Chapter 25

In This Chapter

Exposing tyranny, cruelty, exploitation, and crime

From banning alcohol to shoving people into high-rise tower blocks, the twentieth century was as capable of coming up with really bad ideas as any other. This isn’t a definitive list by any means, but you get the idea.

Prohibition

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. No one in America expected banning the sale, production, and consumption of alcohol to lead to wholesale racketeering, mob violence, and corruption on an unprecedented scale, but really, when you see the smuggling industry that arises just from customs duties, it wouldn’t have taken the greatest of minds to predict some sort of trouble if you took away people’s tipples. Drunkenness was a major problem in America, and the anti-alcohol brigade had a very serious case, but complete prohibition wasn’t the answer. On the other hand, without prohibition we wouldn’t have all those gangster movies, so maybe it had its plus side.

Totalitarian Dictatorship

Dictatorship is nothing new – ask the Romans – but totalitarianism, in which everything is under the control of the State, was a twentieth-century innovation. That for most of the world’s population, dictatorship, not democracy, was the norm for most of the twentieth century is a sobering thought. Dictatorship fans used to say how efficient it was – look at that: Another train on time – compared with boring old democracy with its endless elections and objections; in fact, historians often point out that much of dictatorship’s efficiency is all façade and that behind the gleaming jackboots the government is often inefficient, badly organised, and corrupt. Totalitarianism has led to labour camps, oppression, murder, censorship, and aggressive war. Give me a few late trains any day.

Racial Segregation

Racial segregation reached its most finessed form in the twentieth century, with separate benches, toilets, schools, cafes, churches, cinemas, and heaven knows what else, according to the shape of people’s noses or the colour of their skin. Quite apart from the injustice of it all, think of theexpense.

Most racial segregation is quite open about the racial hatred that underpins it – ‘The Jews are our misfortune’ the Nazis taught German children in the 1930s – but sometimes, as with apartheid in South Africa, the authorities try to claim it is merely ‘separate development’ and all quite harmless. For this reason, the famous Brown case in Kansas in 1954 was such an important breakthrough. Little Linda Brown (well, actually her dad) took her local School Board to court not because her ‘black’ school was bad or underfunded – unlike most ‘black’ schools in America, particularly in the South, it was actually quite adequately funded – but because telling someone they can’t come in to a school, or a cafe, or a cinema, or a toilet, because of the colour of their skin is demeaning and damaging, regardless of how good the alternative might be. She won.

The Domino Theory

The Domino theory that US President Eisenhower spoke of never had much logic to it. His idea was that if communism set down roots in one country (we’re talking South East Asia here, but it could apply elsewhere), then others would ‘fall’ to it in turn, like a row of dominoes. This theory overlooked a number of vital differences between countries and dominoes. Why a country would turn communist just because the neighbours did was never quite made clear: Perhaps they imagined Thailand looking through its net curtains at Laos or Vietnam and saying, ‘Oh look, they’ve got TV next door, and a new car, and they’ve instituted a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of the proletariat. Right, we’re getting all three first thing in the morning.’ Tragically, this theory led America to rush troops to Vietnam and ultimately to extend its bombing to Vietnam’s neighbours, Cambodia and Laos. That development turned people towards the communists and one of the results was Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia. Put the dominoes away and listen more carefully to the people.

Concrete Tower Blocks

They called them ‘cities in the sky’ and came up with exciting plans and drawings showing them soaring upwards like buildings in science fiction films. And then the planners and designers went home to their nice cottages and left the poor people who actually had to live in their creations to discover what life was really like up there in the clouds. What they found was more concrete than ethereal. People were stuck up at the top of huge blocks of flats, cut off from the grass or even the pavements where they’d previously walked and played. While mothers and elderly people had to cope with lifts that kept breaking down, young people on these soulless estates turned to drugs and crime, enlivened by the occasional riot, adding a sense of violent menace to the already bleak atmosphere. Social housing is a major priority for governments all round the world, but the concrete cities of the post-war years illustrate just how to take a problem – and make it worse.

Chewing Gum

If you’ve ever had to prise hardened gobbets of chewing gum off the underside of a school desk, you’ll understand why I hate the stuff with every fibre in my body. The sight of someone’s jaw masticating is stomach-churning enough, and when they’re speaking to you, it’s just plain rude. But worse than the chewing is what people do with it. The makers tell you to wrap finished gum in the silver paper it came in and dispose of it carefully. What most people do is drop it on the ground for others to walk in: Usually me. Scraping the ghastly stuff off your shoe is bad enough, but when you think of where it’s been . . . Although chewing gum was invented in the nineteenth century and may well help people concentrate on their work, its proliferation must rank as one of the lowest points of the twentieth century.

Plastic Wrapping

You need some plastic wrapping to keep food fresh, of course, but the packaging industry didn’t stop there. Everything was to be wrapped in cellophane before it could possibly be allowed to pass into a customer’s hands. Initially consumers protested at the sheer waste of it all and, presumably, the added costs, but in more recent years we’ve become a lot more aware of the environmental impact of producing the stuff in the first place, only for it to go straight in the bin (you can’t yet recycle plastic wrapping). At long last retailers are beginning to wake up to the issue, producing biodegradable plastic bags or even cloth ones, but plastic wrapping carries on as strong as ever. A good idea gone badly wrong.

Esperanto

Oh dear. If you’re an Esperanto speaker you’ll be asking ‘Kiel vi povas fari tion al mi?’ (‘How could you do it to me?’). After all, the idea of Esperanto is to bring people together in a common language with no irregular verbs, where you don’t have to remember if ‘table’ is masculine or feminine, and to enable enthusiasts to write letters to newspapers (but not in Esperanto, curiously) saying how much better the world would be if everyone spoke it. Well, I’m sorry (‘Mi beda ras’), but I don’t buy it. You can create a communications system from scratch, but language is a lot more than that: It’s part of a people’s cultural heritage, part of who they are, and if you tell them ‘Your language is no good; learn this one’ (and many rulers through history have done just that), you’re effectively rejecting their culture and identity. When you learn a language you are also learning about the people who speak it; Esperanto is mother tongue to no one. Nice thought; bad idea.

Sequels

Sequels stink. At least the early days of cinema employed a bit of imagination: Bride of Frankenstein instead of Frankenstein II. More recently, filmmakers have shown as little creativity in their titles as they have in the contents. The Godfather II was an exception, an intelligent and gripping film, as powerful and well crafted as the first, but The Godfather III wasn’t. If a film works, that’s because it’s well written and crafted, with its own natural flow and shape. Endlessly recycling the same characters and the same basic idea is just lazy and does the audience a disservice. (I explore this idea further in my next book, Twentieth Century World History for Dummies II).

Flares for Men

Not for nothing are flares a distress signal. Sailors have long treasured their bell-bottom trousers, but at least they had the decency to wear them at sea. This particular form of horror first hit land in the 1920s in the form of ‘Oxford bags’. The fashion didn’t last, but returned in the 1970s, growing to ever bigger proportions until air was circulating up and down men’s trouser legs and the pavements shone from being swept by the cuffs of thousands of pairs of frayed jeans. Drainpipe trousers returned in the 1980s, when the flares tendency went through the body and emerged at the other end in the biggest hairstyles seen since the eighteenth century. The 1990s brought blessed relief, until some fool came up with the idea of seventies retro and flares came back again. Just bear in mind, you can look intelligent, witty, urbane, handsome, and well dressed, or you can wear flares. Not both.