A Daft History of the Next Decade

It was the troublemaker Karl Marx (above) who said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce.

A Great War dominated the ten laps around the sun, 2010 - 2020. There was lots of heavy guilt to go around, millions wasted by a few inches gained, or lost. The war on eating entered a brutal phase. Poison gas from cows' farts screwed up the atmosphere and left hamburger meat rotting in the trenches of Mickey D's.

The economy sank in 2012, just as the Titanic did in 1912 - dot dot dot-dash dash dash-dot dot dot - but no one was listening. The modern parachute opened for the first time in 1918 and still helped thieves and Wall Street bankers ride safely to the ground, a hundred years later. But don't worry folks. Oreo cookies, originally munched in 1912, were still cheap but admittedly less filling.

Charlie Chaplain, who invented The Tramp in 1915, saw a never-ending cast of homeless thousands follow in his footsteps to cities such as San Francisco, 100 years later. The Soviet Revolution of 1917, when capitalism was thrown in the dustbin in the land of chess and vodka, made a comeback in 2017 - mighty me, God forbid - in the United States which became a socialist nation with welfare for the wealthy, socialized profits for the health care industry, and a host of unwanted czars in cars and drugs.

The South Pole was finally reached in 1911 but ten decades later its twin vanished at the North, and was never seen again. Things got a little hot. But the Swine Flu, a cousin of the Spanish Flu of 1919, decided to make a comeback at the end of the decade to cool things down - in the morgues. At least the Boy Scouts (1910) kept the flag flying but had to cull the campfires due to spare the air days. The modern traffic light first flashed in 1920, and continued to blink a yellow warning a century later but everyone kept driving right on through the Reds.

Not to worry. The Jazz Age lay just around the bender.