The President’s popularity soars. His ambitious legislative agenda seems inevitable. His party is united behind him while his opposition is disorganized and ineffectual.

Then things change.

The opposition gets its act together, rallying around issues that have little to do with the legislation in question.  Those attacks and a sense of inaction drive the President’s approval ratings way down. It’s an election year, so members of his own party start pulling away, refusing to support the President’s agenda for fear of riding a sinking ship into election day.

Sound familiar? It’s the plot of both 2010’s cable news channels and of the 1995 film The American President.

“Weights and measures may be ranked among the necessaries of life, to every individual of human society. They enter into economical arrangement and daily concerns of every family. They are necessary to every occupation of human industry, to the distribution and security of every species of property, to every transaction of trade in commerce, to the labors of the husbandman, to the ingenuity of the artificer, to the studies of the philosopher, to the reaches of the antiquarian, to the navigation of the mariner and the marches of the soldier; to all the exchanges of peace and all the operations of war.”

Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, 1821

A note on sources:

For the factual background of this article, I relied heavily on an article by Hector Vera at the New School for Social Research. It’s short, interesting, available here and well worth a read.

For pop culture uses of the English System of Measurement, I tried a crowdsourcing experiment, calling on friends and family to help me list instances of popular culture featuring units of measurement. Dozens of them responded to a query on Facebook or the hijacking of otherwise pleasant conversation. I am in their debt.

Since its introduction during the era of rationalism that followed the French revolution, the decimal metric system has spread to the vast majority of the world. Universally standardized weights and measures, easily converted even by those who can only multiply and divide by 10 provide obvious advantages to international science and trade. By the mid 20th century, the world was basically divided with the UK, its Commonwealth and the USA using the English standard system and everyone else on metric. Today, only three countries continue to reject the metric system: Burma/Myanmar, Liberia and the United States of America.

A quick look at those three countries:

Obviously, the US is a bit of an exception here, if for no other reason than that we finished our civil war a long time ago.

Since the beginnings of Western civilization, we have understood that knowledge, like freedom, isn’t free.  While we respect the time and effort it takes to learn, we long for a shortcut, a free sandwich from the lunch lady of the mind.  Because it takes so long to acquire and because time is #1 on the list of finite resources, knowledge has always had value. Since the invention of writing, however, that value has been in decline. Thanks to modern technologies, individual facts are worth their weight in Zimbabwean dollars in today’s market.  That devaluation has changed the way we work, the way we learn, and most importantly on a site about pop culture, the way we tell stories.

Ancient astronomers spent decades memorizing the sky.  Their ability to predict eclipses, equinoxes and such made these men high priests.  Then we invented writing, and suddenly, those young whippersnapper priests were spending their nights sitting on the couch, watching the latest episode of Gilgamesh, trusting in written sources for their sacrifices instead of the uphill-both-ways astronomy of their elders.   A couple of thousand years later, Guttenberg opened up the whole deal to the plebians and suddenly, knowledge is off the gold standard.

“Books were prohibitively expensive in the so-called ‘good old days.’ In colonial America, in 1760, a cheap schoolbook cost twice as much as a good pair of leather shoes; Smollett’s Complete History of England cost as much as eighty pairs of shoes, six head of cattle, or thirty hogs. An ordinary laborer had to work two days to earn enough money to buy the cheap schoolbook, or 144 days to buy the Smollett. The modern innovations of mass production and marketing have brought down the cost of a paperback to only slightly more than the American minimum wage.”

–Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, p. 52

These days, whatever the RIAA says, information is free.  Google, Napster, Wikipedia and friends put all the world’s data on the internet and iPhone gave us free* and instant access to that information anytime and anywhere.

At lunch with a guy/girl who’s into Iraqi history? 10 seconds from now you can show her the Gilgamesh story in the original cuneiform.

Out for a fancy dinner that night and want to impress him/her with your knowledge of the stars?  There’s an app for that.

Can’t think of any good pillow talk?  Talk about the implications to society of the fact that the iPhone can now solve a Rubik’s Cube.

Now that your date’s over, we’re here to talk about pop culture, so let’s move on and take a look at how knowledge has been treated in our stories.

Since 1908, Hollywood has been churning out adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Every portrayal detective in literature, film or television harkens back to 221B Baker St. (51° 31’25.50” N, 0° 09’30.89” W)* for those seemingly insignificant details, the flawed but determined investigator, and the big reveal at the end. Even medical shows are cheating off Doyle these days.

With examples ranging from the fabulous (Basil Rathbone, both on film and on the radio) to the awful (much of the Young Sherlock Holmes series), Holmes and his stories are well trodden territory, but there’s hope for tomorrow’s film will have something new. For the first time, we’ll get see Sherlock Holmes portrayed as a superhero by Robert Downey Jr., an actor who plays a good superhero.

Since Aristotle (and probably before that), humans have asked themselves: Do we really have free will? ABC is currently attempting an interesting answer to that question with its new show, FlashForward. In doing so, they inadvertently make Joseph Fiennes a god.

In 2008 and 2009, the zombies have taken over. From the multiplex to the classics of 10th grade literature, the shambling undead hordes have gnawed their way into America’s hearts and skulls since they first appeared in 1968.

But the real origins of today’s zombies don’t lie with George Romero or Dan O’Bannon. Nor do they come from the Voo-Doo mind-control zombie films of the 1940’s. No, the first zombies to invade our popular culture died 3700 years ago, appeared in popular American literature in 1868 and appeared on screen in 1932. They were called Mummies and it seems that they’ve been forgotten this Halloween.

The seasonal shelf at Barnes & Noble. Lots of zombies, several vampires, a couple of ghosts, a pack of Shechner's werewolves and a Frankenstein. Where my Mummies at?

The ancient Romans, the world’s first tourists, used to visit Egypt to see the pyramids and look at mummies because those things were old. 2,000 years ago, they were 2,000 years old. Like us and Madonna, the Romans believed that the ancients knew magical secrets that we have since forgotten. We look for those secrets in the page of Dan Brown novels, but the Romans only had Virgil, so they brought home real unearthed mummies instead. Either as souvenirs in an age before site-specific shot glasses or ground up and ingested as medicine, thousands of mummies made their way to Europe and into the public imagination as something powerful, mysterious and potentially sinister.

If Mummyx causes plague, boils, frogs or the death of your firstborn, stop taking Mummyx and consult your physician.

After the Arabs conquered Egypt, the trade dried up and the European fascination with Egypt didn’t return until the end of the 18th century when Napoleon’s archaeologists found the Rosetta Stone. The 19th century was simply giddy over Egyptology. (What other country should have its own ‘ology’? Sound off in the comments.) As the fine folks at the British Museum plundered every grave they could find, Western writers recognized the inherent creepiness of grave robbing and started writing books about it.

Three major mummy works of the 19th and early twentieth centuries were, in order of coolness, “The Mummy’s Foot” by Theophile Gautier (1847), Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker (1903), and “Lost in the Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott (1868). That’s right, in between Little Women and Little Men, Alcott wrote a short story about the undead.

The three stories basically follow the same plot: person comes into possession of a mummy or a piece thereof, mummy is not as dead as originally hoped, vaguely magical bad things happen until whatever is disturbing the mummy’s rest is put right. Moral of the story: stop robbing graves you sick bastards.

Ultimately, you’ve never heard of any of these. They’re not that good, whatever the New York Times says. Stoker’s plot cowers behind impenetrable prose, Gautier’s story focuses on his protagonist’s great taste in home décor (the titular mummy’s foot is a new paperweight), and Alcott’s most horrific moment involves deadly Egyptian flower seeds. In none of them is there an ancient, rotting corpse coming to get someone. That took the magic of cinema.

In 1922, Howard Carter discovered the previously un-grave-robbed tomb of King Tut and the world’s Egypt fetish hit an all time high. Why it took ten years to greenlight, we’ll never know, but in 1932, Boris Karloff first played an undead creature, shambling across the screen, bringing inevitable doom. He and director Karl Freund, who served as cinematographer on both Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and “I Love Lucy,” where he’s credited with developing the first three-camera sit-com, gave us many of the tropes that horror has come to rely on.

Mouth technology has come a long way since 1932.

Their story, most familiar to us from the once fun and now thoroughly unwatchable Brendan Fraser franchise, has Prince Imhotep cursed for all eternity for falling in love with the Pharaoh’s main squeeze, then killing the boss. Instead of just having him buried/eaten alive, they have him buried/eaten alive in a way that leaves open the possibility that he’ll come back with god-like powers. Say what you want about the American penal system, it has at least replaced apotheosis with a parole board.

The real Imhotep was one of the ancient world’s great architects. To someone from the Old Kingdom, these movies would be like us running from a reincarnated Frank Lloyd Wright.

Having endured that harsh/stupid form of punishment for thousands of years, Imhotep comes back, as Belinkie put it, as an ancient, bandage wrapped, unstoppable Terminator whose existence means certain death for someone. Unlike a zombie, the mummy takes things personally. If you spent much of your life and fortune preparing for the afterlife, had your viscera removed and your brain pulled out of your nose, then found out that eternal life meant millennia of dust and darkness followed by grave robbers screwing with you, you might take things personally too.

So this Halloween, go ahead and put on your zombie costume (or better yet, an Overthinking It “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains” shirt) and have your fun. Just remember the wisdom of the ages, respect your elders and show the mummies some respect.