FA+
Shop
Query: I Know—I’ll Start My Own Meme!
16 years ago
If you had a time machine that would let you make one small change, what would you do?
I would push Walter Gropius at an early age down a long flight of stairs.
Or I would get word to H. Beam Piper of the stories he sold just before the death of his agent.
rindis would double the venture capital supplied by Alan Patricof Associates to Strategic Publications Inc.
smudge would give Pol Pot a scholarship to a major university in the United States instead of the École Française de Radioélectricité.
I would push Walter Gropius at an early age down a long flight of stairs.
Or I would get word to H. Beam Piper of the stories he sold just before the death of his agent.
rindis would double the venture capital supplied by Alan Patricof Associates to Strategic Publications Inc.
smudge would give Pol Pot a scholarship to a major university in the United States instead of the École Française de Radioélectricité.
Aside from that, hmmm.
Find that lost .45 ACP Luger, and put it someplace cool and dry for me to 'find' later . . .
But I'd love to put a few mags through that gun, then sell the damned thing, and live modestly off the proceeds . . .
And... just one change?
Go back in time to 1861 with a history book, show it to Honest Abe, and use it to argue him into not ignoring the Constitution and Supreme Court to do what he "knew" needed to be done. It set such a bad precedent...
[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius]Walter Gropius[/i] founded the Bauhaus and is one of the central figures of the modernist movement in architecture. Glass-and-steel skyscrapers, ugly concrete tilt-ups, and other horrible travesties can be blamed on the modernists. Brasilia is the ultimate result—a soulless, machinelike city with no street life, no sidewalks, and gigantic apartment blocks of the sort that other cities like London have torn down in embarrassment.
Yep, just one change: otherwise there’s no challenge and no novelty to the idea.
Hmm . . . interesting idea—although it might backfire, resulting in the South managing to do well enough to demand a peace settlement that allowed it to continue its independence. That could have drastic consequences down the line. It’s arguable, though!
it might backfire, resulting in the South managing to do well enough to demand a peace settlement that allowed it to continue its independence. That could have drastic consequences down the line. It’s arguable, though!
No disrespect, but I have a hard time seeing how the South could have won in any event short of total Union collapse. The manpower, industrial might, transportation networks, all the advanatges were with the North.
Hmm, another eway of handling it might be to go back a few decades before the War, and convince the Northern Abolitionists to follow a suggested plan: the US outlaw the importation and sale of all slaves, and then buy every slave in the South and free them (after which, the idea vaired on "send them into the American West/back to Liberia").
One has to wonder what the American social and political landscape would have looked like without a Civil War.
Interesting idea about the abolitionists. It would have been a massive undertaking. I suspect the Civil War was largely inevitable, though—there were too many fracture lines running through the antebellum US, left over from compromises the Founding Fathers patched together. If it could have been avoided, though, yeah—that would be a fascinating history.
Perhaps the simplest Civil-War-era change I might make would be to convince Lincoln’s guard not to abandon his post the night Booth came.
If not that, then I'd spike young Billy Clinton's kool aid with arsenic while he was a tot.
Hmm. Are you sure Clinton reaches the bar? By comparison with some of these folks, he was merely annoying.
And Castro was a hopeful, when he failed to get picked up, he went home, and troubles began.. But Yeah, I can hear Vin Skully and Jerry Dogget saying "Castro has him one high and long, aaaaaand it's in the stands!"