Hindsight, on the other hand, can be fucked with, and how.
In May 1914, J.C. McKay’s, Drapers, of Kalgoorlie, declared by way of advertisement, their forthcoming sale was to be ‘The Greatest Event of 1914’. Well, you know, you can’t help it if you fail to predict the odd international conflagration. But to follow up two months later with yet another sale, this time trumpeted, ‘What a slaughter;’ that’s just plain carelessness.
Some seven months later, with Jerry now causing a fearful hullabaloo across Belgium, Sir Oliver Lodge, that well-known Edwardian boffin, stood before an expectant crowd to inaugurate science week in good old Blighty. Though such a doughty personage would never refer to the awful carnage on the Western Front – for security reasons, you understand – he did betray the emotional turmoil in which the nation was mired, a result of the horrendous casualty rates being chalked up in Flanders. Ollie claimed to have scientific evidence that life continued after death. Oh, sure, he never deigned to reveal that evidence, but imagine the reassurance given to the thousands who had just lost loved ones. Ollie, you see, had communicated with the dead. And, poor man, he had just lost his son on the Western Front. Spiritualism would, as a direct result of those many, many similar untimely deaths, become very popular in England during and after the Great War. But it took a Knight of the Realm to lend it a pseudo scientific basis. L. Ron Hubbard could have done well to have checked out the gravitas lent by hereditary qualifications.
