It Ain’t Right

By Matt Kirby

Have you had a cold, or worse, a flu? In today’s fear-driven world, that concept takes on new and profound consequences.

In 1914 Europe, where the powder of Nationalism met the Keg of European delusion, and imperial myopic arrogance had reached its zenith, it started. A War to End All Wars extinguished 40 million souls using technologies never before experienced - machine guns, chemical gas, airplanes, and tanks. Fragile and precarious humans, naked and vulnerable, stood no chance in that game. Those technologies rendered scores of brave men into mats of twisted, violated corpses.

WWI birthed modernism.

World War I was the fulcrum of the modern world. It birthed modernism in many guises; abstract and conceptual art, surrealism, modern literature, modern outrage and satire, modern economies with their subsequent consumer-classes and materialism. The Treaty of Versailles, forged from layers of scar tissues of hate and recrimination, accomplished nothing, save the creation of a rapidly oncoming second world war and rewriting the world’s maps. Communism would also be birthed, with its tidal wave of consequences near and far, then and now.

Ignorant and uncaring European diplomats capriciously and randomly drew lines on maps, ignoring the actual people who resided therein. These lines would create such troubles that would persist perpetually and metastasize into new and disturbing scenarios.

Boogeyman Virus

The Great Influenza of 1918, also known as the Spanish Flu, was forged in the furnaces of the War to End All Wars. The germ started in a pig farm in Kansas. From there, it was able to course through the arteries of civilization from its contact in the extreme dense packing of soldiers in those WWI trenches, where it gained a foothold and unknowing hosts, spreading unchecked for three years. We never killed it, you know; it circulates today as one of several species of virus that we deal with every year. Perhaps it contributed to the creation of today’s Boogeyman Virus. Would today’s new scourge exist without a contribution from a relative of the Spanish Flu?

Did the selfish and rotted hearts of European stupidity and arrogance directly lead to that cold or flu you had, or worse yet, did you get that New Thing, last year? ,

Matt Kirby has always been fascinated by the truth of the world expressed through the two poles of reality: art and physics. He started out as a mechanical engineer, then bUneke M A G A Z I N E .org 12 Apples to Apples happened.