The Worst Century Ever

Worst century ever? You would think that the 20^th Century would be hard to beat. With the Nazis and the Soviets, and the fucking Holocaust being such a stain on the entire human race, and the Soviets with the Kulaks and the Gulag and all, and just the deaths in the Ukraine alone putting the century on the map, and with Mao getting into the action with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, tens of millions killed, and the creeping death of fascism-light seeping into the American way of life, not to mention World Wars I and II. Not that there haven't been other centuries to give the 20^th a run for the title. The 12^th and 13^th before Augustus straightened out the calendar, often stupidly called, “BC,” as if Yeshua had anything to do with it. That was the Bronze Age Collapse, which made a big dent in people's peace of mind, I can tell you. Or the 4^th and 5^th Centuries, which led the way into what were justifiably called the Dark Ages and featured a few plagues of their own, plus a lot of sacking and burning. Or the 14^th Century, with the Black Plague itself, that was a party. Or the 17^th Century, featuring the Thirty Years War, which packed more negativity into those thirty years than the whole fucking Hundred Years War, which just kind of wandered around. The Thirty Years War has been called the first true “world war,” because skirmishes were taking place all around the globe where one stupid empire rubbed up against another in some God forsaken archipelago all the way out in no-man's land.

But this here 21^st Century is really working up a run at the title. Oh! Wasn't that a wondrous blast of stupid that put Bush II in the White House! Ralph Nader! The “Supreme” Court! Hanging chads! Does anyone remember that incident where the American nuclear submarine, carrying nuclear missiles, did an emergency breach right into a Japanese oceanographic research ship, sinking it with considerable loss of life? No, I'm sorry, not the kind of thing that most people remember. Did Bush II issue any kind of convincing apology to the Japanese for that nightmare? Why, no, of course he did not. Because until recently, he was the number one or two idiot to have ever occupied the White House. That was right before he squandered the budget surplus that he inherited from Bill Clinton by returning it, mostly to rich Americans. “It's your money!” By now, of course, he, and Warren Harding even, look like geniuses compared to our current Big Top Extravaganza of a Presidential Display Item. That's after the Teapot Dome scandal and the 2007 crash of the entire world economy. It's hard to top those, but our Golfer-in-Chief is working on it.

Why don't we do this? Because President Merde Coyote is such a “big fan of Easter,” why don't we go back outside and get this economy moving again? It would be “great to see the churches packed for Easter Sunday!” Said the man who has had fewer religious impulses than any human to have previously walked the earth. Virus, Schmirus, you can't lock up America!

This COVID-19 throws an additional forest of trees on the bonfire that was already consuming the entire fucking earth. And it's only 2020! What's in the pipeline? AI, climate change, quantum computing (the most dangerous two-edged sword in history), proliferation of nuclear weapons, there's a bunch of stuff. And it's only 2020!

The Bronze Age Collapse, I am sure, was a terrible shock to the civilizations that were destroyed by it. I'd bet that it was a surprise, too, I'd bet that they didn't see it coming. What will future historians call the 21^st Century? Probably the “Great Cleansing,” or something equally dramatic.