Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Fast Times in 1914 by PITT DICKEY What can you say about a year that brings Zeppelin warfare, Babe Ruth's baseball debut and the assassination of the Archduke of Austria? You can say, Happy 100th Birthday 1914. On Jan. 1, we commemorate 1914's centennial. 1914 was a malignant cock roach of a year, bringing bad tidings to all and sundry. Lest we forget, let's join Mr. Peabody and Sherman, mix some metaphors, rev up the flux capacitor and take a ride in the Way Back Time Machine to 1914 for a look around. 1914 is mostly remembered for the beginning of World War I. We seem to have lost the reason for World War I if anyone ever knew it. It reminds me of a John Prine Archduke Franz Ferdinand song that has the saddest lines ever written. John's song "Hello in There" is about a retired couple who are essentially just sitting around their apartment waiting for the Grim Reaper to come calling. The husband is reminiscing about their kids. They don't see their kids often. One kid, Davy, is dead. The line that always gets to me is: "We lost Davy in the Korean War/ Don't know what for/ Don't matter any more." That seems to about sum up World War I. Millions of people killed. Don't know why. Doesn't matter now. As Tony Soprano would say, "Whattaya gonna do?" In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson was in the White House. Construction began on the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. Women were agitating for the vote. A suffragette named Mary Richardson, imitating Lizzy Borden, gave several whacks with a meat cleaver to a painting by Velazquez called the "Rokeby Venus" in London's National Gallery. Venus was lying around nekkid on her bed looking into a mirror being held up by Cupid. Mary hoped that chopping up Venus would lead to women's voting rights. Valerie Solanis, the founder and possible sole member of the Society of Cutting Up Men, imitated Mary, and shot Andy Warhol in 1968 to protest something. Destroying art and artists in the name of politics has always been a fall back position for the unhinged. February 1914 saw the launching of the HMHS Britannic, the sister ship of the Titanic. The launch of the Britannic was greeted with wild applause by a large crowd of icebergs in the North Atlantic. In May, President Wilson declared Mother's Day, perhaps in an attempt to appease women suffragettes without actually giving them the right to vote. Honus Wagner became the first baseball player to get 3,000 hits in early June. Things looked like they were going to be pretty calm until the proverbial poo hit the fan on June 28, when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria got whacked by a cranky Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. The croaking of the Archduke started a chain of dominos falling faster than President Obama's poll numbers in 2013. Before you could say "Oh Fudge!" World War I had begun. Europe chose up sides and declared war on itself. In one corner, weighing a zillion pounds, we had the Triple Entente tag team of Britain, Russia and France — and ultimately the US and Italy. In the other corner, also weighing a zillion pounds, we had the Central Powers tag team of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. Various other countries chose up sides and fought until about nine million soldiers were killed. The Triple Entente won in a two of three fall decisions setting up the basis for World War II in a carefully designed peace treaty at Versailles that guaranteed more troubles down the road. In September 1914, the last known passenger pigeon died. She was a handsome bird named Martha who breathed her last at the Cincinnati Zoo. On Christmas Eve 1914 on the Western Front, German and British soldiers stopped trying to kill each other long enough to sing Christmas carols together and exchange small gifts. The War to end All Wars resumed shortly thereafter. Fortunately, 1914, died on 31 December 1914. Let us hope its namesake, 2014 performs less PITT DICKEY, Attorney, Contributdramatically. ing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. 6 JANUARY 1-7, 2014 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM