Guest Post by Chris Oakley - After Hours: The 1977 Los Angeles Blackout

(based on the “Electric Nightmares” series by the same author)

The 1965 West Coast blackout was one of the most alarming crises

in U.S. history. For several long hours many of the country’s largest

cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, were plunged into a

total or near-total darkness and public safety in those cities became

precarious at best; Los Angeles in particular teetered on the verge of

a full-scale riot that might have equaled, if not surpassed, the violence

of the Watts riots that raged just a few months before the blackout. It

was partly in hopes of averting such chaos that in early 1966 Congress

passed what was formally known as the American Electrical Transmission

Safety Act but would be better known by its nickname “the Blackout Act”;

among its other provisions the law gave the U.S. Justice Department the

power to investigate and try sabotage of electrical equipment as an act

of terrorism.

   But as the Watergate scandal mushroomed and a growing segment of the

American public became disenchanted with government in general and the

Blackout Act in particular, the act’s security provisions would steadily

come under heavier and heavier criticism. By the time Jimmy Carter threw

his hat into the 1976 Democratic presidential nomination race, there was

massive sentiment in favor of scaling back most if not all of the powers

granted to the Justice Department to investigate and prosecute Blackout

Act-related crimes; sure enough Carter said in his nomination acceptance

speech he would make it a high priority during his first 100 days in the

White House to overhaul the Blackout Act’s security clauses.

   At the time Carter’s pledge earned him a standing ovation from the

convention delegates. But just one year later, his words would come back

to haunt him as another major power outage struck Los Angeles and laid

bare his administration’s shortcomings. Some political historians have

suggested it was the Los Angeles blackout rather than the 1979 Iranian

hostage crisis that truly doomed Carter’s hopes for a second term in the

White House; his first response to the blackout certainly didn't do much

to help him in his efforts to woo undecided potential voters in the 1980

campaign. In fact Carter's handling(or mishandling) of the blackout gave

his 1980 Republican challenger, Ronald Reagan, a perfect opening to take

Carter's domestic policies to task. Noticing that voters were alarmed by

the rising crime rate in America at that time, Reagan promised to (as he

put it) "take the cuffs off" the Justice Department in investigating and

prosecuting violators of the Blackout Act's security articles. Even now,

more than three and a half decades after it happened, the effects of the

blackout are still being felt well beyond southern California.

                                ******

   July 13, 1977, had been a normal summer evening in Los Angeles right

up until the moment the blackout started. It had been searingly hot for

most of the day, and as night fell the temperature was still registering

in the mid-70s. The main topics of conversation among people walking the

city's streets were the fortunes of the Dodgers, the phenomenal success

of Star Wars at the box office, the not-so-phenomenal performance of the

Carter Administration after six months in the White House, and of course

the heat.

    All conversation screeched to a halt around 8:37 PM Pacific time; a

lightning strike at an electrical substation north of the city triggered

a cascade effect that within minutes had plunged all of Los Angeles into

darkness. In sharp contrast to the 1965 West Coast blackout, when power

outages were being reported as far south as San Diego, only metropolitan

L.A. experienced any electrical failures. But those failures made for a

situation every bit as tense as the conditions that had prevailed twelve

years earlier during the '65 outage. The social, economic, and cultural

tensions which had been simmering within the City of Angels all through

those twelve years hadn't diminished much by 1977; if anything, in some

quarters it had actually intensified...

                                 ******

    ...a development that in the long run would cost President Carter

dearly when it came time for him to confront the situation arising from

the blackout. It was just after 9:45 PM Pacific time (12:45 AM Eastern

time July 14th) when Carter was first notified of the power failure in

Los Angeles. Because of incomplete information regarding the nature of

the blackout and its origin, he misjudged the seriousness of the event,

which in turn delayed the release of federal resources that might have

otherwise enabled state and local authorities to get the situation under

control sooner.

    By the time Carter finally did get around to releasing federal funds

and resources to aid L.A. authorities in dealing with the blackout, more

than half the city was engulfed in chaos and the rest was bracing itself

for everything short of the Apocalypse. Even in the most upscale corners

of Los Angeles there were incidents of looting and violence; two Beverly

Hills jewelry stores were ransacked around 11:00 PM Pacific time while a

third was forty minutes later, while in Hollywood an LAPD riot squad had

to be called in to break up a melee near the Paramount backlot. The less

affluent sections of the city were in danger of becoming urban war zones

by that point. In the South Central district homeowners and businesses

were going so far as to set up improvised barricades against what seemed

like an inevitable assault by L.A.'s criminal elements. A local arsonist

who had been dodging the LAPD for weeks prior to the blackout took great

advantage of the chaos the blackout produced to set fires in a number of

abandoned buildings in the heart of Los Angeles, prompting a sportscaster

who was covering that evening's Dodgers game to comment despondently to

his viewers: "Ladies and gentlemen, the City of Angels is burning." Huge

black columns of smoke rose from the torched buildings, visible in every

direction for at least ten miles and bringing back what must have been a

Pandora's box of unpleasant memories for those who had lived through the

Watts riots a decade earlier.

    The California National Guard was activated just before midnight

on July 14th to restore order in metropolitan Los Angeles; to their

considerable credit, the Guardsmen acted quickly and effectively to

accomplish this mission. Their first move was to deploy fire control

teams to assist the beleaguered L.A. Fire Department in putting out the

multiple blazes raging in the heart of the city; simultaneously, squads

of MPs moved to back up the LAPD and CHP in arresting looters. Once the

fires were under control and the looting had been stopped, the National

Guardsmen's next task was to provide medical assistance for injured L.A.

residents who had been unable to get to a doctor or hospital. As a Times

editorial columnist said in the aftermath of the blackout, the Guardsmen

were "the glue that held Los Angeles together". Many of them would later

return to the city as extras when a movie based on the Times' reports of

the blackout was filmed in downtown L.A. in 1991.

     L.A. County sheriff's deputies also played a significant role in

restoring calm to the City of Angels. Many former deputies actually came

out of retirement to support their active-duty colleagues in keeping the

peace while utility crews worked to get the power back on. In some cases

they even had assistance from Hollywood studio security guards who’d been

released by their employers from their regular duties to give overtaxed

regular police personnel a hand with crowd control and guarding life and

property.

                              ******

     Electrical power was restored to most sections of L.A. by 5:30 AM

Pacific time(8:30 AM Eastern) on the morning of July 14. At that point,

much of the city looked like Genghis Khan had rampaged through it. Weeks

after the last light had been turned on in Los Angeles, the city’s public

works department was still picking up trash and debris left behind by the

orgy of crime and looting the blackout had generated; in terms of paying

overtime salary to LAPD personnel and L.A. County sheriff’s deputies, the

blackout was the most expensive civil emergency to hit the City of Angels

since the 1971 Sylmar earthquake. And still more financial headaches were

to come as the inevitable civil damage lawsuits from disgruntled business

owners and ordinary citizens began making their way through the state and

federal courts.

    But as bad as things had been and would get for the administration of

then-Mayor Tom Bradley, there were about to get exponentially worse for

the Carter Administration. At the time of the blackout, Jimmy Carter had

been president less than six months but was already starting to receive a

torrent of criticism from conservative opponents of his government; once

the extent of Carter’s mishandling of the blackout began to sink in those

critics went after him like hounds after the fox. On July 18^th, just four

days after the lights came back on in Los Angeles, two GOP senators went

before Congress to introduce a resolution calling for the appointment of

an independent counsel to look into the Carter administration's response

to the blackout. That same day the Manchester Union-Leader printed one of

the most blistering editorials in its history, a vitriolic anti-Carter

rant essentially accusing the incumbent president of abandoning L.A. in

its hour of need. Even by the Union-Leader's own notoriously belligerent

standards the editorial was a shot across the president's bow; no sooner

had the paper hit newsstands than multitudes of angry Carter supporters

throughout New England starting bombarding the Union-Leader offices with

a barrage of letters, telegrams, and phone calls coming to his defense.

     Some of those defenders would later reverse their stances as the

investigation into the Carter Administration's handling of the blackout

exposed Carter's errors in judgement as well as those of his advisors.

But at the time the Union-Leader editorial was published, Democrats all

throughout New England were unanimous in blasting the paper for what in

their eyes constituted an intolerable and deliberate slight of the chief

executive. A few of the more vocal critics of the Union-Leader editorial

even went so far as to picket the newspaper's printing plant or threaten

lawsuits against the publishers for allegedly slandering the President.

The suits never went forward, but just the same they reflect the outrage

the editorial had stirred among Carter's supporters.

     The resolution to appoint an independent counsel to probe the White

House's handling of the Los Angeles blackout was debated in Congress for

weeks before finally being approved on August 2, almost one month after

the blackout. And even after its approval many of Carter's allies in the

House and Senate continued to bitterly criticize the decision; one junior

Vermont representative labeled the inquiry “a politically motivated smear

job.” Nor for that matter was the GOP unanimous in agreement on the need

for a Congressional probe into Carter's response to the blackout--one of

the members of Montana's GOP Congressional contingent labeled it “a waste

of good money” and questioned the timing of the inquiry at a moment when

there was an economy to be revived and Soviet expansionism to be opposed.

                               ******

     The Congressional inquiry into President Carter's handling of the

Los Angeles blackout didn't officially convene until October 10, 1978,

slightly over two months after the resolution appointing the independent

counsel who would lead the inquiry had been passed. Right from the start

the independent counsel's office was dogged by allegations that they were

engaged in a political witch-hunt; it didn't help matters any when one of

the law clerks assigned to the office was photographed sporting a 'Reagan

For President 1980' button on his lapel. Many Carter White House staffers

viewed the inquiry as at best an intentional slight of the commander-in-

chief and at worst the beginning of a right-wing attempt to overthrow the

Carter Administration via a questionable impeachment proceeding.

     But in January of 1979, just as the Pahlavi monarchy in Iran was on

its last legs, a former White House staffer gave devastating testimony to

the inquiry that would make many of Carter's defenders start to question

whether he was worthy of defense. In a two-hour hearing that was the talk

of the Beltway for days after it ended, the witness painted a devastating

portrait of an Oval Office whose right hand didn't know what its left one

was doing. He described people giving President Carter getting a hundred

different reports from a hundred different sources about what was taking

place in Los Angeles-- reports often blatantly contradicting each other.

He portrayed a cabinet that was seriously if not totally flustered in the

face of a major urban crisis. He spoke of a president who had been asleep

at the switch at a time when alertness was critical. He pointed to scores

of misjudgments by Carter's senior disaster preparedness officials which

served to make an already grave situation that much worse. By the time he

finally left the stand, some members of the inquiry panel members who had

been listening to the staffer's testimony were ready to at the very least

censure Carter if not impeach him outright.

    And it wasn't just the Republicans who were incensed about Carter's

mismanagement of the Los Angeles blackout; many of the President's fellow

Democrats were equally fed up if not more so. The chairman of California's

state Democratic committee published a blistering op-ed in the Los Angeles

Times essentially accusing President Carter of abandoning Los Angelenos to

the whims of fate. A leading Democratic member of Alabama's Congressional

delegation painted a grim picture of what would happen to the United States

if terrorists attacked during an L.A. blackout-type crisis, suggesting such

an event could sow the seeds of nationwide anarchy. Even in constituencies

where Carter usually enjoyed heavy support, critics of the incumbent chief

executive were preparing attack ads on behalf of those who would challenge

him for the Oval Office. In many southern states a certain conservative PAC

started running a notorious commercial now known simply as “the 3:00 AM ad”

that implied Carter's mismanagement of the L.A. blackout had left the door

open for enemies of the United States to wreak havoc on its citizens while

they were at their most vulnerable.

    The controversy over Carter's handling of the Los Angeles blackout had

serious consequences for his 1980 re-election bid. Carter's main rival for

the Democratic nomination, Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy, relentlessly

exploited the incumbent's vulnerability on this matter; had it not been for

Kennedy's own perceived transgressions, he might easily have supplanted the

President as his party's nominee. As it was, Carter just barely managed to

squeak past Kennedy for the nomination and would find himself operating at

a serious disadvantage when he faced Republican candidate Ronald Reagan in

the general election.

May 23, 399 BC – Socrates Revived

After a clamorous trial in which the philosopher Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth and believing in novel gods, the Athenian jury of Five Hundred declared him guilty by a narrow margin (56% in modern estimates). Following the conviction, both sides proposed punishments. Socrates suggested that he be forced to dine in the Prytaneum and hold a position in high society, which would be the opposite of his philosophy of calling all norms into question. His accusers, representing business concerns, religious laymen, and other philosophers, argued that Socrates should be compelled to suicide by drinking hemlock.

This form of execution was traditional in ancient culture, where there was worry about reprisals from the gods if an innocent person was accidentally executed. Instead, the legally guilty would kill himself and then receive a more noble place in the afterlife for taking personal responsibility. On a practical level, however, it was customary for the guilty party to flee town before nightfall and go into exile, thus freeing the city of nonviolent social misfits. Following this understanding, the jury sentenced Socrates to death on a wide margin of 72%.

Socrates’s longtime friend Crito begged Socrates to make an escape. Socrates, however, was determined to follow the letter of the law, even if it was against the unspoken spirit, as was outlined in a dialogue between them written by Socrates’s student Plato. Surrounded by many of his friends and favorite students, Socrates drank the hemlock made from leaves of the Conium plant by a city official. While the philosophers debated and his friends began mourning, Socrates described to them how his feet had gone numb, not even feeling a pinch. The cold feeling crept up his legs toward his heart, where it was expected to kill him.

As he struggled to take his final breaths, he called out, “Crito, we owe a rooster to Asclepius. Please, don’t forget to pay the debt.” There is much debate about whether Socrates’s last words were a reminder to settle his books so that there could be not even an unpaid medical bill against him, or perhaps a reference to the healer demi-god granting immortality to his words, or if it was a suggestion to attempt a resurrection as the mythological Asclepius himself had done. Said to be the son of Apollo, Asclepius was the first physician and founded medicine, but when he cured death itself by resurrecting Hippolytus after his horses threw him, the gods struck Asclepius down for impudence.

Whatever the meaning, Crito was not satisfied and asked for Socrates to say something more, anything at all. Socrates then stopped breathing.

Crito threw himself into an embrace of Socrates’s chest, where he noticed that the old philosopher’s heart was still slowly beating. He cried out that if Socrates would not take in breath, he would give it to him, and blew into his mouth. The body did not reflexively deflate, so Crito pushed the air out from the torso and breathed again.

The young philosophers were divided, some believing Crito to have gone mad, while others were fascinated. While Crito worked, they examined the body and found that Socrates’s heart continued to beat and, in fact, grew stronger rather than stopping. Crito became exhausted, and soldier-scholar Xenophon, who had just returned from a disastrous campaign in Persia, stepped up to continue the artificial breathing. Over the course of the next two days, the students took turns breathing for Socrates, although he largely breathed for himself through the last night. After sleeping several hours more, Socrates awoke.

Athens was shocked. The official who had given the poison was put on trial and proved with witnesses that he had given the appropriate dose. Socrates had fulfilled his execution and yet lived. A cult swiftly broke out around him as a miraculous return to life, and his philosophy students found themselves as priests to a swarming congregation.

There are few recorded words from Socrates after his near-death. Descriptions from Plato paint him as sickly and slow to respond, likely due to at least some brain-damage during his low-oxygen state. He survived for at least a year more before passing away more conventionally.

Yet Socrates lived on through his apparent apotheosis. Those who had accused him either quickly converted or were hounded out of Athens, prompting many of the “new gods” or “daimons” Socrates was convicted of worshiping to become accepted. These were explained by Plato and others as forces of nature and spirit. Study of natural philosophy flourished, incorporating a great deal of numerology from previous thinkers such as Pythagoras. Soon Socratics developed statistics, economics, and biology, with a special emphasis in medicine.

Many students under Antisthenes broke away to create their own Cynic cult, rejecting many of Plato’s diamons that directed human activity. The more material-directed thought spread to the fledgling Roman Republic through the Greek colony at Syracuse, where the philosopher Archimedes had applied many principles into engineering. Using enormous war engines and efficient logistics, the Romans conquered Greece despite its vast wealth in a social system that knew almost no poverty.

--

In reality, Socrates died in self-execution and swiftly became a martyr. His “Socratic method” of admitting ignorance, asking questions to reveal foundational truth, and then building logically from there became the groundwork for the Western style of philosophy, which would be expanded through his students, especially Plato for the generations to today.

Hemlock is wildly poisonous to animals, its alkaline structure blocking the neuromuscular activity of the respiratory system. Although the victim would die after ingesting seven or eight leaves or even fewer seeds, it has been shown that an artificial respirator can provide a cure by breathing until the poison is worked out of the patient’s system.

Guest Post from Chris Oakley

August 15, 1962--Defection Attempt Sparks Second Korean War

A disillusioned U.S. Army private’s attempt to cross the 38th parallel and defect to North Korea touched off a second war in the Korean Peninsula just over nine years after the signing of the armistice that ended the first one.

Private 1st Class Joseph Dresnok, a Virginia native whose marriage had failed during a previous stint in the Army, had made up his mind to abandon his post rather than face a court-martial for forging his commanding officer’s signature on a pass into the nearby town. As he was attempting to make his way over the DMZ to reach the nearest North Korean outpost, a U.S. sentry spotted him and called for him to come back to the South Korean side of the line. In response, Dresnok fired off a round from the twelve-gauge shotgun he carried with him. The sentry immediately returned fire, and even though neither Dresnok’s shotgun blast nor the sentry’s answering bullet hit anything, the noisy exchange of gunfire was enough to persuade a nearby Korean People’s Army border patrol that an American attack on the North was imminent.

Just minutes after the sentry fired on Dresnok, U.S. outposts all along the 38th parallel came under heavy North Korean artillery bombardment, which in turn provoked retaliatory U.S. and South Korean air strikes. By nightfall, U.S. and ROK infantry were engaging the NKPA at six key points along the Demilitarized Zone, and a somber President John F. Kennedy told the American people that the U.S. was once again at war with North Korea.

In contrast to the first Korean conflict, which had ground on for over three years before concluding in a stalemate, the Second Korean War ended after just ten weeks with a decisive U.S.-ROK victory. The Soviet Union and China, North Korea’s main foreign allies, were caught off guard by the rapid pace with which events unfolded and had no time to act before U.S. and South Korean troops routed the NKPA in a series of set-piece battles that culminated with the fall of Pyongyang to U.S. Marines on October 18, 1962. North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung was fatally wounded as he was attempting to escape the city; his son Kim Jong Il fled to China and would later be granted political asylum there by the Mao Zedong regime. Although scattered groups of Communist insurgents would continue to harass U.S. and South Korean forces until mid-January of 1963, the capture of Pyongyang effectively marked the end of North Korea as a separate country. Without military placements able to back their bravado, Chinese and Soviet Union diplomats judged the US harshly for imperialism but kept themselves out of the war rather than facing early defeats before the bulk of their forces could move. The formal re-establishment of a unified Korean nation was announced by President Park Chung-Hee on March 2, 1963; the anniversary of that proclamation would then become a Korean national holiday, Reunification Day.

Post-reunification Korea quickly established itself as one of the strongest military and economic powers in Asia. In foreign affairs, the Korean government took a largely pro-U.S. policy line, particularly after the Pueblo incident of 1968 in which a U.S. Navy communications ship was fired upon by a Chinese submarine while on the Korean side of the China-Korea maritime boundary line. During the Vietnam War, over 30,000 ROK troops fought on the U.S. side against the Viet Cong and NVA; the Koreans also provided air support and intelligence data to U.S. forces and gave political asylum to North Vietnamese defectors. The ROK armed forces’ most notable success in Vietnam came in the summer of 1974 with a raid on the port of Haiphong by Korean air force fighter jets which destroyed thousands of tons of supplies and equipment meant for the Viet Cong.

By 1978, fifteen years after Korea was officially reunified, the ROK had the highest standard of living of any country in Asia and the third-highest in the entire world. In the 1980s, Korean athletes would make their presence felt at the Olympics, most notably at the 1988 Summer Games when the Korean women’s gymnastics team upset Romania to win the group bronze medal and the men’s boxing squad won golds in the lightweight and welterweight divisions. In 1991, Korea became the third country in the world to send human beings into space, launching a two-man capsule from the Yongbyon rocket facility on a three-day orbital flight.

The former DMZ was re-purposed into a national park complex that included nature preserves, historical and cultural museums, and a memorial site commemorating the thousands of ROK soldiers who died over the course of the two Korean Wars. The old “truce village” of Panmunjom, evacuated after the end of the First Korean War, became a private retreat for the Korean president and a meeting place for Korean and foreign officials. In Pyongyang, the headquarters of the defunct Korean Workers’ Party was converted to an archive storing millions of documents and files related to the human rights abuses and war crimes committed by the fallen Kim Il Sung regime. While the United States would substantially reduce its military presence in Korea after the Vietnam War ended, a sizable garrison would remain on station along the Korean-Russian frontier until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1988. In the 1991 Gulf War, Korea would serve as a critical transit stop for coalition troops being deployed to Kuwait and Iraq. As Korea entered the twenty-first century, its economy would enter a new era of rapid growth thanks to “green” technology and the resurgence of the country’s automotive industry.

PFC Dresnok never knew the consequences his actions had wrought; when North Korean soldiers finally sighted him, they shot him dead on the spot. His body was left to decay in the rough countryside between the northern and southern sides of the DMZ, and his fate would continue to be a mystery until 1965, when a group of hikers on a nature walk found his skeletal remains near the site of his execution. Larry Allen Abshier, a GI who had gone over to North Korea three months before Dresnok’s defection attempt, was hanged as a spy not long after Dresnok was shot. Charles Robert Jenkins, a sergeant who’d been contemplating defection to North Korea himself, changed his plans and decided instead to defect to the Soviet Union, where he would live until its collapse at the end of the Cold War.

                                                                          ******

In reality, the only shot fired during Joseph Dresnok’s defection was the shotgun round from Dresnok himself as he was walking across the Korean DMZ. He was briefly detained at an NKPA border outpost before being sent to Pyongyang; he would spend the next decade there being indoctrinated in Kim Il Sung’s juche ideology before being granted North Korean citizenship in 1972.

As of this writing, Dresnok is the only living American expatriate left in North Korea; Larry Allen Abshier died of a heart attack in 1983 while Jerry Wayne Parrish, a U.S. Army Specialist 4 who defected to the North shortly after Dresnok crossed over, succumbed to kidney problems in 1998. Charles Robert Jenkins left North Korea in 2007 and emigrated to Japan, where he subsequently turned himself in to U.S. authorities and served a 30-day jail term for desertion. The DMZ today constitutes the most heavily fortified border on Earth.

2700 BC - Gilgamesh Protects the Flower of Youth

After the tragic death of his formal rival and friend Enkidu, king of Uruk Gilgamesh set forth on his quest to find the secret to eternal life so that he would never face his own dark end. He journeyed to the end of the world, traveled underground through a tunnel under Mount Mashu, crossed the oceanic Waters of Death, and at last met Utnapishtim, an immortal man who survived the Great Flood centuries before. Utnapishtim admited that his immortality was singularly bestowed from the gods, not something that can be replicated. Saddened, Gilgamesh prepared to leave.

He was granted a final token, however: the story of an undersea plant that granted eternal youth. Gilgamesh dove for the flowering plant called Ur-shanabi, the "Plant of Heartbeat," with rocks tied to his feet. Despite it being covered in thorns, he seized it and began the long journey back to Uruk. Along the way, he was tempted to bathe in a glistening pond to prepare for his reentry to the city, but a prickle of a thorn prompted him to be determined in keeping his precious plant safe. He even slayed a serpent wandering nearby out of caution.

Gilgamesh's experiment of giving some of the plant to an old man in the city turned him into an eager youth once more. Gilgamesh then used the plant himself, maintaining youth as he built a grand garden centered upon it. Word of the plant spread through the ancient world, causing many kings to seek it for themselves. Gilgamesh proved selfish with eternal youth, granting it only to those who proved themselves worthy and humble before him and the gods. Those sentenced to die routinely besieged the city, but Uruk's walls and Gilgamesh's semi-divine strength proved too strong. The Pharaohs of Egypt, unable to seize the flower, cursed it as sacrilege against the cycle of death.

Gilgamesh ruled for over 1,000 years, keeping at bay opponents even as powerful as the Assyrians, until the Hittites came with their iron chariots. He fled with the plant, although cuttings were delivered to the Hittite kings, who established their own rule over the Middle East. Although the plants established a ruling class of century-lived royals, climatic shift brought an era of drought to the region. The starving populace rebelled against their kings, many of them who had established themselves as gods on Earth now seen as powerless. The resulting dark age eventually brightened as Babylonians again established rule, only to be eclipsed by the Medes and Persians. They themselves were conquered by Alexander, leading the Greeks.

When Alexander fell ill in Babylon, a mysterious visitor arrived at court offering the curative properties of a thorny plant. He was physically young and enormously strong, but his eyes were wizened by uncounted centuries. Although the interpreter struggled to determine the man's accent, the man's royal stature prompted Alexander's guards to allow him to pass. The man introduced himself as "Gilgamesh" and said that a plant he offered would cure any illness and return Alexander to his youthful vigor. He had made his offer to Cyrus the Great, but Cyrus had refused, stating that eternal youth would only make him weak in his day-to-day affairs.

Alexander, however, leaped at the chance. Upon his recovery, Alexander placed Gilgamesh as ruler over conquered Babylon, just upriver from the ruins of Uruk. Alexander himself marched west, ultimately reminding the world that eternal youth was not immortality when his life ended upon a Roman blade.

Gilgamesh continued his rule. Rather than holding his plant selfishly, he sent envoys to rulers he deemed suitable bearing a flowered gift worth another lifespan. His kingdom remained strong, although it faced increasing strife from the west and south as monotheists stated that God demanded death from men. Waves of crusades and holy wars marched against Gilgamesh, but he was aptly supported by his allies in the east, including the Great Khan, who would rule the greatest empire on Earth for centuries.

Despite the European kings decrying the flower, it gradually became proven that many of them secretly bought their own clippings and replaced their own sons upon tasting its gift of youth. Sciences of botany and chemistry progressed as scientists attempted to unravel the secrets of enzymes within the plant. When at last a synthetic Formula of Life was created, the growing middle class of bankers and merchants proved a fertile ground for sales. The widespread interest was met with large-scale production in the Industrial Revolution, and soon Earth faced a new problem of rampant overpopulation of ever-young, healthy citizens clamoring for resources.

Gilgamesh himself continued to rule over a carefully cultivated Mesopotamia, the one center of progress and peace on the world, surrounded by enormous walls to keep out anyone deemed unworthy.


--

In reality, according to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest recorded literary work, Gilgamesh lost the plant to the serpent as he bathed. He returned empty-handed to Uruk, where he took great solace in seeing his works, such as the great walls of Uruk he erected to defend the city.

January 19, 1809 - Birth of Famed Military Man Edgar Allan Poe

The lifelong military career of General Edgar Allan Poe began during his troubled youth, trying to find a place in the world. Poe, who had been born as the second son of actor David Poe and actress Eliza Hopkins Poe, did not know his parents. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and his mother died of tuberculosis in 1811. His siblings were scattered; Poe was sent to live with a foster family, the Allans. They moved from Richmond, Virginia, to London, and young Poe was juggled between boarding schools, never in one place long.

Returning to America in 1820, Poe continued his education, spending a year at the University of Virginia before dropping out. He had quickly burned through his allowance, and requests for more money were turned down as Poe’s debts seemed to increase just as the flow of money did. His relationship with his foster father became very strained, prompting Poe to set off on his own, working a variety of small jobs before enlisting in the Army in 1827 under a pseudonym and lying about his age.

The Army proved to give Poe enough stability to publish his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. His writing is likely to have been inspired by his older brother Henry, who had traveled the world with another family and written in the Romantic style of Lord Byron. The two mailed poems to one another, and Edgar’s “The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour” was mistaken for Henry’s upon publication. Although Poe’s book showed his talent, it was met with little recognition. Few of the 50 copies printed sold.

While his writing career struggled, Poe did well in the Army. He was promoted within months of enlistment into the artillery, which doubled his pay. In two years, he was Sergeant Major for Artillery, but Poe had reached the highest rank he could as a noncommissioned officer. With his future in the military frozen, he consulted his commanding officer. Declaring that he had come to the Army under a false name due to his struggles with his foster father, he requested an early discharge so that he could attend West Point and become an officer.

Lieutenant Howard considered using the situation as an opportunity to force Poe to restore his relationship with his foster father, but ultimately Howard decided that the affairs of home would only trouble his bright young soldier. Howard approved Poe’s request and said famously, “The Army is your family, son.” These words would follow Poe for the rest of his life.

En route to West Point, Poe visited his biological family in Baltimore. He stayed with his aunt, young cousin Virginia, and brother Henry, who worked in a law office and was as famous for his drinking as he was for his romance. Henry had given up publishing his work, although he encouraged Edgar while falling ill with tuberculosis. There were rumors of Poe’s foster mother dying and his foster father remarrying, but Poe distanced himself from the troubles and instead focused on his career.

Poe began his studies at West Point in 1831, graduating four years later alongside many classmates who immediately resigned to be engineers and lawyers rather than go fight in the Second Seminole War. Poe stayed on, cheered on in his writing by his fellow soldiers. Publishing was largely a business of piracy with printers stealing the works of authors across the Atlantic so that they did not have to pay royalties, yet Poe found a ready audience for his tales of mystery, macabre, and adventure among the military. He found a good deal of time to write while he waited for deliveries working in ordinance. He was routinely punished for dereliction of duty due to heavy drinking and later sent to “dry out” on the frontier.

Out in the lonely forts of the West, Poe found himself with even more time to write and, in 1838, published the complete The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, telling the tale of a stowaway having adventures at sea. The novel had been published in installments, and the military mail wagon was packed with letters from readers eager for more. As he included special codes with hints toward the answers to his cliffhangers, the mail only increased. Inspired, Poe began writing ongoing adventures of Pym, producing an average of one per year through the next two decades in addition to his collections of short stories and poems. Poe’s work was interrupted by the Mexican-American War, although the experiences gave him fuel for a wealth of new stories and a collection of non-fiction stories about his fellow soldiers.

By the time of the Civil War, Poe had been promoted to Colonel. He continued working in supply, although his expertise in cryptology soon gave him a new position in code-breaking. Poe’s finest hour is claimed to be at Chancellorsville, when he cracked the Confederate code stating that they themselves had cracked the Union code. While General Hooker prepared to call back his forces to a defended position in the trees, duplicating Lee’s tactic that had devastated the Union at Fredericksburg, other officers suggested they maintain their forward position on the hilltops. Poe wrote an intelligence report that painted the image of victory so eloquently that Hooker’s mind was changed. When Stonewall Jackson attempted his infamous flanking maneuver, he found himself too far behind the Union lines and surrounded. Jackson was killed, and his famous brigade was captured, leaving Lee to a humbled retreat to Virginia, where he would surrender in late 1864.

Poe stayed with the Army following the war, overseeing military publications as he continued the Stars and Stripes newspaper founded by Illinois soldiers in Missouri. He died in 1869, leaving behind several chests of notes and unfinished stories, along with an entire manuscript written in a code that has never been solved.

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In reality, Poe became reacquainted with his foster father, which later led to a series of arguments about Allan’s care for his illegitimate children. Poe decided to leave West Point and was drummed out for neglect of duty. Henry Poe died just months later, possibly while Poe was visiting him. Poe’s cousin-and-wife Virginia Clemm, whom Edgar married when he was 26 and she 13, also died young of tuberculosis. Poe himself died under mysterious circumstances, but not before writing immortal literature such as “The Raven” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which founded the detective genre.