400. Era Discrimination

Whaaaaat!  You're not going to call the Dark Ages dark?

"Not if I can help it.  You think I want to go to a history conference and have people thinking my period isn't as good as theirs?  Get snooted by all those Enlightenment bastards?  Somebody dumb as dirt going ahead of me on the program just because he's got an Isaac Newton?  Nosirree."

How about life in Greece after the Dorian invasions?  Would you call that dark?

"I don't call any age dark.  If you can't say something nice about an age don't say anything at all."

So you're going to sit by the ruins of your temples with your wife just raped and your daughter carried off because you couldn't buy off the rapists with your coins because the Dorians or whoever the hell they were didn't know anything about coinage, or anything about anything, anything civilized, and their life is going to be your life but you're not going to call it dark.

"I don't know that's the way it was with the Dorians.  If I called their life dark it would be because I don't know much about it.  My 'dark' would mean 'dark to me.'  My view would be dark.  There's no written record of that era, you know."

That's because nobody could write! The Dorians really swept the place clean. They blew away the alphabet, the whole fucking Mycenean alphabet.

"Fucking alphabet?  You talk like a barbarian.  And an ignoramus.  Alphabets don't fuck."

I am not an ignoramus.  I know that when the Roman Empire disintegrated Europe lost its roads and coinage and ability to control bandits and pirates, it lost its commerce, which lost it its cities, then its towns, taking it down to a few villages in the woods; it lost its schools and scholars, taking learning down to a few monasteries, it lost law, it lost literacy, it lost sanitation, it lost health, it lost population.  I call myself a scholar and I call the period from 500 to 1000 AD dark.

"Listen buddy, I made a bundle out of that period.  A bundle.  Do you know how many talks I gave?  Paid talks?  And I'm a scholar in good standing with every prof who's called himself a scholar since the sixties."

I see.  That's what's right for you and your friends and I'm stuck.  For something nice.  How about, "Dandy, just dandy"?