The Obscure Presidents of the U.S.: Part II

December 13, 2022December 13, 2022 RilalyLeave a comment

Joggers and those who take regular walks know that they’ll step in something sooner or later. I see historical nuggets in much the same way. When we read and research matters of history, some of it will find its way into the grooves in our shoes and stick and some of it is so old or cold that it just falls off. That being said, I don’t think a display of nugget knowledge is a display of intelligence, but a byproduct of interest. Those who are fans of the show Friends, or Jennifer Aniston, could probably tell me a number of interesting little nuggets that might shock me. I happen to be interested in the history of the United States through its presidents, and the following is a list of the nuggets that have stuck through the years. I’ve known these little nuggets for so long that I assume everyone knows them, but when I provide the big reveal, the reactions. They either think I’m a huge nerd, a vat of useless knowledge, or an interesting conversationalist. I add the latter as a narcissistic possibility, but I’ve rarely seen evidence of it on my audience’s faces. They usually pause politely and carry on the conversation I interrupted as if I didn’t say anything.

William Henry Harrison

“Tippy canoe and Tyler too,” my great-aunt sang for no reason.

“What is that?” I asked her.

“It’s a saying,” she said. “I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t think anyone does. It’s just something to hum.”

My great-aunt was old when she sang that, and I was accustomed to old people knowing everything about everything, but she didn’t know the origin of a song she sang all the time.

Decades later, I learned that Tippy Canoe and Tyler too was a song used to influence the 1840 presidential campaign of William Henry Harrison and vice-presidential candidate John Tyler. They nicknamed William Henry Harrison Tippecanoe, because he led the forces that defeated Tecumseh on the Tippecanoe River, and John Tyler was the other guy on the ticket, the candidate for vice-president, or the “too”.

James K. Polk

Though one of the country’s shortest presidents at 5’8″, Polk accomplished the “no small feat” of annexing Texas, New Mexico, Oregon, and California. Polk was instrumental in acquiring more than 800,000 square miles and expanding the country by roughly one-third.

Presidential candidate Polk won his election by pledging to reduce tariffs, reform the national banking system, expand the country, and that he would accomplish all that in four years. He pledged he would not run for reelection.

Polk was one of the few presidents to accomplish all of his core pledges while in office, and he accomplished the latter after his term ended, and he did not submit for reelection. While in office, Polk was well-known as a workaholic, working to accomplish all of his campaign pledges. Some suggest that he worked so hard, and for so many hours, that his four years in the White House wore him out. He died months after leaving office of cholera on 15 June 1849 at the young age of fifty-three.

James Knox Polk is rarely listed among the great presidents by non-historians. Historians often list him in the upper half, some list him in the upper third. He gets high marks for crisis leadership and administrative skills, but he fails in other areas, according to historians. Yet, he often gets lumped in with the relatively forgettable presidents that took office after Andrew Jackson and before Abraham Lincoln.

Theodore Roosevelt

Needless to say, campaign speeches are vital to every presidential campaign. With modern technology, a presidential candidate can deliver speeches in his basement, but candidates did not have such luxuries in 1912. The only way, save for print, for a candidate to deliver his message, display his charisma, and woo prospective voters, was to take a train, or whatever lesser mode of transportation they could find, to stop in various locales and speak directly to voters. The various campaign speeches a candidate delivered across large and small pockets of the nation were sink or swim for him.

That said, we can bet that candidates toughed it out through a case of a sore throat, a flu, and other, more severe illnesses or minor broken bones to speak to the public. As tough as those candidates needed to be, I don’t think voters was prepared for:

“I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot,” Theodore Roosevelt informed an audience in Milwaukee, after asking for silence. To confirm what he was saying, Roosevelt unbuttoned his vest to reveal his bloodstained shirt. “But it takes more than that to kill a bull moose.”

To reassure them that he was able to deliver the speech, he said, “Fortunately I had my [50 page] manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”

As History.com furthers, the projectile had been slowed by his dense overcoat, steel-reinforced eyeglass case and the hefty speech squeezed into his inner right jacket pocket.

The unsuccessful assassin, “John Schrank, [was] an unemployed New York City saloonkeeper who had stalked [Roosevelt] around the country for weeks. A handwritten screed found in his pockets reflected the troubled thoughts of a paranoid schizophrenic. “To the people of the United States,” Schrank [wrote]. “In a dream, I saw President McKinley sit up in his coffin pointing at a man in a monk’s attire in whom I recognized Theodore Roosevelt. The dead president said—This is my murderer—avenge my death.” Schrank also claimed he acted to defend the two-term tradition of American presidents. “I did not intend to kill the citizen Roosevelt,” the shooter said at his trial. “I intended to kill Theodore

Roosevelt, the third termer.” Schrank pled guilty, was determined to be insane and was confined for life in a Wisconsin state asylum.

Roosevelt tried to use the story of the assassination attempt to secure a third term as president. He did so as a third-party Progressive candidate that they nicknamed “The Bull Moose Party”. He was successful in splitting the Republican vote, squashing his frenemy, William Howard Taft’s reelection bid, but all his efforts did, in reality, was allow one of the worst presidents to ever sit in Washington D.C. to take office Woodrow Wilson.

James Garfield

As with presidents William Henry Harrison, Warren Harding, and to a lesser degree John Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, Garfield’s tenure as president is better known for his death than his tenure in office, as he was assassinated while in office. Some historians say that this is one of the biggest tragedies in U.S. History, because Garfield’s potential to be one of the presidents on the Mt. Rushmore creation (that occurred much later), is high. Due to the assassin’s bullet, and his doctors historical ineptitude, James Garfield served a mere six months in office, and historians say he was only in peak form for three-to-four of those six months.

A self-avowed communist named Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield, claiming “I am a Stalwart and [Vice-president Chester A.] Arthur is president now!”

History.com notes, “Doctors were unable to locate the bullet in [Garfield’s] back. Even inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) tried–unsuccessfully–to find the bullet with a metal detector he designed.” Medical professionals would later say that if Garfield’s doctors simply left the bullet in Garfield’s body, as they later would with Theodore Roosevelt, Garfield’s chances of survival would’ve greatly increased. On September 19, 1881 — 79 days after the shooting — President Garfield died of a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm due to sepsis and pneumonia. It is believed that Garfield probably would have survived his wounds had he been treated properly.

This was well-known at the time, as evidenced by Charles Guiteau’s attempts to avoid a death sentence, saying, “I did not kill Garfield after all, his doctors did. I just shot him.” As the Crime Museum notes, Guiteau’s bid was unsuccessful, and he was executed on June 30, 1882, less than a year after the shooting. This defeat did not depress Guiteau however, as he danced to the gallows and recited a poem, before waving to the crowd, and shaking hands with the executioner.

***

Charles Dickens provided the best line to describe the present state of the human being, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” How can both exist at the same time? It can’t, but it does, in the present. In the present, you might sing “I got to admit it’s getting better, a little better all the time,” but you can always find someone who sings the, “It can’t get no worse,” part of the refrain.

If you’ve ever discussed the issues of the day with your grandpa, you’ve heard him say something along the lines of, “That’s exactly what we were obsessed with when I was younger. Let me guess, fall of the Republic? Most divisive issue of our day? Yep, yep, that’s exactly what we said.” If you’ve ever discussed the wonderful advancements your generation has made with him, he’s probably said something along the lines of, “Well, when you don’t know the difference, you find a way.” You walk away thinking the good times and the bad times are probably a bunch of hype that you bought into.

Pick the issue, and you’ll hear people take conflicting opinions sometimes in the same sentence, “The technological advancements we’ve made in the present are greater, by leaps and bounds, but I worry about AI.” The same conflicting opinions revolving around the nature of presidential elections we’ve had, occurred some 200 years prior in 1825. Our present suggests it couldn’t get much worse, and that the Founders messed up presidential elections by creating this device called the Electoral College. The 1825 presidential election between Jackson and Adams occurred while most of them were still alive, thirty-seven years after The Constitution was verified, and other than a brief entry by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 68, that discusses the virtues of popular will, I find no letters that state anything specific about the errors of the Electoral College. They probably didn’t love the idea, but they compromised to make sure smaller states felt greater representation in the decision of their leader. Remember, the Founders were overly sensitive to cries of lack of representation after they were denied it by the monarchy. This lack of representation and the mess that followed in the Jackson v Adams presidential election of 1825 happened in their lifetime, and they probably saw the elements of their Constitutional solutions as the lesser of two evils.

Andrew Jackson V. John Quincy Adams

In 1824, the nation was just coming out of the “Era of Good Feelings” after James Monroe (1817-1825) led an era of peace in the aftermath of War of 1812, and he led the country to a period of true strength, unity of purpose, and one-party government, after the death of Alexander Hamilton and his ideas of Federalism.

Those good feelings of unity ended quickly in the ensuing 1825 election race between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. The country appeared as divided as its ever been with Andrew Jackson winning a plurality, but not a majority, of either the popular and the electoral votes. This election pushed the country into its first dispute between the Electoral College and the popular vote, as neither Jackson nor Quincy Adams accumulated the plurality of votes needed to secure the 1825 presidential election. As Tara Ross reports, this election was between Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, Secretary of the Treasury William Harris Crawford, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, and Tennessee Senator Andrew Jackson. This conflict resulted in the first time in the young Republic’s history that no presidential candidate secured enough Electoral votes, so, as the 12th Amendment dictated, it was on the House of Representatives to elect the president.

The House of Representatives were given three options: Adams, Jackson, or Crawford. The Constitutional provision did not allow Henry Clay to be considered because he placed fourth.

The latter note proved crucial to the final outcome allegedly, because knowing that he had no avenue for victory, Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House, allegedly entered into a “corrupt bargain” with John Quincy Adams. The “corrupt bargain”, as Jackson supporters theorized, was that Clay met privately a month before the House vote. In that private meeting, Jackson and his supporters allege that Clay informed Adams that he would throw his powerful support, as Speaker of the House to Adams if Adams would use the victory to later nominate Clay to a cabinet position. Adams, for his part, denied the allegation, but Clay’s support gave Adams the 13 House votes Adams needed to secure the presidential election.

Jackson conceded to the peaceful transition initially, until Clay was nominated to arguably the most prestigious position in the cabinet, Secretary of State, three days later. Jackson, and his supporters viewed that appointment as proof that a “corrupt bargain” had been made.

Adding fuel to the fire, reports later emerged that Clay initially tried to strike a deal with Jackson, but Jackson refused to “go to that chair” except “with clean hands.” Had Adams taken a deal when Jackson would not? As with modern politics, Adams never admitted to anything, and no reporters in the era ever uncovered a truth or any evidence that would incriminate or absolve Adams. Hence, even with 200 years of hindsight, “We shall probably never know whether there was a ‘corrupt bargain,’” historian Paul Johnson concludes. “Most likely not. But most Americans thought so. And the phrase made a superb slogan [in the 1828 Jackson v Adams rematch].”

Some allege that this idea of a “corrupt bargain” not only cost Quincy Adams his reelection in the 1828 rematch with Andrew Jackson, but it severely damaged the future political career of Henry Clay too. In this era, the Secretary of State was viewed as a natural stepping stone for the presidency, as four of the seven previous Secretaries eventually sat in the highest office in the land. Clay’s resume not only listed House Speaker and Secretary of State, he was a Congressman, and a Senator before rising to prominence. He helped found both the National Republican Party and the Whig Party. He was well-known as the “Great Compromiser” and was part of the “Great Triumvirate” of Congressmen. He also received Electoral votes for president before the 1825 election. On his resume alone, Clay was a could’ve been should’ve been who never was president. He would rue the day he accepted the Adam’s appointment, because whether it was true or not, the charge of the “corrupt bargain” stuck to him throughout his political career.

If you’re as interested in U.S. History through relatively obscure presidents as I am, read Obscure Presidents part I

Grigori Rasputin V: Sorcerer or Charlatan?

November 5, 2022October 1, 2025 RilalyLeave a comment

“Was Gregori Rasputin really an occult mystic who used treacherous sorcery to ingratiate himself to Tsar Nicholas II by performing miracles on and curing the pain of the Tsar’s son? Or was he, no less impressively, a most gifted Counter-Agent who disarmed his country’s most powerful rulers through sheer charisma and manipulative charm?” –asks Adam Lehrer in the Safety Propoganda.

“No!” say some historians. “Rasputin wasn’t any of those things. He was nothing more than a right time, right place charlatan.” Anytime one accuses another of absolute fraud, deceit or corruption, their first responsibility is to prove that the provocateur knowingly deceived. We can all read the conditions of the Russian empire at the time and see that they were susceptible and vulnerable to a charlatan. We can read through the health conditions of Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich, and know that the Romanovs were desperate for a miracle worker to spare him the pain and possible death of hemophilia. We can take one look at Rasputin, the ill-educated peasant from nowhere, Russia and know that if he didn’t do something spectacular, he was doomed to a life of anonymity, but there is ample evidence to suggest that Rasputin believed he had an ability, if not the otherworldly powers, to cure the Tsar’s son. To believe otherwise is to suggest that Rasputin knowingly deceived his family since birth, and the friends and neighbors who surrounded him in the early part of his life. There’s an old line on subterfuge that it’s not really a lie if you believe it. When we say this, we usually do so tongue in cheek, but Rasputin’s bio suggests that he truly believed he had God-like powers? “Christ in miniature,” Rasputin often said when asked to characterize himself. Was he a deceptive person? Did he attempt to deceive the Empress Alexandra, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich’s mother, to weave a way into the empire, or did he attempt to prove to himself as “The Chosen One!”

At the moment of his birth, Rasputin’s mother believed he was the chosen one, and we can guess that she told him as much on a daily basis throughout his youth. We might cut her some slack for this fantastical notion, seeing as how Rasputin may have been her only child of seven, or eight, to survive childhood. (Evidence suggests she had a daughter who may have also survived for a time.) Anytime a mother has a child, they consider that child special, but in Rasputin’s Serbian village of Polrovskove death among children was so common that the miracle we know as childbirth was increased tenfold in that world of peasants. The idea that Rasputin was special may have grown in her mind as he did, until she was convinced that Grigori was a gift from God, and she eventually made a crossover to the idea that her son was the chosen one.

What would we think if our mother told us we were God’s messenger throughout our youth? What if she bolstered her claim by telling us that at the moment we were born a rare celestial event occurred to mark the occasion of our birth. “A shooting star of such magnitude that had always been taken by the God-fearing muzhiks as an omen of some momentous event,” she said.

What if everyone we knew and loved growing up believed, as our mother did, that we were gifted with the ability to read minds, and/or “see things that others could not”. Rasputin grew up in a climate where everyone he encountered on a daily basis, and presumably throughout his life, believed he had divine powers. If we marinated in the thoughts of our own divine nature throughout our youth, how many of us would end our believing it? Our parents are powerful influences on our lives, and how we think, but as we age, we begin to see the errors of their ways. If Rasputin went through this natural course of maturation, his friends and neighbors in Polrovskove only bolstered his mother’s claims. Rasputin was also involved in a death-defying accident that took the life of his cousin. He spent years wondering aloud why he was spared and his cousin wasn’t. His conclusion, one which we can assume that his friends and family encouraged, was that divine intervention spare him, so he could go out and spread God’s message.

When historians say Rasputin fell into a right place, right time era, they’re talking about an era that followed executions for anyone who attempted the heretical notions Rasputin espoused to a time when minds were just beginning to open up to the idea that man could manipulate his surroundings for the purpose of massive technological advancement. Those from the era also learned, mostly secondhand, of some of the advancements made in medicine that suggested man could wield God-like powers over life and death in a manner deemed heretical in previous eras. The early 20^th century Russian citizen was likely more amenable than ever before to the belief that man could now manipulate the bridge between life and death, and generally make life better for his fellow man without necessarily being a heretic. Based on that, we could say that Rasputin was a right time, right place charlatan, or we could say he, more than any other, took advantage of this window in time. Those who call him a charlatan, however, must still address the notion that Rasputin knew he wasn’t the chosen one, and that he was lying to the vulnerable, desperate Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (Alix of Hesse) to convince her that he was.

How did Rasputin discover that Tsar Nicholas II’s son, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich was sick? The Russian empire, in the era of the Romanovs rule, was a vault. No state secrets, or leaks, found their way out, and the illness of the Tsarevich was one of the most guarded secrets. The Romanovs had nothing to gain by announcing their only male heir’s illness and everything to lose. Through the connections he made, as a man “known to possess the ability to heal through prayer” Rasputin was called upon to heal the Tsarevich by Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s best friend. Did Rasputin struggle with this newfound information, did he consider it his patriotic duty to try to save the young heir to the throne, or did he see this as an opportunity to finally prove himself to himself? If he failed to convince his family, friends and neighbors of his special powers, there was nothing lost. If he was a fraud, and he knew it, he would surely have a list of excuses he could use to explain it. If he failed the Empress, the embarrassment of trusting the health of her only begotten son to a lowly peasant could lead the Empire to try to silence any fallout by imprisoning Rasputin or executing him, and needless to say, this empire had no moral qualms executing peasants. Failing the empire, at the very least, would ultimately reveal to Rasputin and everyone else in the empire that he was a fraud and a charlatan. This presumed struggle goes to the heart of this article, because Rasputin eagerly accepted the invitation to try to heal Alexei.

The arguments about what Rasputin did to eventually calm the conditions of Alexei Nikolaevich are wide and varied, but most historians agree that Alexei was never cured of his case of hemophilia, because there is no cure. To this date, modern medicine has yet to find a cure. Alexei had hemophilia the day he was born, and he had it when he was murdered, a month before his fourteenth birthday. The very idea that he almost made it to fourteen, and he could’ve lived well beyond that, had he not been murdered, was viewed as one of a series of Rasputin’s miracles. The fact that Alexei was relieved of his pain, and many of the symptoms of hemophilia, was also viewed as one of Rasputins’ miracles.

Some argue that Rasputin may have been so familiar with hemophilia that he knew certain techniques he could use to help calm the Tsarevich down, and thus give the illusion that he was cured. We still consider it something of a miracle that our body often manages to heal itself. Some call it the power of the mind, others call it the power of prayer, and still others call it the mysterious power of the miraculous machines in the human body to heal itself. No matter what we believe, it appears that in some cases, if our mind believes we are being cured, it can go a long way to encouraging us that we are.

No matter the arguments, details, and conclusions, Rasputin did it. Rasputin did what the most brilliant minds of medicine in Russia, in the early 20th century, could not, and when he advised Alexandra on how to maintain Alexei’s health, and that advice proved successful, Alexandra fell under Rasputin’s spell. She thought he, more than any of the other men of medicine in the empire, could cure her son of a malady to which her side of the family was genetically susceptible. The idea that she believed Rasputin could cure her son, led her to convince her son of it, and that presumably led Alexei calming to the point that his hemophilia was not as debilitating as it would’ve been otherwise. So, Rasputin did help provide what Alexandra considered a miracle, but our modern understanding of the relationship between body and mind suggests that it was not as mystical or unprecedented as Alexandra and those who love the narrative want us to believe.

The interesting nugget here, and the import of this story, is that Alexandra may have followed Rasputin’s advice on how to cure her son so often that she may have also followed his other advice on greater matters of the Russian Empire, and she may have whispered that same advice into Tsar Nicholas II’s ear as if it were her own.

“What was he?” “Who was he?” “What exactly did he do to spare the life of the Tsarevich?” “Was he the most gifted sorcerer the world has ever known?” How great was his influence over Alexandra? Reports suggest he had no influence over Nicholas II, but Alexandra did. Did Rasputin whisper things in Alexandra’s ear that she whispered into Nicholas II’s, as if they were her own ideas. British intelligence believed this, and some suggest that the Britain commissioned Rasputin’s murder, because they feared his influence in the Romanov Empire might prevent Russian entry into World War I?

We’ll probably never know the truth of any of this, because the Romanovs had a situation in their empire where they were able to control their narrative. They had very little in the way of leaks, and no one from the empire wrote a tell-all after the empire collapsed to detail what really happened within the confines of its walls. It was a situation modern politicians would salivate over, but historians, not so much. As a result of the tight Romanov ship, most of the literature written about this Russian era and the relationship between Rasputin and the Romanovs involves a great deal speculation. That’s the fun part for the rest of us, because we can use the base details of what happened and submit our own subjective beliefs into the story for fantastic and fantastical conclusions. One of us can speculate that Grigori Rasputin was a sorcerer with otherworldly powers, another can say he was an absolute charlatan, and the rest of us can say that the man landed in the perfect time and place for nature of his actions are almost impossible to prove or disprove. The one thing we can state without fear of too much refutation, is if we took all of these ingredients and threw them into a big stew of rhetorical discussion, is that Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was one of the most enigmatic figures in world history.

Was Y2K an Unfixable Problem, Hysteria, or an Easy Fix?

February 27, 2022November 12, 2024 Rilaly1 Comment

“You never get credit for the disasters you avert,” Technology forecaster Paul Saffo told the New York Times in 2013.

The greatest fear of the Y2K (Year 2000) bug was the fear of the unknown. In 1999, we thought “the unfixable” Y2K bug was a first step in our dystopian future. We can all have a laugh about it now, but very few of us were laughing in December 1999. We didn’t know, and that’s what scared us.

The crux of the fear, for those who didn’t live through it, was that computer programmers didn’t bother listing the full four numbers of a year. 1995, for example, was listed by most computers as 95. 1996 was listed by computers as 96, and so on and so forth. The fear was that when the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000, computers might not be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000, because computers, in computer-reliant industries, might not be able to distinguish between the years, since they had, to this point, only listed years as two digits.

If it was fixed, did it require a collective effort from private companies, government expenditures that some estimate in the range of $400 to $600 billion, and independent engineers, or was this largely exaggerated problem a relatively easy fix? Was the problem greatly exaggerated and overhyped?

Some of us had our own, internalized doomsday clock in December of 1999, because we feared the unknown. Did we fear it from the comfort of our own home, because we were told to fear it? We were told it would affect every human’s daily life in one way or another. Large or small, we thought every day life wouldn’t be as great as it once was in December 1999. Some of us thought the electricity grid might go down, we heard planes might fall from the sky, our cars and unprepared computers would become inoperable, and our bank’s automatic teller machines (ATMs) would not dispense money. We all laugh about it now, but some maintain that tragedy was averted, and when tragedy is averted without a noteworthy event, we quickly forget how tragic it could’ve and probably should’ve been.

If any problem solver fixes a problem before it ever becomes a problem, they receive no credit for it. If they’re concerned with receiving some form of credit, the most advantageous route is to forestall a solution to allow noteworthy events to occur, and then fix it and save the world. As we all know, this did not happen in the Y2K scare.

I knew people who stocked their pantries with bottled water and grain pellets, I knew others who withdrew extra cash from their bank’s ATM, and I knew a number of people who bought Y2K software updates for their computers. No one knew everything, but we all knew some things, and everyone knew that we had to be prepared for anything. Our reaction to the scare defined us in 1999, but it further defined us on January 1, 2000, as it was noteworthy what we did to avoid becoming a victim of something that never happened. Whatever you did became the subject of ridicule.

The theoretical question we asked one another in 1999 was not when it would affect us, because we all knew that. The question was how much would it affect our daily lives? Few reasonable and rational adults asked the question if it would affect us. Due to the fact that computers were still relatively new to us, we considered it a fait accompli that it would affect us. We grew up with science fiction movies that revolved around a plot that that which can help man today could one day, and in some way, ruin man in a dystopian manner that no one saw coming.

In those movies, the proverbial, street corner bell ringer was always the best-looking actor in the movie (which lends their character more gravitas) warning the less attractive (and thus less aware) side characters of impending doom. None of the average-to-ugly actors in the movies recognized the true, impending threat for what it was until it was too late. We didn’t want anyone to consider us average-to-ugly, so we mentally prepared for the day when an attractive person lofted a preposterous notion to us.

In 1985, someone posed a theoretical question about how Y2K might affect computers when the century switched, but the problem for us was we didn’t know how attractive that theoretician was, so we didn’t take it seriously. Their theoretical notion hinged on the idea that for decades computer programmers wrote the year in shorthand. They didn’t write out the year 1985, they wrote 85. Some claimed the shorthand was done to save memory space. Thus, when the year flipped from 99 to 00, we feared that all of our computers would believe the year was 1900, 1800, or even year 00? Most of us didn’t believe that computers would transport us bedside, next to the baby Jesus, but we feared that our computers would fail to recognize the logic of the switch, and that the bug it created might introduce such internal confusion in the computer’s mainframe that they would simply shutdown. We feared any human input introduced to combat this inconsistency would prove insufficient, and that human interference could lead to some unforeseen complications, and we feared our computers would be unable to sort it out? The theoretical question reached hysterical proportions in the fourteen years between 1985 and 1999, as America grew more and more reliant on computers for everything from its most important activities (travel) to its most basic (ATMs and the electrical grid).

My guess is that the recipient of that first theoretical question brought it to a closed-door boardroom, and some of those board members took that question out to other parties, until someone in the media heard the question and thought it might prove to be an excellent ongoing question to ask an audience in ongoing features every week. They could start a Tuesday Tech story of the week in which they asked the informed and uninformed what they thought of a problem that wasn’t a problem yet, but could be a problem when the calendar flipped.

Media figures play two roles in our lives, they tell us what we need to hear, read, and see, and they tell us what we want to hear. We don’t want to hear eggheads talk 1s and 0s, unless they can make it apply to our lives with a quality presentation. That, in my opinion, provides stark clarity on our mindset, because we prefer the presentations inherent in science fiction to the hard science of the actual factual.

“Nobody cares about computer programming,” we can guess a network executive informed that ambitious reporter’s Tuesday Tech proposal. “Why should I care about this?”

“The angle we’re proposing is more granular,” this reporter said. “The first network focused on the larger question of computer technology in their Tech Tuesday reports. In our Tech Thursday features, we’ll explore how much of our lives are now dependent on computers. Our energy grid, the tanks at the gas station, and the ATMs. We plan on bringing this theoretical problem home to where people live. We will say this Y2K bug is not just going to affect Silicon Valley and Wall Street, it could have far-reaching implications for citizens watching from Pocatello, Idaho to Destin, Florida, and here’s how …”

As usual with hysterical premises of this sort, the one component most news agencies, and the word-of-mouth hysteria that follows, fail to address is human ingenuity. Rarely, do we hear a reporter say, “We’ve all heard the problem called the Y2K bug, but we rarely hear about proposed solutions. Today, our guest Derrick Aspergren will talk about proposed solutions to comfort the audience at home.” The problem for news agencies is that the Derrick Apergrens of the world are often not very attractive or charismatic, and they speak in ones and zeroes. Even though most computer problems and solutions involve a lexicon of ones and zeroes, no one wants to hear it, and few will remember it. As a result, news agencies rarely give Derrick Aspergrens airtime, and they focus on the dramatic and provocative, proverbial bell ringers standing on a street corner.

In 1999, we rarely heard the question, can hardware engineers and electrical engineers fix a problem they created? The learned fear we’re conditioned to believe, based on the plot lines of so many science fiction movies, is that if we dig deep enough, we’ll discover that this isn’t a human problem at all, but a problem generated by a scary conglomeration of ones and zeroes we call AI (artificial intelligence). We knew little-to-nothing about the potential of AI in 1999, but we feared it, and its potential, because we feared the unknown. “AI is here, and there’s nothing we can do about it!” was (and is) the battle cry of conspiracy theorists on radio, in our neighborhoods, and in our work place. The truth is often much less dramatic.

The truth, we now know, was somewhere south of the hype. The truth lived somewhere in the question of whether the Y2K fear was real. If it required a big, worldwide fix, as some suggest happened, how come there were no Nobel Prizes handed out? “That’s because it required a collective effort from so many minds, around the world that there was no individual to accord credit.” Or, was the fix so easy that any hardware engineer, worth half of his college tuition payments, was able to do it?

Was the Y2K scare a tragedy averted by hardware engineers enduring mind-numbing hours of editing, or was the entire affair hyped up through media mis, dis, or mal-information? I don’t remember the reports from every media outlet, but how much focus did the round robin hysteria generated by the media place on possible and probable fixes? Some suggest if there was a need for a fix, it could be easily accomplished by hardware programmers, and others suggest it was never this world-shaking threat we thought it was.

The problem for us was that the problem was so much more interesting than the fix. Take a step back to December 1999, and imagine this news report, “Here we have a man named Geoffrey James, who says, “If Y2K experts (some of whom have a software background but none a hardware background) ask some electrical engineers about date checking in embedded systems, they will learn that only a complete idiot would do anything resembling the conversion and comparison of calendar dates inside a chip. We use elapsed time, which is a simple, single counter; it takes ten seconds to add to a circuit.

“I may oversimplifying but ultimately the reasoning doesn’t matter,” Geoffrey continues, “the unfixable system problem either isn’t real or isn’t significant enough to spawn a disaster. Because there aren’t any.” That rational and reasonable explanation from someone purportedly in the know would’ve gone in one ear and out the other, because for some of us there are no absolutes, and there are no quick fixes. When someone dangles the prospect of a simple solution to the simplest problems, we swat them away:

“You mean to tell me that all they have to do is add to a circuit. I ain’t buying it brother, and if I were you, I wouldn’t buy it either. I wouldn’t go out into the world naked with the beliefs of some egghead. We all have to prepare for this, in one way or another, we must prepare.”

Some of us thought the Y2K bug would force us to back to the primal life of the cavemen, or at least to the latest and greatest technology of the McKinley administration of 1900. Friends of mine thought those of us who know how to hunt and forage for food would once again take their rightful place atop the kingdom of those who grew so accustomed to the comfy life of a visit to the neighborhood grocery store. More than one person I knew thought our appliances might explode, and that Americans might finally know what it’s like to live in the poorest third-world nations in the world. They thought we would return to our primal life, and our TV shows and movies reflected that fear, anxiety, and (some say) desire to return to our primal roots.

News reports stated that hardware engineers and other electrical engineers were working on the problem, but they’re not sure they’ll have a workable in time. We knew the line: “For every problem there is a solution,” but when you’re in the midst of hysteria, lines like, “This was a man-made problem that requires a man-made solution” provide no comfort. We all know that tangled within mankind is a ratio of geniuses who not only know how to propose solutions, but they know how to apply and implement them. We know this, but humans suffer from an ever-present inferiority complex that suggests no mere mortal can resolve a crisis like this one. We know this because no self-respecting science fiction writer would ever be so lazy as to suggest that a mortal, whether they be a military leader with a blood lust who wants to detonate a warhead on the monster, a policeman who believes that a bullet can kill it, or an egotistical scientist can resolve this particular dystopian dilemma.

Even though this was a man-made problem, few outside the halls of hardware engineer offices believed man could solve the problem. We heard about geniuses who brought us incredible leaps of technology so often that it was old hat to us. We knew they could build it, but there was this fear, borne in the human inferiority complex, and propagated by the sci-fi movies we loved, that technology had spiraled so out of our control that it was now beyond human comprehension to fix it.

Was Y2K overhyped as an unfixable problem, was the solution so elementary that it simply took a mind-numbing number of man hours to implement it, or was it a simple hardware fix? I don’t know if the numerous media outlets who ran their Tech Tuesday features ever focused on the idea that the Y2K problem, of two digits vs. four, was generated by a theoretical question someone asked fifteen years before, but I told my terrified friends as much. “If this whole thing is based on a theoretical question, what is the theoretical answer?” With fellow uneducated types, I furthered, “And if we search through the theoretical answers, we might find an actual one.” The theme of my response involved the hope that we weren’t so terrified by the questions that we failed to seek answers, and I was shouted down. I was shouted down by uneducated types, like me, and I was, am, and forever will be woefully uninformed on this subject. They told me that I didn’t understand the complexities involved, that this situation was far more serious, and that I was underestimating it. I’d love to say that I adjusted the focus of my glasses, as I attempted to adjust theirs, but when the screaming majority in your inner circle is convinced to consensus those who are relatively uninformed either silence or buckle. I cowered, and I regrettably conformed to some of their fears, but I didn’t know any better. None of us did. The one takeaway I have from the hysteria we now call Y2K is that we should use Y2K hysterica’s fears as a precedent. If we have theoretical questions based on theoretical questions we should ask them of the more informed, more educated “experts”, because theoretical questions could eventually lead to some actual answers. The alternative might result in us shutting down the world over some hysterical fear of the unknown.