April 19, 2011

420 Ain't So Bad....

For years, I’ve commemorated 420. Except the literal train touring the Dole Plantation in Hawaii, I’ve never ridden the Pineapple Express. I’ve merely bombarded my fellowmen with trivia about the historic date. It’s just generally an awful day in history. Besides being the cannabis feast day, it’s Hitler’s birthday. It’s also the day not-very-American-supported troops failed to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. It’s also the day of the Columbine shooting. Generally bad stuff all around.

Although I started telling people 420 trivia back in the eighth grade, more recently I’ve been writing a “This Day in History” column for the Pepperdine Graphic. It lets me peruse Wikipedia, ground my historical understanding in concrete events, and disseminate history humorously. I have a lot of fun with it.

But the Graphic’s last issue of the semester hit the stands on Thursday, 7 April. (There are almost certainly still copies on the vermillion rack in Firestone Fieldhouse. Pick one up if you haven’t yet. Also, check out Currents.) Thus, if I want to rehash events that happened on 420, I must do it on this, my blog.

My goal in this entry is to redeem 420 from the throes of wacky tobaccy, the Führer, American military debacles, and Coloradan school shootings. I want to prove that even on the darkest of days, many good things happen too.

On 420 in 1657, the colony of New Amsterdam (present-day New York City) granted Jews the freedom of religion.

Jews first came to New Amsterdam back in 1654. They came in two waves. First, Ashkenazic Jews arrived with passports from the Dutch West India Company from (Old) Amsterdam. The second wave were Sephardic Jews escaping Portuguese persecution in Brazil. Since I don't have much more information on that, here’s a list of famous Jews.

Famous Ashkenazic, read ‛German’, Jews include psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Zionist Theodor Herzl, the physicist and highly quotable Albert Einstein, despairing author Franz Kafka, Israeli PM Golda Meir, American composer George Gershwin, and... diary-writer Anne Frank. Quite a lineup.

Famous Sephardic Jews, or Jews from the Iberian Peninsula include rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Conservative British PM and demigod Benjamin Disraeli, “New Colossus” poet Emma Lazarus, and Simpsons voice actor Hank Azaria. In my book, while the Sephardic Jews make a good showing, they just don’t measure up to the Ashkenazic Jews.

That having been said, on 420, 1657 the Dutch gave these new Manhattanites the right to worship freely. This was no small feat, for it went against the will of the ornery, peg-legged director-general of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, who would still not allow the Jews to build a synagogue. Little did he know how thoroughly Jews would come to dominate the culture of New York. And little did he know his colony would be conquered by James II, Duke of York and become New York. Today, Stuyvesant’s name lives on in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z were born— “Bed-Stuy, Do or Die.”

315 years later, in 1972, Apollo 16 landed on the Moon.

The lunar module had an engine crisis before landing, and Thomas Mattingly, the astronaut who was removed from the infamous Apollo 13 mission at the last minute, was able to deal with the issue, correct course, and land the craft. This was the penultimate manned mission to the Moon, and astronauts roamed the surface in the lunar rover and collected over 200 pounds of moon rock, exfoliating the pores of the chronically dry-skinned Man in the Moon.

Four years later, former Beatle George Harrison sang the “Lumberjack Song” with Monty Python.

When Harrison died, Royal Albert Hall hosted a tribute concert to George where a reunited Python crew, including Tom Hanks (look for him in the lower right-hand corner of the Mounties) sang an ode to the enthusiastically transvestite Canadian. I can’t really make any joke about this song to make it any funnier than it already is. Here’s the link:


420 has also been a good day for the Chicago Bulls. In Jordan’s 1986 rookie season, he scored a then record 63 points in a playoff game against the Boston Celtics. Larry Bird described the rookie: “God disguised as Michael Jordan.”

On this same day ten years later, the Chicago Bulls won a still record 72 games in a single season. That means they only lost 10 games in the whole season. Incredible. The Bulls went on to defeat the Seattle Sonics to win the NBA Finals, making it their fourth win in the ’90s. The really amazing thing in those days, however, was the Bulls’ starting lineup video. So good.


My point is not that these events outweigh the bad things that happened on 420. I really don’t think there’s any way to measure that. My point is that no day, no matter how bad, is all bad. Whether it’s begrudgingly bestowed freedom of religion, a Moon landing, a Beatle making his mark on British comedy, or just generally a good day for Chicago sports history (and thus world history), no day is as dark as it seems. Remember that this 420.

No comments:

Post a Comment