Saturday, August 20, 2016

A Century of Spin

Battle of the Somme: 100 years ago.
Reading the news today is like a test to see how much frivolous bullshit one can tolerate. CNN has adopted a habit of posting random, anonymous Twitter comments instead of interviewing real people on the street. We all know how Twitter brings out the best in us. That allows CNN to cherry pick the most infantile or dramatic or clever or literary quote to fit their rotten article. It got me thinking, "How would these illiterate fuckwad journalists who graduated from some diploma-mill like Brown write about events from 100 years ago?" I really am curious how someone who scours Twitter for snarky remarks about totally irrelevant events in 2016 would write about almost identical international news a century ago. 

Now, the Battle of the Somme resulted in 1,000,000 casualties over 4 months (yes, one million) so it's pretty high on the list of insane human events, but are events of 2016 much different? I think not. The 1916 Summer Olympics were scheduled (by some idiot) to be held in Berlin so they were cancelled because of an active war zone. Today, Rio, Brazil was deemed safe enough to hold the Olympics but Russia is militarizing allies for a land grab, Syria is in a Civil War, refugees are fleeing Africa by inflatable raft to countries that immediately criminalize their religion, America has been occupying oil production territory in Iraq and Yemen while ignoring blatant civil rights problems in distant barbarian cities such as Chicago and obviously dire flooding in other foreign lands not protected by the Constitution, such as Louisiana, while paying some $2 Billion to Iran for an arms deal that was intended to keep the despotic Shah in power back in 1979, but never happened because he was overthrown, but Iran had already paid for the arms so even though the 'buyer' from 1979 died a year later the U.S., for some reason, feels obligated to pay this money back, with interest, to a completely different terror supporting band of lunatics who now claim it is owed to them, the same people who tried to kill the original buyer whose goal was to squash the rebellion led by the parents of the people now demanding the money back. Makes sense. In 1916 a campaign was building to end alcohol production because it was an obvious health scourge and in 2016 there are more Heroin overdoses than births* But Heroin is already illegal because that law empowers municipalities to attempt to profit from suicidal, broke, drug junkies. Pretty smart!

Here is a list of actual events from 1916 - combined with generic spin from a modern day fuckwad journalist a'la CNN or Breitbart.

  • Battle of Verdun is fought - A Pop singer in N.Y. complains that her summer house in Belrupt-en-Verdunois has been destroyed. Demands restitution.
  • Mexican Rebel Pancho Villa attacks town in New Mexico - Woodrow Wilson claims this is proof that we need to build a wall between America and Mexico.
  • Easter Rebellion in Ireland put down by British troops. - 10 Irishwomen in Boston refuse to wash any clothes manufactured in Britain for a week. They are denounced as Atheists. User #RemembertheMaine@'98 comments on Twitter "A Chink can wash clothes as good as any potato famine Cat-lick whore."
  • Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control in the United States. - Goldman is uniformly considered a slut but a small group defend her. She later accepts lucrative offers to pose nude.
  • Voyage of the James Caird: an open boat journey from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands to South Georgia in the southern Atlantic Ocean (800 nautical miles (1,500 km; 920 mi)) undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition following the loss of its ship Endurance - Lurid rumors of homosexual orgies plague expedition. Financial sponsors flee.
  • United States Marines invade the Dominican Republic - Florida rejoices as Banana prices plummet!
  • U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America - Conservative pundits say this demonstrates failure of American family to perform first duty of preparing sons for war.
  • In San Francisco, a bomb explodes on Market Street during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 injuring 40. (Warren Billings and Tom Mooney are later wrongly convicted of it) - Billings and Mooney were identified by web sleuths who later delete their accounts.
  • U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs legislation creating the National Park Service - Liberal Pundits announce this will lead to high price of admission at previously free parks. 
  •  Mary, a circus elephant, is hanged in the town of Erwin, Tennessee for killing her handler, Walter "Red" Eldridge - "Pachyderm Lives Matter" activists boycott Tennessee. #JusticeforMary
  • Margaret Sanger opens the first U.S. birth control clinic - Men nationwide breath a sigh of relief in private but denounce whorish behavior in public.
  • The first 40-hour work week officially begins in the Endicott-Johnson factories of Western New York - 11-year old Derek "Nine-finger" Sullivan says he prefers the new hours. "It's like working half-time," says a smiling Sullivan from behind his bench.

I couldn't resist an insulting modern day meme.



*none of this is fact-checked
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.