History Does so Repeat
Bananachlamyddydiddle! Parakeetleconantsia! Azingruncy-clumunge! Behonkingly guestfullery-lozengettebhagavadgitaasitiscontiddle-pireyutemion! Sorry labias and gremlins, but I am so incredibly confident that my client is innocent, I believe I can waste your time by showing you some words I made up. The bloody gloves do not fit that of the girl my client decapitated—I mean the murder victim he butchered—I mean the dead girl’s hot sexy corpse.
And everyone’s shoe has blood in it!
Making up words is a classic example of history not repeating itself. (An example of history repeating would be that I used the word ‘I’ more than once in this paragraph, but don’t tell Nic or he will leak this episode to Fox Mulder.) Hang on. What am I arguing about? That it does repeat? Okay. So just reverse what I just said before. Just make it so I’m right, in your brain. Just pretend I’m real smart, or something—which I am! So now I know what the argument is, I can express it. Let us express together.
(Note that I use ‘let us’ instead of ‘let’s’ which gives me an extra word, making me the better argumenter.)
My argumentance can be expressed thusly: HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT HISTORY DOES SO REPEAT SO NYEH NYEH NYEH NYEH.
How is that for a logical concise argument? I just proved it. Not true, you say? I’m telling Dawkins on you? And you have to prove it with an experiment!
Where’s your billions of dollars research libra-tory? I don’t reckon you’re true at all! Where is your particle emitter? Oh man, I could do a wicked dick joke about particle emitters! But I am far, far, FAR too well-bred a gentleman for that sort of penis cock schlong. Also I am still wearing that silly lawyer wig on my head, and standing in front of Judge Ito. Of course she stabbed herself to death, your honour!
Do not believe Nic’s thing. I mean his article. Not his ‘thing’ thing. Don’t be crass. Why not? Because I busted him having a heroin-fuelled beastial sex orgy with an orangutan, a toy space shuttle, a giraffe, Madonna, Sleepy Geoff from The Wiggles, that handsome guy from Full House, K-Fed, and a cross-dressing Jim Morrison’s corpse look-a-like from last week’s zombie-cat issue. The only reason I don’t have any actual photographic evidence is because my camera broke when I joined in. GET SOME! But yeah, don’t believe him.
So basically what I am saying here, is that history, per se, doesn’t, not, not now, not never ever, even in the future—reprint.doc. Can history exist in the future? Maybe. I’m not there yet. Now I am. Is that time travelling? Yes, history does exist in the future, which is now, so it’s a while ago. Am I the first human to ever time travel? Is that why my thoughts always hurt?
Hang on, I’m a bit confused. Let’s see … history … which is now—I mean happening now—is on a roll, but not in the same place. I mean it is in the same place! Repeating! Now something about war. War sucks. I know this because I saw a movie about it, and that movie sucked.
Lemme—no: LET ME tell you about another movie I saw, that also sucked. I have seen two movies that sucked, so I thought they both sucked, which sucked for me, because I can’t get those hours of my life back, unless I wait for someone to build a time machine and go back in time to tell myself not to watch them, which I haven’t done, but if I did do it I would do it for lots of shitty things in my life, which would be history theoretically repeating, but because I haven’t it’s history actually repeating! Because my life still sucks! Because I saw two! Movies that sucked! So I repeated the thoughts that I had about the first one about the second one! So history repeated right in my brain!
Is there more evidence of things repeating in my brain? Granted, my short term memory is not quite what it used to be. How it was ten mins ago, I can’t remember. So lettuce—LET US say, impartially, scientifically, without favouritism, that yes, I’m right, and it’s happening now as we sleep, hopefully, as always, to someone else.
Is numbers repeating her story? Two is just two ones. So you have one, then another one (history repeating) which is two (I just used the word two twice, then once again, which is thrice, which is history repeating an already repeated history), then another one, which is one one one which is emergency. Aaaaaaaiiiieeeee! Emergency! Quick, evacuate! Terrorists! Everywhere!
PS. “Wake up Geoff!” “AAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!”
By Guy Armstrong
History Never Repeats
History never repeats. In case you didn’t catch that, it’s a song title! Oh those popular culture and kiwiana references that we literati make to fill our lives with bemused titters.
Look; if some sort of plebeian or lazzaroni came cowering beneath my mighty gaze and asked if history ever repeats I would have to throw my head back in a disdainful position, nooked, possibly even cocked at the ready. Waiting to unleash an unrelenting wave of guffaw like laughter towards that person. “No, my wretched Guy (we’ll call this wretch ‘Guy,’ as it is a nice generic name for a lower class of man), history never repeats. What sort of pathetic education did you receive through your undergraduate Art History papers? A lesser one?” I’d then congratulate the fellow on his fine pattern reasoning abilities given through months of staring at the paintings of Johanne Vermeer and his drab ilk. Even a theoretical man like this Guy deserves to have some sort of positivity given to him to relieve the burdenship of criticism. It’s management, dear friends.
“Guy,” I’d say, “Guy, my dear lad, rest your weary and lice-ridden head upon my plush footstool. I’m glad that you’ve noticed that certain patently backwards events, that shouldn’t conceivably happen, do crop up from time to time. Guy, child, a less sapient man than I would say that there is a certain reiteration happening here; it must be repetition. Balderdash and date rape say I! Guy, my sweetness, have you not heard of molecular vibration? Certain diatomic molecules have a mode of incredibly fast vibration that seems to be a piece of identical repetition to the brain of an ape trained in recognising banana similarity; indeed yes, at times one could say that they are indistinguishable. One would be a fool! As any pious priest of science could, and very well would tell you if given the opportunity, these vibrations are microscopically different from each other. Even on this insignificant plane of existence, these little differences show false your notion of historic repitition. For surely, if history could be repeated, it would be so in exactitude on a molecular level. Let me be clear: when talking about something as big as history, every microscopic detail is of huge importance. For you see, dear smelly dilapidated Guy Miley Cyrus, while disturbingly similar to Omar al-Bashir, or that Jiang Qing wench is not living the same life with every fibre of her natural being. To my hyper-keen and superior taste buds it is clear that certain molecules found in Miley’s voluptuous thymus gland are vibrating at a slightly different rhythm than Jiangs at the same age.”
I then would pause to ill advisedly tussle Guy’s soft yet thinning hair. Moving my hand away, I’d wipe it once, twice and then thrice with a rag sopped full of methyl alcohol. Then I’d stand, stroll out of my mansion and stare at my beloved fish pond to ponder the state of the planet. If history could or did repeat then what we’d see would be the same mistakes playing out time and time again, but what we are seeing are the same results from different mistakes.
It’s incredibly hard to see the difference between the burnt remains of Tokyo after the famous fire, and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. Guy could join me from inside, when he would pause to say that it was repetition because the Japanese should have built less flammable houses. I’d slap him for his cultural insensibility and because it relieves the tension in my hands. “Useless and vindictive Guy, the stupid strategies that caused pets.com to blow the internet inside out are not the same ones that caused the great depression. People would like to say ‘America, you’re acting just like Rome!’ Before there was Rome, people were saying the same thing about Mesopotamia. This was incoherantly asinine, as Mesopotamia was a hydraulic empire and Rome was far to diverse to be able to exert control using mere liquid.” I’d then pause to pour myself a fine glass of scotch, and tell Guy to fetch my binging blanket. It would be a long night.
So, no, Guy, history doesn’t repeat, you’re just too involved with Baroque art to see so. Maybe next time you’ll retrain in a field that is of actual use. By then you will be older, less full, because you can’t just repeat your time on earth. Why not try a field such as Orchard Management, hmmn? You could be out there breeding new tiny versions of kiwifruit? Who’s a lovely budding horticultural expert? It’s you! Budding… Horticulture! Ye gods’ puns make a man feel alive.
By Nic Sando