it seems to be with the explicit idea
of pissing off as many Italians as possible.
So O’Banion dies, obviously
(in his flower shop, it’s way cinematic)
and all his guys are like “Awesome
we were looking for an excuse to kill everyone.”
So now dudes are just shooting each other all day
every day
in the street, downtown, at like noon.
Dudes die in restaurants and bowling alleys
in the business district or wherever.
So many dudes die in barbershops
that barbers start facing the seats toward the door
just so gangsters won’t be so freaked out.
It’s a mess
and Capone is having none of it
so while he’s vacationing in Miami
(and by “vacationing”
I mean “being questioned by the cops
as to how he got the money
to buy a house in frikkin’ Miami”)
he has a couple of his guys dress like cops
and go to an auto garage full of O’Banion dudes
and be like “Hey, guys, you’re under arrest.
HAHA PRANKED
WE’RE ACTUALLY SHOOTING YOU.”
And to this day
couples across the world celebrate this massacre
every February 14
by giving each other flowers and edible underwear.
So at this point
pretty much every single person
who could possibly oppose Capone
is dead.
He is basically the mayor of Chicago.
Dudes come to him like
“Please, Mr. Capone
could you ensure a fair and safe election?”
and Capone is like “Sure
it was me that was gonna make it unsafe anyway”
and then the election is safe
just because he said so.
And once Al owns basically all of Chicago
he can afford to be a nice dude.
He’s constantly giving money to orphans and shit
buying his mom nice houses
giving whiskey to one-legged puppies
whatever
everybody loves this dude
so finally the government is like “Shit
we gotta make this guy look bad.
But how?”
The first thing they try
is they name him Public Enemy Number One.
This does not work at all
because that is an objectively rad title.
So then they hire this dude Eliot Ness
and give him a big sack of money
and they say, “Okay, dude
make Capone’s life suck.”
So Eliot Ness just drives around Chicago
blowing up distilleries and filming it.
But it turns out that Ness cares more about publicity
than actually doing a good job
so nothing he does actually results in a conviction
(he does get a lot of movies made about him though
and his dudes get nicknamed “The Untouchables”
which might be a better name than “Public Enemy”
but there’s no rapper named “The Untouchables”
so it evens out).
So finally the government gives up being cool
and just does what it does best:
It buries Capone in paperwork.
Seriously, they spend five years
reading ALL his financial records
just to figure out how many taxes he’s not paying
based on the solid idea
that just because your income is illegal
doesn’t mean you can avoid paying taxes on it.
So they bust Capone for tax evasion.
The Founding Fathers would’ve gone to war over this
but Al Capone just goes to JAIL.
They send him to Alcatraz
which they pretty much opened just for him
and he learns to play the banjo there
but other than that it sucks.
It especially sucks because Al is sick.
Apparently a lifetime of banging whores
can saddle you with certain inconvenient diseases
like for example syphilis
which Al has repeatedly refused tests for.
BECAUSE HE’S TERRIFIED OF NEEDLES.
and he will not have blood taken to save his life
LITERALLY.
Finally they figure it out though
around the time his brain totally stops working
and then they feel sorta bad for him
so they let him out of prison
and people pretend to respect him until he dies
of pneumonia
before the age of fifty.
So the moral of the story
is that when you’re running a criminal empire
you should always use a condom.
THOMAS EDISON IS A KILLING MACHINIST
Did you think I forgot about electricity?
Tsk tsk, friends
what good is a pantheon without a god of lightning?
Benjamin Franklin was all well and good
FOR A WHILE
but we needed someone to get modern with this shit
so listen up:
When last we left our heroes
they were busy proving that lightning was electric
and then going to France and having a lot of sex
and apparently all this was crucial
(especially that last part)
because it opened the door for a dude named Faraday
to come along and start making machines
that rubbed shit on other shit
with UNHEARD-OF EFFICIENCY.
He also invented a kind of cage
that makes your cell phone not work
so basically he sounds like a dick
BUT HE IS AN IMPORTANT DICK.
History is full of important dicks
like Alexander the Great
and Napoleon
and Benjamin Franklin’s dick
but there are at least as many important ASSHOLES.
Enter Thomas Alva Edison.
See, after Faraday invents his super efficient method
for rubbing shit together
Thomas Edison gets very rich
by selling crazy souped-up telegraphs
and puts up a gigantic building in New Jersey
so that he can more efficiently gather smart people
and rub their brains together
(as a side note
I am currently pioneering a new theory of history
it is called
“everything in history as rubbing things on things”)
and through the friction of all these smart brains
Edison comes up with some pretty cool ideas
or more accurately
better versions of other people’s already cool ideas
like lightbulbs and whatever
and one of the things he comes up with
is another way to generate and distribute electricity.
Edison calls his way “direct current”
(or DC)
and the other way
which is being pioneered at the same time
by a dude named Westinghouse
is called “alternating current”
(or AC).
Do not try to understand what these things mean
it’s really hard
all you need to know
is they would make an incredibly sweet band name.
So the problem with DC power
is it’s lazy
it won’t travel very far before it gives up
so you gotta make tons of power stations for it to use.
Meanwhile
the problem with AC power
is that someone has not yet come along
who can upgrade it and make it TOTALLY RAD.
ENTER NIKOLA TESLA.
Tesla is this Serbian dude with like no social skills
because he put all his stat points in CRAZY BRAIN.
He willingly gave up rubbing his junk on ladies’ junk
so he could spend more time rubbing electric junk
plus he hallucinated like ALL THE TIME
because he slept like NONE OF THE TIME.
This dude was less of a dude
and more of a streamlined engine
for turning water and saltines into SCIENCE.
So Tesla looks at AC power like “Okay, guys
I see what you’re doing
with the rubbing stuff on other stuff
but guys
what if we made it
MORE COMPLICATED???”
and everyone is like “AWRIIIIGHT”
especially that Westinghouse guy
so Westinghouse buys all of Tesla’s great ideas
and then Edison is like “Oh man
Westinghouse is about to totally wreck my shit.
AC power can travel longer distances than DC power
and it is cheaper and more efficient . . .
Welp
I guess there’s only one thing left to do:
time to start murdering animals.”
THAT IS, NO JOKE, WHAT EDISON DOES.
First he invents the electric chair
and powers it with AC power
so everyone will know just how dangerous that shit is
ignoring the fact that lightning can also kill people
and I’m pretty sure that’s not AC OR DC
ELECTRICITY:
JUST PRETTY DANGEROUS ALL AROUND.
But Edison doesn’t stop at fixing American justice
no no no
he starts stealing stray cats
and frying those babies on his electro-kill machine
but everyone is still like yawn
so finally Edison is like “Fuck this.
Just fuck this.
I’m gonna get an elephant from the goddamn zoo
stick an electrode up its butt
and shock it to DEATH
while filming it with another of my inventions
and THAT is going to solve this whole thing for me
I don’t see how it could fail.”
So he kills Topsy the Elephant
and then shows people the video
and somehow
that fails to convince everyone to buy his electricity
but it’s fine, because it’s not like Edison is poor.
He gets distracted pretty quickly
by an ambitious scheme
to repeatedly fire X-rays into his own eyes
presumably in order to become more like Superman.
Meanwhile, things are not going too well for Tesla
because after a brilliant career of turning down ladies
and sculpting reality with his mind
said mind is finally like “Okay, I’m done
it’s just gonna be martians and talking pigeons now
all day every day”
and Tesla is like “Oh well
I guess I better go die in a tiny apartment
after living on milk and crackers for months.”
And once Tesla and Edison are dead
from crazy and diabetes respectively
everybody’s like “You know what
why don’t we just compromise?
We’ll use AC to get electricity into our houses
and once it’s there we’ll turn it into DC
and use it to make our toast and power our dildos”
and that’s why pretty much every appliance you use
needs some kind of DC converter on it
so thanks a lot, past people.
Now, guys
I know you were expecting the standard narrative
“Nikola Tesla invented radar and gravity and knees
and Thomas Edison stole all of it
with his asshole machine made of assholes”
and while Thomas Edison is indeed an asshole
and Nikola Tesla did indeed invent a million things
what both of them have in common
is being MEGA CRAZY.
Like, from my perspective
there is not a lot of difference
between hallucinating pigeons and aliens
and shooting yourself in the eyes with X-rays
which just goes to show
that all the smartest people in the world
are secretly the biggest goddamn idiots.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION WAS ACTUALLY NOT SO GREAT
So back in olden times
(by which I mean about a hundred years ago)
all the great economies of Europe
plus the United States of America
had mad buxx
mostly from exploiting Africa
and Asia
and South America
and North America too, if you think about it
so the combined wealth of all these continents
is mostly focused on this one little tiny continent
which only really gets to be its own continent
because back when the Greeks were naming stuff
they didn’t have satellites
to tell them Asia and Europe are joined at the hip.
ANYWAY
these hella wealthy bros all worship the same god
no, not God
Nietzsche already told everybody that dude was dead
the god I am referring to is called the Gold Standard
and it has only one commandment:
The amount of money you have in your country
must equal the amount of shiny yellow metal
that your country has found in the ground.
It is a pretty arbitrary way to handle money
but so far so good
mainly because people keep finding gold in Africa
so there keeps being more money
which people are stoked about
because they never want to stop buying things.
But guess what?
WAR HAPPENS.
Yeah, some dude gets shot in Austria
he’s named for the indie band that wrote “This Fire”
and I guess that band is really big in Europe
because his death makes everybody start fighting.
They call it the Great War
but it’s actually a pretty sucky war for everyone.
Here’s why:
War is way expensive
and nobody really budgets for it
so everybody’s economic strategy becomes
“Let’s just win the war
and then make the other guys pay for it.”
But they still have to get the money in the meantime
so they borrow it
mostly from the United States
but also from Britain.
The U.S. ge
ts mad rich off of this
and ends up with most of the world’s gold.
But then everybody still doesn’t have enough money
so what do they do?
They just print more money.
Being a government is awesome.
The war goes on for four years
and at the end of it, Germany loses
the problem being that of all the guys in the war
Germany was the MOST SURE it was gonna win
so it borrowed/made up THE MOST MONEY
and now Britain and France are like “Hey, Germany
you need to pay us back all the money we spent
you know, on killing you”
and meanwhile the U.S. is like “Oh, hi there, guys
you need to pay us back all the money we gave you
you know, to kill Germany”
and Britain and France are like “Okay, sure
just let us get all that money Germany owes us”
and Germany is like “Uhh . . .
we don’t have this money.”
So Germany can’t pay France and Britain
and France and Britain can’t pay America
because the Gold Standard says money = gold
and America already has all the gold.
But America won’t forgive the loans
so Germany starts printing dumpsters full of money
just to keep up appearances
until one U.S. dollar
is worth six hundred and thirty BILLION marks.
There’s so much cash, kids are building money forts
it is tragic/pimp as hell.
Britain does convince America to go easy
and lower the interest rates on the loans
but in order to do that
America has to lower ALL THE INTEREST RATES
so everybody back in the U.S. is like “SWEET
FREE MONEY
BETTER USE IT TO BUY STOCKS”
and they just go nuts
the whole stock market goes completely bonkers
shoe-shine boys are giving out hot tips
hobos have stock portfolios
and the dudes in charge are TERRIFIED
because they know that at this point
the market is just running on bullshit and dreams
and real soon it’s gonna get to that part in the dream
where you’re naked at your tuba recital
and you never learned to play the tuba.
There are other people who are like “NAW
THE MARKET WILL BE GREAT FOREVER
PUT ALL YOUR MONEY IN IT”
but you know what those people are?
WRONG.
WRONG LIKE A DOG EATING MAYONNAISE.
The market goes down like a clown
and a bunch of people lose a bunch of money.