THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (2 page)

Best Television Series of The Millennium.

The Simpsons. And if you don't think a crudely-drawn animated series filled with bug-eyed miscreants can't be the best television series ever, you're missing the whole point of episodic television.

Television exists for three reasons. The first reason is to provide illiterates with news, although this is a futile effort, since why would illiterates watch news, especially when another station is showing Ricki Lake at the same time? (I can write these terrible things about illiterates because, really, how are they going to find out? And if they do, how will they complain? By sending me e-mail?) 

The second reason is to remind the general populace that actors who work in commercials are trapped a special sort of living hell provided to those who've squandered a college education by getting a theater arts degree. What could a beautiful young woman have done to be forced to
extol
the virtues of a one-day yeast infection cream on national TV? A reader's theater version of "Our Town" instead of an economics course, that's what. Kids, let that be a lesson.

The third reason for television is to keep people amused. What keeps people amused? Certainly not their real lives -- if their real lives were so amusing, why would they be at home gaping mindlessly at a glowing box? (Gaping at the glowing box on which you're reading
this
is another matter entirely.) People like to see fantasy worlds, preferably worlds as static as possible -- because once you've found something you like, it shouldn't
ever
be messed with.

The Simpsons fits this exactly. Of course it's a fantasy world -- it's
animated
, after all. Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie are given set roles, but that doesn't stop each of them from doing whatever catches the writer's fancy that week. Homer, purportedly a nuclear safety engineer for the last ten years, has in fact had more jobs than anyone not living in the
Silicon Valley
. For that matter, so has Marge -- cop, pretzel vendor, church counselor. Bart's owned a factory. Lisa's always on some crusade. Maggie's the spawn of aliens.

The Simpsons are also blessedly static. Thanks to the miracle of animation, they've not aged a day in ten years -- and as an extra special added bonus, there's none of those "real" actors to worry about breaking out of character. If they were a real life series, the actor playing Bart would be twenty and undoubtedly making the rounds at the nightclubs and spending his summer hiatus drying out at Betty Ford. The actress playing Lisa would either be starring in a teen horror film, or arrested for shoplifting from Marshall's. The actor playing Homer would have tried to negotiate for more cash at the end of the fourth season, only to be replaced by John Larroquette. The actress playing Marge would have gone in for liposuction. Four times. It's no good. 

(Sure, real people play the Simpson's
voices
, but let's face it: If Dan Castellaneta sat next to you on the bus, or started dating rich scary old women, or spent his days espousing a nutbag philosophy that involved high colonics, you couldn't possibly care less. You wouldn't look at Homer and think to yourself, "That guy's probably either dating Martha Stewart or having an enema
right now."
Well
,
I wouldn't, anyway.)

Beyond this is the fact that "The Simpsons" is brilliantly, bitterly funny, and have been for almost all the decade they've been on. What is the secret? Despite their unreality, despite their static nature, and despite the slashing commentary on life, at heart, the characters are good people. "The Simpsons" mock religion at every opportunity, yet they go to church and have values -- admittedly sometimes grudgingly (the episode where Bart loses his soul and regains it through personal trial is easily the best religious programming of the 90s). 

Homer and Marge have had their troubles, but they've never not been in love with each other. Bart and Lisa are unspeakably cruel to each other, but there's no doubt that when the chips are down, they'll stand by each other. "The Simpsons" can get away with being heretically funny because the Simpsons themselves have genuine heart. If you don't think it matters, watch "Family Guy" sometime. Same general outlines, but it's just freakin'
awful
. 

This is not to say "The Simpsons" hasn't had its rough spots. Then again, you try doing something for ten years without flubbing now and again. Pound for pound, episode for episode, "The Simpsons" clobber the competition and keep going. It's TV the way TV is meant to be. When it's not telling illiterates about the news, of course.

Best Invaders of The Millennium.

The Mongols. The difference between the Mongols and every one else was the personal touch they provided each and every town, hamlet and village they visited. Other notable invading armies didn't really give a damn about  your pathetic little hole-in-the-wall burg. It was just another bump on the road to, oh, let's say, Russia. You could just feed 'em lunch and send them on their way, and still get the harvest in on time. Everyone was happy, at least until the army froze itself to death outside of St. Petersburg later that winter. But hey, like that's
your
problem. 

Not so the Mongols. Sure, they were gonna kick the stuffing out of China, sooner or later. But they weren't in
that
much of a rush. China wasn't
going
anywhere -- heck, it's just over that wall they built. Handy marker, that. In the meantime, they were happy to devote their full and undivided attention to
you
. But at least they made it simple. You had two choices: Resist, and die a totally freakin' horrible death, what with the screaming and the stabbing and the horse trampling with the clop clop clop
clop
, or surrender, and have your village serve as the shock troops to invade the pathetic little hole-in-the-wall burg two miles down the road. Unless they decided to kill the hell out of you anyway, for tactical reasons. Nothing personal.

Historians (inevitably on the losing side, as the Mongol language wasn't codified into writing until well into the continental ass-kicking) typified the Mongols as a "horde." While admittedly this would appear the apt description, as tens of thousands of yowling Asiatic warriors bore down on you with spears, atop a sea of fiery steeds, the fact is that the Mongols were both amazingly well disciplined and utterly loyal to the aims of their maximum leader.  He's a fellow we call Ginghis Khan, but who, to his friends and family, was known as Temüjin (although anyone who further shortened this to "Timmy" was shown his own steaming liver, freshly extracted, ere he died of blood loss).

You can't tell the story of the Mongols without telling the story of Ginghis, a story that reads like the script pitch of a desperate hack screenwriter to a development minion for Roger Corman. Ginghis, pampered son of a clan leader, found his life shattered when his noble father Yesügei was poisoned by the evil Tartars (it was in the Yak's milk!). Abandoned by his clan, Ginghis' family was reduced to eating roots and fish. Ginghis swore, with God as his witness, that he would never be hungry again!

Later, Ginghis would go to claim the woman to whom he was betrothed by his father as a small boy, only to find that she had been kidnapped and ravished by the nefarious Merkit people!  Enraged, Ginghis allied himself with an old blood brother of his father, gathered an army together, and crushed those nasty Merkits like the
fiancée
-ravishing worms they were! While he was away, the Jürkins, supposedly his allies, plundered his lands! Those Jürks! He squashed them too, and killed every member of the clan taller than a wagon axel, leaving only children and Dr. Ruth Westheimer alive!

Thus Ginghis began his conquering ways. It wasn't all murder and pillage, mind you. Ginghis actually had a plan. It had been the old clan system that contributed to his father's death and which kept the Mongol people set against themselves; Ginghis changed all that by scattering the members of conquered clans amongst his troops, and by arranging those troops into
divisions
that were arranged numerically rather than by clan. Advancement in the army was thus tied to a soldier's loyalty to Ginghis, not to his former clan; soon enough, everyone was sucking up to Ginghis, and of course he liked that just fine.

By 1206, Ginghis and his
highly
-regimented not-at-all-a-horde horde was ready to kick some serious non-
Mongol
booty, and off they went. They were almost all on horseback, which gave them exceptional mobility and range, since all the horses needed to eat was the grass they found on the way to clobbering some poor foes. The Mongols also made use of whatever technology they found; they were extremely happy to use a nation's own knowledge against it. Ginghis himself, despite his current reputation for crazed, baby-eating dictatorship, actually took advice rather well. For example, he had planned to turn the whole of northern China into a horse pasture, until it was pointed out to him that it might be better to raise food there and then profit from the taxes and trade. Only
after
he made that decision did he eat any babies (no, not
really
).

It was in fact this combination of ruthlessness and adaptability that made the Mongols the invaders to beat -- literally-- this entire millennium. They were smarter, they w
ere meaner, and they could ride
circles around you on their little horses. Their empire ultimately reached from China to the Russian steppes.

(And they would have gotten Japan, too, were it not for a fortuitous typhoon that sunk their attacking ships -- the fabled
kamikaze
, or "divine wind," which would serve as a
motivation
for Japanese fighter pilots to ram explosives-laden fighter planes into American battleships in WWII. Alas, it was America who ultimately brought death from the skies, but that's another installment, somewhere down the road.)

The Mongol's problem was that they were better at conquering than they were at actual empire ruling; aft
er the death of Ginghis's grand
kid Kubla Khan in 1294, it all sort of fell apart. But who cares? When they knocked on the door, and said "Hi! We're the Mongol Horde!" you just
knew
they weren't selling magazine subscriptions to work their way through college. It was trouble with a capital "T," and that rhymed with "G," and that stood for "Ginghis." That's what it took to be the best invaders of the millennium, and the Mongols had it, with plenty to spare. 

Best Plague of The Millennium.

It's
The
Plague, that funny little infection we like to call the Black Death -- bubonic plague. Other plagues have killed more people more quickly (just this century, in 1918, a mutated swine flu erupted out of Kansas and killed 25 million in just over a year -- proof we should have quarantined Kansas a
long
time ago), but none have had, shall we say, the same style and impact. The Black Death didn't just kill people, it pretty much killed off Europe. The continent was out of it for a century, as it struggled to get back to the place it was, economically and intellectually, before the plague knocked off a third of the population. That's right, if it weren't for the plague, we might right now be at the technological level where we could all drive
our own rocket cars to the moon!
Instead, I'm forced to tool around in a 1989 white Escort. Stupid Black Death.

As a point of fact, it should be noted that bubonic plague was just one version of The Plague -- and, as it happens, the least fatal version at that. What we call The Plague is a bacterial infection that takes on several forms. In the bubonic form, symptoms begin with shivering, vomiting, headache, giddiness, intolerance to light; pain in the back and limbs; sleeplessness, apathy, or delirium. In short, nothing to distinguish the disease from the state of your typical college freshman after his first frat party. 

But then come the blackened, festering inflammation of the lymph nodes known as "buboes," which no amount of cheap fraternity beer will cause. Unless your frat typically allows a flea-ridden Norway rat to float in the keg. Which they almost never do anymore. From there, it's just a hop, skip and a jump to a massive rise in body temperature, constipation or, alternately and much more grave, diarrhea, and then, you know, death.

Remember, this is the most pleasant version. Worse is the pneumonic plague, in which the victim drowns in his own phlegm and infects everyone around him (bubonic plague is not directly contagious). Even worse than
that
is the septicemic plague, in which so much of the plague
bacillus
is dumped into the blood stream that the vessels literally explode. You'd also suffer brain damage, but really, how is that worse than every vein in your body popped open like an over-boiled hot dog? Besides, with septicemic plague, you were dead in a day, anyway. It's not like you were going to use your brain afterwards for a hefty game of Scrabble.

If you were to go back to the 14th Century, easily one of the crappiest centuries around even if you throw out the plague, you'd find that the average European citizen had not the slightest idea of how this plague was getting around. Most chalked it up to God (who as the Old Testament shows us, was always scourging someone or another, because he was God and, darn it, sometimes us humans just really
ticked him off
) and hid in a barn, never even guessing that it was  the fleas that were passing the disease around. If you had suggested that if they took a bath every once in a while it might help, you'd have received a blank stare and then probably would have been held down while the general population had you pressed to death with stones. Everyone knows that bathing removes that protective layer of grime! What, you want to get everyone
killed
or something?

Even the more learned minds of the era had not a clue. Advisors to the Pope informed His Holiness that the plague had been the result of a conjunction of
 
Saturn
, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Aquarius, back in 1345. This conjunction caused warm, moist conditions that allowed the earth to release poisonous gases; essentially, the plague was a case of planetary halitosis (the irony is that this
explanation
is not
entirely
out of left field -- scientists today suspect a strong El Nino effect in the 14th Century contributed to milder winters that allowed for easier transmission of the plague. Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, of course, had little to do with it -- or that's what today's "scientists" would have you
believe...
). The Pope's advisors suggested avoiding meat, sleeping in the daytime, olive oil, and of course, bathing. Nothing about avoiding rats or their pesky fleas.

In Venice, the plague begun the process of
quarantine
, named for the number of days (40, for those of you who aren't so handy with the Italian) an incoming ship had to stay isolated, presumably to let the plague burn itself out. Over in Germany, they decided to blame the plague on the Jews, and slaughtered 8,000 of them in the city of Strasbourg alone. The Germans also took to self-flagellation as a way to cleanse their bodies and their souls. The
 
Germans
were freaks, particularly since the rest of Europe was going the other direction morally. While the Germans were literally whipping themselves (and the Jews) into
a
frenzy
, everyone else was drinking and partying. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, every one of your blood vessels might explode. It's hard think of a better reason to get down.

At the end of the 14th Century pandemic, 25 million Europeans were dead. It would take 300 years to get the population back up to pre-plague levels (at which time, the plague came around for another bite). The plague took another 10 million or so in China in the late 19th century; all told, plague ate up over 100 million lives this millennium. It's still around, too -- there are a couple thousand cases of the plague worldwide every year, including about a dozen and a half right here in the States (kids, stay away from strange squirrels). 

Thanks to such advances as streptomycin, bathing, and the general avoidance of nasty, flea-bearing rodents on a daily basis, the Black Death is not likely to make much of a comeback. But you never know. Right now, Jupiter and Saturn are cozying up to each other just southwest of Taurus; follow the line down, and you'll find Mars, loitering south of Aquila. They're
all up there
. And that global warming is acting up again. Throw in a vegetarian S&M fetishist with a cat o' nine tails, and the Black Death will be right back in business! Hide in the barn. It's the safe thing to do.