History doesn’t always move in a straight line. Sometimes it just… trips. Take April 11, for instance. It is a day that carries an unusual amount of baggage, packed with everything from the mundane to the genuinely catastrophic. Standing here, staring at the ticker, I can hear the hum of the server room cooling units—a steady, mechanical drone that feels strangely disconnected from the chaos of the dates I’m sifting through.
It’s a mix of theater and tragedy. In 2011, Obama was at the Correspondents’ Dinner, taking jabs at Trump. It feels like a lifetime ago, or maybe just yesterday—hard to tell anymore. Before that, in 1968, LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act into law, a heavy, monumental pivot point. But then you look at 1966, and the mood shifts entirely. Charlie Company of the 2/16th Infantry was essentially used as bait at Xa Cam My. The relief efforts failed, friendly fire tore through the ranks, and the result was 36 dead and 71 wounded. It’s the kind of fact that makes you stop typing for a second.
Some of these moments are just bizarre. In 1955, Chiang Kai-shek tried to take out Zhou Enlai by bombing an airliner. He missed. The target wasn’t even on the plane. Then there’s the 1950 incident near Albuquerque where a B-29 crashed, detonating the conventional explosives of a nuclear bomb—thankfully, there was no fissile core installed. Imagine if that had gone differently. Or the 1862 story of Gen. Fitz John Porter drifting over Confederate lines in a rogue balloon during the Siege of Yorktown. He made it back, which is… lucky, I suppose.
Let’s not forget the institutional failings, either. Wilson ordered federal agencies to segregate by race in 1913. That’s a stain that stayed. Or Dick Cheney getting booed at the Nationals’ opener in 2006. It’s a strange juxtaposition, seeing the weight of civil rights law sitting right next to a politician getting jeered at a baseball game.
Everything overlaps. You look at 2002, when Venezuelan generals swapped Hugo Chavez for Pedro Carmona with a nudge from the CIA, and then you jump back to 1985, where Reagan was supposed to visit a cemetery in Bitburg. The plan was to honor both American and German soldiers, but it turned out the site was restricted to Waffen SS. A massive, messy oversight.
It’s a lot to process. Between Richard Whitney’s 1938 stint for larceny on the floor of the NYSE and Truman firing MacArthur in ’51 for insubordination, it feels like the world is constantly trying to correct its own course. Or maybe it’s just spinning. Actually, it feels like we’re just reading the error logs of the 20th century.