FROM BAD TO NORSE

The dearth of recent news stories on the subject of Vikings is a troubling trend that we feel obligated to address. Most people consider Vikings to be little more than a bygone race of Scandinavian sea pirates that roamed Western Europe a thousand or so years ago before their reign of sack and pillage was brought to an end by the mass embrace of Christianity in their home region. These people are dangerously deluded, in dire need of being smacked around, shouted at, and quite possibly spat upon.

One of the primary misconceptions of the modern world is that the Viking menace is past. The truth is that there is a direct line of descent between Vikings and modern terrorists. Bereft of their dragon-hulled battleships, many of them migrated inland. Some wound up in Middle East, where they have stoked havoc for nearly a millennium. Others sat around in Central Europe scratching their asses until the circumstances were promising for Fascism. Still others wrote operas about Vikings, in which Viking stories were sung in Viking costume by Viking singers. But despite the fatness and femininity of some of these performers, their singing did not spell the end of the Viking era. In fact, Vikings continue, in their guises of regular, everyday people, to have a profound impact on the workings of recent history.

As such, please study, memorize, and tremble in fear of this list of "Five Events in Recent History That Were Actually Caused By Vikings - Yes, Vikings!"

1. THE BOER WAR - When a group of Edwardian Vikings decided that they wanted to terrorize the Southern Hemisphere for a change, they went straight to South Africa and subjugate the British, who were in turn subjugating the Dutch Boers, who were in turn subjugating the Zulus, who were in turn subjugating the lions, who were in turn subjugating the giraffes, who were in turn subjugating the the mimosa trees, who were in turn pretty much screwed. There were no victors.

2. COMMUNISM - Originally a shiny, happy philosophical system of shared resources and equality devised by the world's first hippie, Carl Marks, Communism could very well have served as a solution to the world's ills were it not for the Vikings who secretly overthrew the Russian Revolution and decided that it would be a lot more fun to kill millions of people and turn the verdant greenlands of Siberia into a crappy prison camp.

3. THE TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL - Vikings have a known propensity to disguise themselves as corrupt politicians and sabotage the system from within. During the reign of President Harden G. Warning, whose cabinet was lousy with them, Vikings accepted millions of dollars in kickbacks from the tea lobby in exchange for the promise to affix a giant handle and spout to the Capitol building in Washington, DC. (In a planned double-cross, these accoutrements would, at the final moment, be replaced with classic Viking horns that would cast their pointy shadows across the Mall for generations to come.) When the scheme was discovered, the Vikings were unceremoniously kicked out of Washington until the next President was sworn in.

4. ISHTAR - Unhappy about their portrayal in such historical films as Erik the Red-Faced, Kill All the Vikings! and Wild Strawberries, the Vikings decided to strike Hollywood in its most tender part: the money. Infiltrating the studio establishment, secret Viking producers created a bizarre proposal for a buddy comedy starring the aging comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, who play songwriters at the ancient temple of the Babylonian Goddess of Love and War, Ishtar. Though the film fared poorly at the box office, it failed to destroy the entertainment-industrial complex of the United States, as originally intended.

5. 9/11 - What were those deadly airplanes if not Viking vessels of fearmongering and attempted conquerment? Sure, they didn't have dragons emblazoned on the front, but that was merely practical - the Viking-descended members of Al-Qaeda would have loved nothing more than to paint some scary teeth onto the noses of those jets, only by doing so they would have been caught before liftoff.

And what are they up to right now? It is believed that a group of Vikings has joined the Steampunkerism movement's attempts to revive the corpse of Queen Victoria, in the hopes that a new British Empire would give them something more interesting to conquer than the amateur crap being thrown down by the current United States government. Of course, the Viking scourge has grown so diffuse in the generations since its acme that it is difficult to imagine them banding together and traumatizing the world en masse. Still, Viking sleeper cells are present in every nation of the world, and it is only a matter of time before one of them dons their ceremonial helmets, drinks an assload of grog, and starts swinging a battle-axe at your friends and relations. Look sharp!

FRENCHED

This rare, hand-tinted early daguerreotype of French revolutionaries blowing up the original Eiffel Tower can only mean one thing: Bastille Day is here again.

Americans – along with the British, other Europeans, denizens of former Communist Bloc nations, citizens of the Third World, Canadians, and the majority of the French – nurse many misconceptions about the 18th-century Gallic struggle for liberté, égalité, and fraternité (roughly translated: “libraries, eagles, and fraternities,” otherwise known as the Holy Trinity of Universal Literacy, Nature Conservation, and Limitless Booze, the age-old earmarks of Liberal Education). As always, we are prepared to jump into the breach with some straight talk.

King Louis XIV, the self-styled “King of the Sun,” fancied that the French royal line were the descendents of solar aliens, the same race that ostensibly constructed the Pyramids, Stonehenge, and China. He decided that he needed an earthly construction to define his glory and compete with his supposed ancestors’ finest achievements, and so he called upon the royal engineer Alec Eiffel (who previously designed the haunted underground grottoes of Versailles) to create the world’s tallest structure – a 324-meter high wooden throne that would allow the entire world to view Louis in all his glory.

In order to fund this edifice, the peasants were forced to preemptively sign over the income of their next twelve generations of progeny to the French court. This worked for a while, but by the time the third sou-less generation came of age, during the reign of Louis XVII, the deal no longer held its former appeal. When Benjamin Franklin visited the nation in 1787, his fiery, demagogic speaking style and bloody rhetoric whipped the peasantry into a frenzy, and the French decided to join their American cousins in revolution.

For the Tennis Court Oath (which was actually sworn on a badminton green, which the proletariat found too faggy to identify as such), selected members of the French underclass dressed as Indians in order to disrupt the decadent games of the aristocracy and have their sporting equipment thrown into the Seine. As birdies, lacrosse sticks, and frilly knee-pads floated through the city, the anger they spawned pointed in one direction: the Tower.

In the decades following its erection, the Tower had been nicknamed “Bastille” (a French diminutive of “Bastarde”) by Parisians. This symbol of monarchy gone phallically awry represented all of the grievances of the People, and so, on July 14, 1789, they stormed it, rigged it up with a bunch of firecrackers, and watched it burn to the ground.

The years that followed were full of blood, both metaphorically and physically. Robespierre’s Reign of Terribleness began when Revolutionary leaders held a contest to devise the most fucked-up way of killing people – and thus the guillotine was born. The killing only ended when Louis XVII’s bastard son, Napoleon Bonaparte, reminded the people that there was no more Tower or racquet sports, and therefore the monarchy was dead. He then named himself Emperor.

It wasn’t until the reign of Napoleon’s grandson, Napoleon III, that everyone remembered how cool the Tower was, and plans were instantly drafted to rebuild it in iron, so the rabble couldn’t burn it down. Instead, they could pretend to burn it down every year, in a ritual similar to the Wicker Man ceremonies of ancient pagans and horror geeks. And so to this day the French enjoy having an excuse to make a lot of noise and set off fireworks in emulation of the July 4th holiday of their older post-Revolutionary siblings, the Americans. They’re like children that way.

PAYBACK FOR APRIL SHOWERS

Today is May Day – the holiday in which we celebrate the Bolshevik invention of the maypole, an ideological community-building device designed to empower the proletariat by educating them in three-dimensional weaving skills. It’s also a phrase employed in World War II films to denote the malfunction of aircraft. What do these two concepts have in common?

Answer: they were both created by the same man. And who was this man? No less than Orville Wright, co-inventor of the airplane and secret leftist (pictured above left, with ectoplasm).

Orville and his brother Wilbur stand as case studies in the political history of the Twentieth Century. Orville, a Communist sympathizer who later defected to the nascent Soviet Union, was less outspoken than Wilbur, an arch-conservative who inspired the younger Charles Lindbergh in the fields of both aviation and reactionary politics. But despite his lack of bombast, his beliefs were no less deeply held.

Though their epoch-making initial flight at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903 is the one immortalized in the history books, we’re concerned today with a lesser-known event the following year. On May 1, 1904, the Wright Brothers returned to Kitty Hawk to try out a second-generation prototype. This new version of the airplane, however, proved even more recalcitrant than the first, and flew straight up into the air several times before landing propellor-first in the dunes. Orville, the pilot, giddy with the repetitive dizziness and savage brush with death, attempted to joke with his brother about how the first day of May would go down in history as the antithesis of their original flight, but the only words he could get out of his bruised, bloodied mouth were “May day… May day…” The phrase went on to become shorthand for aviatory disaster.

It wasn’t until 20 years later that Orville, living in Moscow since the death of his brother, was asked by Lenin himself, on his deathbed, to create a spring diversion to inspire Russian air workers. He originally conceived a gigantic ballet in the sky, in which airplanes with long ribbons connecting them would draw out beautiful, Spirograph-style patterns upon the sky. In the event, the choreography was poorly planned, and the ribbons became entrapped in the propellers, causing them to crash into each other and the surrounding countryside. Chastened by this experience, Orville brought the procession to earth, taking the added precaution of attaching the ribbons to a pole to lessen the chances of strangulation. And thus our modern May Day celebrations were born.