If you have ever shaken your fist at the heavens and wailed, “This is the worst day ever!” Washington author Michael Farquhar would beg to disagree. However bad your day may be going, it probably isn’t historically bad.
Not as bad as April 28, 1789, was for William Bligh of the H.M.S. Bounty, when his second-in-command, Fletcher Christian, led a mutiny precipitated by a fight, it seems, over stolen coconuts. (Who knew?)
Or June 8, 1998, when Nigerian military dictator Sani Abacha died of a heart attack while in bed with three women, none of whom was his wife.
Or April 20, 1991, when the cast of “Saturday Night Live” had to put up with the surliest, unfunniest host in the show’s history: wooden action star Steven Seagal.
These anecdotes are all gathered in Michael’s new book, “More Bad Days in History: The Delightfully Dismal Day-by-Day Saga of Ignominy, Idiocy and Incompetence Continues.”
The book is a daily reminder that things could always be worse. It required endless hours of searching for the nadirs of human experience. That meant poring through history books, memoirs, letters, journals and newspapers. Michael needed something for each day, after all.
“It’s fun,” he said. “I have a broad, superficial familiarity with the historic spectrum, but by no means am I an expert. I read a fair amount. I have smart friends — much smarter than I am — who are voracious readers and they’ll say, ‘Oh my God, this would be perfect.’ ”
Said Michael: “None of this would be worthwhile or interesting if it wasn’t 100 percent true. You can’t go ‘Rumor has it . . . ’ ”
Michael is particularly interested in people who — because of their hubris, depravity or cluelessness — bring bad days upon themselves.
These are people like the cruel crown prince of Korea, Prince Sado, who was so rapacious and murderous that on July 4, 1762, he was sealed inside a rice chest by his father, King Yeongjo.
“It’s not so much that I like doom and gloom stories,” Michael said. “I think — and I hope the readers agree — that they’re entertaining. People stumbling all over themselves and getting egg on their face is entertainment. That’s what introduces a lot of people to history and gives them an appreciation for the other side of history that they literally did not learn in history class.”
For example, you probably learned that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a liberal. You may have learned he had a complicated relationship with his wife, Eleanor. But you probably didn’t know about Feb. 10, 1940, when Eleanor invited thousands of members of the left-wing American Youth Council to gather on the White House lawn, only to have FDR tick everyone off by suggesting in a speech to the group that some of their opinions were “absolute twaddle.”
I know Michael, 56, from his decade at The Washington Post. A graduate of Catholic University, he was hired in 1991 as a copy aide — answering phones, delivering mail and running copy. When it was announced that Queen Elizabeth II would be making a state visit that year, he wrote a piece that collected various scandals of the royal family.
After reading it, the then-editor of Style, Mary Hadar, said, “This sounds like something Weingarten would like.”
That was Gene Weingarten, the demented Harold Ross of the Style section, who ushered into print Michael’s dive into the messier aspects of the Windsors. That led eventually to a contract for his first book, 2001’s “A Treasury of Royal Scandals.”
Michael left The Post, trading answering phones for writing books. “More Bad Days in History” is his eighth. It’s a sequel to 2015’s “Bad Days in History.” Both were published by National Geographic, whose editorial director, Lisa Thomas, came up with the idea of a daily calendar of the ignominious.
A pair of principals guide the process for deciding what makes the cut, Michael said. There can’t be anything too horrible. (No genocides.) And there can’t be anything too obvious. Everyone knows the Titanic sank on the night of April 14, 1912. A bad day, surely. But more interesting is that a month later the father of one of the musicians who went down with the ship received a bill for his son’s uniform, which had not been returned.
I asked Michael if he worried that after a very bad year, readers might not be so interested in a book full of very bad days.
“I thought about that a lot,” he said.
But as vaccination rates went up and infection rates went down, he decided people might be in the mood for some dark fun.
Said Michael: “It’s not really negative. I like to think it’s a celebratory view of history.”
Twitter: @johnkelly
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.
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Had a bad day? It can’t be worse than the bad days compiled in this new book. - The Washington Post
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