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I remember in the ninth grade Mrs. Wittenborn teaching us briefly
about the Middle Ages. Mrs. Wittenborn was a history teacher in
the classic mode - stern, unblinking, with hair of spun steel and
with a demeanor that made donkeys speak, mountains move, and grown
men wet themselves. She would look out at you from behind those
tiny rimless glass that made her eyes look as large as fried eggs,
staring, staring, as she waited for you to answer some arcane question
regarding the Crusades or the total aggregate income of serfs in
Tuscany in the years immediately preceding the introduction of movable
type.
She made an observation about the Vikings once. Not the Minnesota
football team (I don't think she even knew there was a football
team. I 'm not even confident that she knew football existed. She
seemed to exist, like most teachers, on another planet, a planet
that had never heard of football, baseball, soccer, or indeed of
anything that countenanced free time, fun or foolishness), but the
savage, cut-throat, axe-wielding, sociopathic mutants who terrified
half the planet. I thought they were really cool, but that's not
the point.
She made an observation about the Vikings: people don't really
know when the "era of the Vikings" ended because the era
itself was so sporadic. It wasn't like you could set your watch
to them coming and kicking your ass like you could, say, if you
were Indians or Africans or any number of people subjugated by the
English - a race whose blood thirsty superiority complex was exceeded
only by their punctuality, or if your name is Pierre and we're talking
about the Germans. So, there existed this weird period of time,
years even, when people in Ireland and England and Scotland and
France (hmm, France; I'm sensing a pattern here), lived in abject
fear of an attack that wasn't coming. I mean, they're sitting there,
manning the battlements, promoting bozos from the ranks, making
speeches about preparedness, and generally cowering in their caves,
while putting off doing important things like, I don't know, inventing
the steam engine, or perfecting vichyssoise, thinking that these
bloodthirsty maniacs are, at any moment, about to show up and pillage
and burn and destroy and force them to eat snails with the wrong
fork. And they're not coming. I mean, ever. All these people preparing
for the next ass-kicking, and these Vikings are sitting around comparing
recipes for Lutekvisk or something.
And after a few years, people finally realize this, right? One
of them finally says something like "Hey, it's been a while
since those Viking guys came and beat the crap out of us, isn't
it?" And another one says, "You know, I think you're right.
I guess they found something more interesting to do. Let's go experiment
with hemlines." Although what could be more fun than beating
up the French, I don't know.
The point is, they were waiting, years maybe, for something that
wasn't going to happen. And at some point they must've realized
this, and realized that for years they'd been standing there like
morons, right?
Which must have made them feel really stupid. They must have felt
like Class A idiots - they must've smacked their heads like some
12th century V-8 commercial and said "What the hell were we
thinking? We could've been invading Poland or writing 'Finnegan's
Wake' or thinking up ways to honor Jerry Lewis. Instead we practiced
surrendering and cowering and peeing on ourselves."
And then they must have looked around at what all the other countries
were doing, countries who'd gotten hip to the Vikings' jive decades
earlier, and they must have started furiously working, inventing
and beating the hell out of each other in an effort to prove that
they were just as cool, bloodthirsty and ballsy as the Vikings.
Except, of course the French who figured that all those years learning
how to say "You look marvelous in that dress" in Swedish,
Norwegian, German, Russian and Farsi was probably not going to go
to waste. That's the point.
This is what I was thinking about as I was standing at the airport recently, waiting for my luggage
at the baggage carousel. Luggage that wasn't coming out no matter
how long I waited for it, because it had never left the other airport. Stupid Frogs.
Flip to the US
Department of Transportations Lost Luggage Reports
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