January 2011

The usual image of invention is of the solitary genius struggling in his garret with an idea only he has faith in. One day, he shouts, “Eureka!” and the world changes. Sometimes this is actually the case. Thomas Edison, after all, was entitled to shout, “Eureka!” more than a thousand times in his life, although I doubt that he did.

Like Wow, Man

November 8 saw the release of the fourth album from the British rock group Led Zeppelin, with a song that would become God’s gift to the American marijuana industry: “Stairway to Heaven.” The album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV , had for its actual title a group of cryptic symbols that was rendered very roughly as “#&@%” in Lenny Kaye’s Rolling Stone review. Kaye singled out “Rock and Roll” and “When the Levee Breaks” for especial praise, mentioning the eight-minute “Stairway” only in passing. Yet the song’s blend of mystical and apocalyptic imagery with Zeppelin’s usual incendiary riffs, pounding bass, and thunderous drumbeat—building, in classic rock-anthem style, from a quiet acoustic introduction (with recorders, even) to a thrashing, head-banging climax—has proved irresistible to generation after generation of adolescent potheads. It is still the most popular rock song of all time among frat boys and people with nothing better to do than phone in to radio-station listener polls.

Republicans Capture Congress

On November 5 the Republican party won control of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration, with 246 of 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 51 of 96 in the Senate. The old Confederate states remained solidly Democratic, by a margin of 103 House seats to 2, but the rest of the House was almost three-to-one Republican. Americans were suffering through a rocky transition to peacetime, and the Republicans had capitalized on voters’ anger with the slogan “Had Enough?” The focus of the gibe was the country’s foundering President, Harry S. Truman.

Ending the War to End Wars

Three years after the end of the Great War, Americans dealt with some unfinished business from that conflict. On November 8, after the Senate had ratified peace agreements with Germany, Austria, and Hungary to replace the rejected Versailles Treaty, President Warren Harding declared an official end to the war. On Armistice Day, November 11, the remains of an unknown American soldier, exhumed from a French grave, were interred in Washington, D.C. Military men from all nations paid tribute with medals, ribbons, and decorations, including an Indian who laid a coup stick and war bonnet on the bier.

The Inoculation Controversy

Around three o’clock on the morning of November 14, a crude grenade made of black powder and turpentine sailed through a window of Cotton Mather’s house in Boston. It landed in Mather’s guest room but failed to explode, thus sparing the life of his nephew. The attempted bombing was the most lurid episode in a campaign of intimidation aimed at Mather and his ally Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, whom rope-toting mobs had threatened to hang. What offense had these two men committed to enrage the Boston masses so violently? Inoculating their fellow citizens against smallpox.

Rhetorical bombs were bursting last May, but the shock waves are just now being felt. The issue: “What is the civil definition of marriage?” Faced with the possibility that Hawaii might be judicially ordered to legalize marriages between homosexual couples (which other states might then be constitutionally obliged to recognize), Congress followed the lead of several states and this fall passed a “defense of marriage” law that would reserve the term (and its benefits) exclusively for the legal union of one man and one woman. In making this pre-emptive strike, Republicans hoped to force President Clinton into a position on the matter that would alienate either socially conservative Democrats or gay and lesbian voters. Clinton promptly promised to sign the bill; at press time the final outcome remains to be seen.

According to Bob Fulton’s article “Our First Olympics,” (July/August) our athletes discovered that the games were scheduled to begin on April 6, 1896, twelve days earlier than they had supposed because Greece still observed the Julian calendar. Since that calendar lagged behind the Gregorian, our athletes would have had more time, not less, had they forgotten that Greece observed a different calendar. What must have happened, for Mr. Fulton’s story to make any sense, was that the athletes were given a date according to the Gregorian calendar, which they mistakenly assumed must be a Julian calendar date since the games were in Greece. Maybe a little knowledge was a dangerous thing.

Spencer Ervin Philadelphia, Pa.

WHEN CLINT EASTWOOD ROLLS INTO MERYL Streep’s Iowa driveway in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), he is driving a clapped-out 1963 GMC pickup truck. You can safely bet that not one person who saw that movie laughed to see Mr. Eastwood in a pickup, instead of a Corvette or a Mustang or some other vehicle that might once have seemed more fitting for a freelance photographer. Contrast this with Cary Grant’s brief stint as a pickup driver in North by Northwest (1959). Grant, driving the truck through no choice of his own, hides it on a side street before reaching his destination, a fashionable Chicago hotel. In those days, nice people didn’t drive pickups; today, they do.