It Might Get Messy

In an episode of BBC weekly human comedy “Doc Martin”, the doctor is requested to ascertain whether one of his patient’s parents is becoming senile. He asks her if she knows when World War Two started. Her answer (imagine sour, sarcastic face) is “28 June 1919, when the Germans were forced to accept the Treaty of Versailles which humiliated them and stripped them of all economic potential for their foreseeable future.” Or words to that effect. The Doc figures she’s not slipping into Alzheimer’s.


She is also, by consensus, correct. The last couple decades of the 1800s, what was finally a more-or-less united Germany rode a razor’s edge between progressive, liberal, egalitarian democracy and autocratic, centralized, reactionary oligarchy. And the delta? Which way Deutschland—and, by extension of circumstances as it turned out, the world—slipped off that edge might well have been due to the darkest case of throat cancer in human history. 


Now, stay with me here just a few seconds. Queen Victoria and Prince (Consort) Albert of England were not British—they were German. They favored widespread public participation in government and liberalization of legal systems. And they figured the stuffy Prussian establishment would be the perfect place to start. So Prince Frederick and Princess Victoria married, and generated a series of great plans to reign in the power of the Kaiser, expand the German vote, and drive the united German government from the aristocracy to the people. 


Frederick succeeded to throne of Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia in 1888. 99 days later, he died of throat cancer. From there, things went downhill with a vengeance. The Chancellor and the militarists took Germany into World War One, which led to the Weimar Republic, multiple recessions and depressions, the rise and fall of pre-war Communism, the rise of Nazism, World War Two, and the rise and fall of post-war Communism. Which largely got us where we are today.


Bummer about Frederick’s throat cancer, huh? 


Personally, of course, the odds on my changing the world for good, ill, or as a matter of fact in any meaningful way are akin to the odds of the Millennium Falcon getting safely through the asteroid field (“Never tell me the odds!”). Which makes it sort of ironic that my throat cancer was curable and, while recovery is admittedly troublesome and uncomfortable, rehabable (is that a word?). My mouth still hurts. My jaw is still dead, but it is apparently recovering. There’s only one small piece of continuing-to-rot exposed bone, and the dentist will look at that next month. My speech/chewing therapist remains confident that I can be eating enough solid food to survive a week or two in Europe in May. I’m still on an all-liquid diet. I reported to Dr. H that I was feeling rather like a weenie because I hurt too much to chew solid food. He suggested I stay with the weenie factor for a while as the bone could still break which would be a very bad thing. 


So I continue to rock and roll on the road to recovery. Wish my recovery could do something as helpful as preventing World Wars One and Two. But I’m afraid I’m gonna have to live with the knowledge that the best any of us is gonna get out of my surviving throat cancer is a few good meals, photographs of snakes and flowers, some decent jokes, and the occasional oddball work of art. 


I’ll take it!!!!!!