detonation threw smoke and ash 17 miles in the air. In fact, the ferocity of the burst echoed so loudly that the sound of the explosion was heard on Rodriguez Island, nearly 3,000 miles away (imagine being in New York and hearing a boom from San Francisco!). The pressure wave caused barometers to twitch as far away as London seven times as the shock bounded and rebounded around the globe. But the eruption itself wasn't the worst of it. The explosion sent tsunami waves over 100 feet high toward Java and Sumatra. s.h.i.+ps were carried a mile and a half inland and dumped in the jungle. The disruption was so great, the tide actually rose several inches in New York. In all, more than 36,000 people were killed by the tsunami, and most of the nearby coasts of both islands were laid waste. As for Krakatoa, the island blew itself out of existence. It reemerged years later, the result of continued volcanic activity in this turbulent part of the Pacific ”Ring of Fire.”

_02:: ”Bring Out Your Dead!” The Black Death Between 1347 and 1351, a plague raged through Europe. Arriving in Messina, Sicily, on a Black Sea merchant s.h.i.+p, the disease was initially thought of as solely an animal sicknesslike bird flu or mad cow disease. But somehow fleas managed to transmit the condition from rats to people. Called the Black Death because of the dark spots that appeared on victims' skin, the pandemic wasn't just the bubonic plague. In fact, the vicious strain was actually a lethal combination of four variations of plague: bubonic (causing buboes, or inflammations of the lymph nodes), enteric (intestinal), septicemic (an infection of the blood), and pneumonic (filling the lungs with fluid). Quadruple yuck. Even worse, the Black Death worked fast. People who were perfectly healthy at midday were dead by sunset. And the staggering death toll reflects it. An estimated 12 million people in Asia and 25 million in Europe (or one-third of Europe's population) were wiped out. An indiscriminate killer, the disease destroyed rich and poor alike, though only one reigning monarch is known to have died: King Alfonse XI of Castile, who refused to abandon his troops when plague struck his army.

_03:: Russia Dodges a Bullet from s.p.a.ce: The Tunguska Blast At 7:17 a.m. on June 30, 1908, a 15-megaton explosion (more than 1,000 times that at Hiros.h.i.+ma) flattened a ma.s.sive part of the Tunguska region of Siberia. The devastated area was 57 miles across, and the explosion shattered windows 400 miles away. A real investigation of the event wasn't undertaken until 1927. But that's not the weird part. The strangest fact about the incident is that there was no impact crater. An entire forest flattened, but there was no hole, meaning the object had exploded in the air. Scientists now believe that the object was an asteroid or extinct stony comet; the pressure of its descent simply blew it apart before it hit the ground. But the mysterious nature of the event has led to a whole literature of ludicrous theories, blaming the blast on everything from a black hole pa.s.sing through the earth to a chunk of antimatter to an exploding UFO towe love this onean energy death ray built by Nikola Tesla and test-fired from the Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. Whatever they believe, scientists have shuddered and thanked their lucky stars, contemplating what might have happened had the object decided to explode over, say, Central Park. Due to the remoteness of Tunguska, not a single person was killed by the blast.

_04:: The Day the Little Conemaugh Got Much Bigger Lake Conemaugh lies 14 miles up the Little Conemaugh River from the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. On May 31, 1889, the dam that held back the lake waters burst after two days of torrential rain. The results were devastating. A wall of water 60 feet high, moving at 40 mph, crashed down on the unsuspecting people of Johnstown, and the water and debris it carried all but flattened the entire town. In an utterly tragic twist, the town was downstream from a wire factory that was also flattened by the water. Many townspeople caught in the deluge got so entangled in barbed wire that they couldn't escape. In the end, 2,209 people were killed, including 99 entire families. But Mother Nature was not wholly to blame for the tragedy. The Lake Conemaugh Dam was the property of the South Fork Fis.h.i.+ng and Forestry Club, which had turned the area into a mountain retreat for the wealthy. However, the club had neglected proper maintenance on the dam. Despite its culpability, though, it was never held legally responsible.

_05:: From the People Who Brought You World War I: The Flu Just as the Great War was ending and the world looked like it might finally get back to normal, the influenza pandemic of 19181919 struck. The pandemic most likely originated in China, but its huge and devastating impact on Spain's population earned it the name ”Spanish flu,” while the French called it ”La Grippe.” Even such luminaries as President Woodrow Wilson caught the bug, in his case while attending the Versailles Peace Conference. In the end, onefifth of the world's population would become infected, and more people would diesome estimates are as high as 40 millionthan had during four years of fighting in the First World War. Ironically, the war can be held partly responsible not only for spreading the flu, but also for checking it. Populations were weakened, and thereby made more susceptible, by shortages and rationing and the fact that many of the strongest and healthiest members had been killed in some trench or no-man's-land. But the war had also advanced medical learning and germ theory, and steeled people to hards.h.i.+p. They were used to self-sacrifice and putting the nation before the individual. So they were more calm and cooperative with the measures taken by their public health departments, some of which were tremendously restrictive.

_06:: Yellowstone National... Supervolcano?

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