it's one hundred years to the day that gavrilo shot franz and sophie as they rode through the streets of sarajevo...it was a sunday and th elast day of their visit to the imperial outpost...sophie went along because she could be photographed with her husband there...franz had married nobility ( sophie was a countess ) but he hadn't married a princess or a grand duchess..so when they were in vienna the rigid court protocol required sophie to stand behind the princesses and grad duchesses of the court...so no photographs of the couple in public in vienna...sophie was freer away from the imperial center and so she died with her husband...gavrilo was a bosnian serb nationalist so his memory there is somewhat clouded by more recent events...he was the catalyst, not the cause of the first world war which resulted in, among billions of other things...the french and brits drawing abstract and artificial borders in the "middle east" after the war to ease their administrative burdens while creating an ethnic and religious tragedy that still plays on today in seemingly endless conflict...the bolshevik revolution which beget stalin and a teleological bureaucracy that took on a life of its own embedded in a secular religion in which parentage was ( and still is in all secular religions ) original sin, poison gas, tanks, fighter aircraft, massive artillery...and on and on...the armistice, the treaty of versailles the "stab in the back" and, along with the poison gas business, hitler...an entry of the u s into the wider world of imperialism in which we had been mere dilettantes before the war flouncing around cuba and the phillipines ( look at us now! )...eerie to be able to pinpoint an historical catalyst so precisely...causation is non-linear...this gave it focus momentarily before it caromed off into history...but not before franz and sophie's driver turned down the wrong street and stopped to back up giving gavrilo his perfect moment.
