DAVE BARRY SLEPT HERE

By

Dave Barry

Fawcett Columbine

New York

Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright (C) 1989 by Dave Barry

Maps copyright (C) 1989 by Anita Karl and Jim Kemp

A Fawcett Columbine Book

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

Conventions.

Published in the United States by Ballantine books, a division of Random

House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-91513

This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc., New York.

Cover design by Loretta Leiva

Cover illustration by Van Howell

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: June 1990

America loves Dave Barry

"Brilliant ... Barry not only changes the face of American history, he

practically has to be restrained from taking up hammer and chisel to change

the faces on Mount Rushmore as well."--Associated Press

"If you like to have fun with American history, here's your chance. Dave

Barry Slept Here is a zany, delightful twisting of just about everything

important in America's past."--St. Louis Post Dispatch

"A delight from the top of his introduction to the tip of his last

outrageous footnote."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Impressive ... Genuinely fresh insight ... Dave Barry Slept Here might

be the rallying point for reformers determined to restore rigor and bite to

the public school curriculum."--Greensboro News and Record

"I wish I would have taken Dave Barry's history class in high school

instead of the one I did. Instead of getting in trouble for writing all over

the desk, I would have been excused for an upset stomach from laughing so

hard. And I would still be laughing now, years later."--Grand Rapids Press

"All the history you'll ever need to know."--Tampa Tribune-Times

THIS GUY HAS ALSO WRITTEN

Dave Barry Turns 40

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

Homes and Other Black Holes

Bad Habits

The Taming of the Screw

Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead

Claw Your Way to the Top

Dave Barry's Guide to Marriage and/or Sex

Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

Dedication

For Robert, who really was born on October 8

CONTENTS

Introduction...............................................................vii

ONE Deflowering a Virgin Continent...........................................3

TWO Spain Gets Hot...........................................................8

THREE England Starts Some Fun Colonies......................................16

FouR The Colonies Develop a Life-style......................................24

FIVE The Birthing Contractions of a Nation..................................31

six Kicking Some British Butt...............................................37

SEVEN The Forging of a Large, Wasteful Bureaucracy..........................46

EIGHT A Brash Young Nation Gets into Wars and Stuff.........................54

NINE Barging Westward.......................................................62

TEN The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball.....................70

ELEVEN The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven.....................................75

TWELVE Groping Toward Empire................................................85

THIRTEEN Deep International Doo-doo.........................................95

FOURTEEN A Nation Gets Funky...............................................103

FIFTEEN Severe Economic Bummerhood.........................................109

SIXTEEN Major Nonhumorous Events Occur.....................................117

SEVENTEEN International Tension City.......................................124

EIGHTEEN The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death.......................133

NINETEEN The Sixties: A Nation Gets High and Has Amazing Insights, Many of

Which Later On Turn Out to Seem Kind of Stupid........................143

TWENTY The Seventies: A Relieved Nation Learns That It Does Not Actually Need

a President...........................................................153

TWENTY-ONE The Reagan-Bush Years: Napping Toward Glory.....................163

Index......................................................................177

INTRODUCTION

"WE THE PEOPLE ..." These are the words that begin the Declaration of

Independence. Or maybe we are thinking of the Gettysburg Address. No matter.

The point is, these words are written on an extremely historic yellowed

document that we, as a nation, keep in a special vault in Washington, D.C.,

where, each working day, it is cherished by employees of the Document

Cherishing Division of the Federal Bureau of Historic Yellowed Objects.

And with good reason. For these three words remind us that we live in a

nation that was built by human beings. It is easy to forget this, especially

when we are riding in the coach section of a commercial aircraft, sitting on

seats apparently built by and for alien beings who are fourteen inches tall

and capable of ingesting airline "omelets" manufactured during the Korean War

(1949-1953). At times like this, it is important that we look back at the

people and the events that got us to where we are today, for, in the words of

a very wise dead person, "A nation that does not know its history is doomed to

do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test."

And that was the main reason why we wrote this book, aside from wanting

to become so wealthy that we shall routinely leave motor yachts as tips.

Tragically, many Americans know very little about the history of their own

country. We constantly see surveys that reveal this ignorance, especially

among our high school students, 78 percent of whom, in a recent nationwide

multiple-choice test, identified Abraham Lincoln as "a kind of lobster."

That's right: more than three quarters of our nation's youth could not

correctly identify the man who invented the telephone.

What is the cause of this alarming situation? Partly, of course, it is

that our young people are stupid. Young people have always been stupid,

dating back to when you were a young person (1971-1973) and you drank an

entire quart of Midnight Surprise Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping and threw up

in your best friend's father's elaborate saltwater aquarium containing $6,500

worth of rare and, as it turned out, extremely delicate fish. (You thought we

didn't know about that? We know everything. We are a history book.)

But another major part of the problem is the system used to teach history

in our schools, a system known technically, among professional educators, as

the Boring Method. You were probably taught via this method, which features

textbooks that drone on eternally as follows:

EARLY EXPLORATIONS

The region was first explored by the Spanish explorer Juan

Ponce de Rigeur (1534-1579), who in 1541 was commissioned

by King Charles "Chuck" IV of England (1512-1583) under

the terms of the Treaty of Weems (1544) as authorized by

Pope Bilious XIV (1511-1598) to end the Nine Years, Three

Months, and the Better Part of a Week War (May 4,

1534-August 8, 1543, at about 1:30 P.m.), under which

France (1243-present) would cede an area "north of the

17th parallel, west of the 163rd longitude, and convenient

to shopping" to England in exchange for those lands

originally conquered by Denmark during the Reign of Large

Unattractive Feathered Hats (1387-1396) and subsequently

granted to Italy under the Treaty of ...

And so on. Little wonder that our young people choose to ignore their

nation's history and instead focus their intellectual energies on procuring

designer clothing. Not that you, the reader, should feel superior. You are

probably not such a history whiz yourself. In fact, we are willing to bet

that you cannot even name the man who served as Gerald Ford's running mate in

1976 (It doesn't matter.). Which is why it is a darned good thing for all

concerned that this book has been published. Because this book does not waste

the reader's valuable brain cells with such trivial details as when various

events actually occurred. Oh, sure, it contains many exact dates--it is,

after all, a history book--but you will notice that we have tried to make

these dates as easy as possible to remember by making them all start with

"October 8," as in "October 8, 1729" or "October 8, 1953." We chose this

particular date after carefully weighing a number of important historical

criteria, such as (a) it is our son's birthday.

In our view, the one-date system of history has the same advantages, in

terms of simplifying things, as the metric system of measurement, which has

taken this country by storm, and we look forward to the day when history

textbooks carry this system even further and contain only one year, so that a

child will be able to get all the way through the secondary educational system

without ever having to grasp any concept other than "October 8, 1947" (We were

born in 1947.). And that is only one of the many revolutionary advances

contained here. Another one is: We have left out the dull parts. Take, for

example, the Role of the Plow in the Settlement of Nebraska. "The hell with

the Role of the Plow in the Settlement of Nebraska"--that is our motto. This

philosophy left us with plenty of extra room, which enabled us to provide you,

the reader, with large, restful expanses of white space, as well as numerous

riveting "behind-the-scenes" historical anecdotes that you will not find in a

normal history book because we made them up.

In conclusion, we hope that, in reading this work, you gain a deeper and

broader and taller understanding of how We, the People, through the sweat of

our armpits, created this great nation, a nation of which it can truly be

stated, in the words of the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie (October 8,

1912-October 8, 1967.):

This land is your land,

This land is my land,

Looks like one of us

Has a forged deed to this land.

CHAPTER ONE

Deflowering a virgin Continent

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, America was very different. There

was no civilization: no roads, no cities, no shopping malls, no Honda

dealerships. There were, of course, obnoxious shouting radio commercials for

car dealerships; these have been broadcast toward Earth for billions of years

by the evil Planet of Men Wearing Polyester Sport Coats, and there is nothing

anybody can do to stop them. But back then, you see, there was no way to

receive them, so things were pretty peaceful.

The only inhabitants of America in those days were animals such as the

deer and the antelope, who were engaged primarily in playing; and the buffalo,

or "bison," (Meaning "buffalo.") who mainly roamed. The bison must have been

an awe-inspiring sight: millions of huge, majestic animals, forming humongous

herds, their hooves thundering like, we don't know, thunder or something,

roaming from the Mississippi River all the way across the Great Plains to the

Rocky Mountains, which they would smash into headfirst at speeds ranging

upward of thirty-five miles per hour, then fall down. They were majestic,

those bison, but stupid.

But all of this changed twenty thousand years ago with the construction

of the Land Bridge to Asia, which was completed on October 8. Suddenly, the

ancestors of the Indians and the Eskimos, clans who called themselves "The

Ancestors of the Indians and the Eskimos," had a way to get to North America.

Still, it was not an easy trek: They had to traverse hundreds of miles of

frigid snow-swept wasteland, which was cold, and each was permitted to carry

only two small pieces of luggage. Eventually they arrived in an area very

near what we now know as Kansas, and they saw that it was a place of gently

rolling hills and clear flowing streams and abundant fertile earth, and they

looked upon this place, and they said, "Nah" ("No."). Because quite frankly

they were looking for a little more action, which is how come they ended up on

the East Coast. There they formed tribes and spent the next several thousand

years thinking up comical and hard-to-spell names for major rivers. Also they

made a great many Native American handicrafts such as pots, although at the

time there was not much of a retail market for these, so the Native Americans

wound up having to use them as household implements.

During this same period another group of early Americans, the Mayans,

were constructing a culture down in Mexico featuring a calendar so advanced

that it can still, to this very day, tell you where various celestial bodies

such as Venus and the Moon will be at any given moment. They will be out in

space, states the miraculous Mayan calendar.

Meanwhile, way the hell far away in someplace like Finland, Vikings were

forming. These were extremely rugged individuals whose idea of a fun time was

to sail over and set fire to England, which in those days was fairly easy to

ignite because it had a very high level of thatch, this being the kind of roof

favored by the local tribespeople--the Klaxons, the Gurnseys, the Spasms, the

Wasps, the Celtics, and the Detroit Pistons. No sooner would they finish

thatching one when the Vikings, led by their leader, Eric the Red (so called

because that was his name), would come charging up, Zippos blazing, and that

would be the end of that roof. This went on for thousands of years, during

which time the English tribespeople became very oppressed, not to mention

damp.

Then there arose among them a young man who many said would someday

become the king of all of England because his name was King Arthur. According

to legend, one day he was walking along with some onlookers, when he came to a

sword that was stuck in a stone. He grasped the sword by the handle and gave

a mighty heave, and to the amazement of the onlookers, he suddenly saw his

shadow, and correctly predicted that there would be six more weeks of winter.

This so impressed the various tribes that Arthur was able to unite them and

drive off the Vikings via the bold and resourceful maneuver of serving them

relentlessly bland food, a tradition that remains in England to this day

despite numerous armed attempts by the French to invade with sauces.

Thus it was that the Vikings set off across the Atlantic in approximately

the year 867--on October 8--to (a) try to locate North America and (b) see if

it was flammable. Did these hardy adventurers reach the New World centuries

before Columbus? More and more, historians argue that they did, because this

would result in a new national holiday, which a lot of historians would get

off. But before we can truly know the answer to this question, we must do a

great deal more research. And quite frankly, we would rather not.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Would you buy a car from a dealership that ran one of those obnoxious

shouting radio commercials? Neither would we.

2. Have you noticed that you hardly ever see Zippo lighters anymore? Explain.

3. Are you aware that there is a traditional British dish called "cock-a-leeky

soup"? Really.

CHAPTER TWO

Spain Gets Hot

For many hundreds of years, European traders had dreamed of discovering a

new route to the East, but every time they thought they had found it, they

would start whimpering, and their wives would wake them up. So they continued

to use the old route, which required them to cross the Alps on foot, then take

a sailing ship across the Mediterranean to Egypt, then take a camel across the

desert, then take another sailing ship back across the Mediterranean, then

change to the IRT Number 6 Local as far as 104th Street, and then ask

directions. Thus it would often take them years to get to the East, and when

they finally did, they were almost always disappointed. "This is it?" they

would say. "This is the East?"

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking

for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the

West. The problem here was that the immediate west was covered with the

Atlantic Ocean, which represented a major obstacle because back in those days

many people believed that the world was flat. Today, of course, we know that

this is true only in heavily Protestant states such as Iowa, but back then

people believed that if you went too far, you might sail right off the edge.

In fact, you would probably want to sail off the edge, since the average

sailing ship had about the same size and seaworthiness as a Yugo hatchback.

THE FORTUNATE INVENTION OF CERTAIN NAVIGATIONAL AIDS

Then, fortunately, along came the invention of certain navigational aids.

Chief among these was a very realistic doll that, when you inflated it, could

... WAIT! Wrong kind of aid! Our mistake! Chief among the navigational

aids was the compass, a device that, no matter where it is, always indicated

which way was north. This was a tremendous boon to early navigators, although

its value was diminished somewhat by the fact that the early voyages always

ended with the ship banging into the polar ice cap and everybody aboard

freezing to death. But eventually the compass was improved by the addition of

such features as: south, west, and even east again, and soon hardy (In the

sense of, "not tremendously bright.") mariners were able to venture far out

into the Atlantic before getting lost. Still, it was difficult to recruit new

sailors, even with the use of extensive advertising campaigns built around

catchy themes such as:

BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE!

Become a Hardy Mariner

"Get Lost and Die."

Eventually the breakthrough came that made modern navigation possible:

the discovery of longitudes and latitudes. These are thin black lines that go

all around Earth in a number of locations, so that all you have to do is

follow them, and you have a surefire way of getting wherever it is they go.

Of course they are difficult for the untrained eye to see; the early sailors

had to squint at the water for hours, which is why so many of them ended up

having to wear eye patches, especially in movies. But the hardy sacrifice

those early mariners made for us will never be forgotten, not as long as we

are reading this particular paragraph.

Meanwhile, in nearby Italy, Christopher Columbus was forming. As a

youth, he spent many hours gazing out to sea and thinking to himself: "Someday

I will be the cause of a holiday observed by millions of government workers."

The fact that he thought in English was only one of the amazing things about

the young Columbus. Another was his conviction that if he sailed all the way

across the Atlantic, he would reach India. We now know, thanks to satellite

photographs, that this makes him seem as stupid as a buffalo, although it

sounded pretty good when Columbus explained it to the rulers of Spain,

Ferdinand and his lovely wife, Imelda, who agreed to finance the voyage by

selling six thousand pairs of her shoes.

And so Columbus assembled a group of the hardiest mariners he could find.

These fellows were so hardy that, had the light bulb been invented at that

time, it would have taken at least three of these mariners to screw one in, if

you get our drift. On October 8, 1492 they set out across the storm-tossed

Atlantic in three tiny ships, the Ninia, the Pina Colada, and the Heidy-Ho

III. Fortunately Columbus kept a detailed log, so we can get some sense of

how long and arduous their journey was from revealing excerpts such as this:

October 8--Boy, is this journey ever long! Also arduous!

But finally, after numerous storm-tossed weeks, just when it seemed as if

Columbus and his men would never see land again, there came an excited cry

from the lookout.

"Hey!" he cried. "we forgot to put up the sails!"

And so they all had a hearty laugh, after which they hoisted the damned

things. A few hours later, on October 8, they came to an island, where

Columbus and a convenient interpreter waded ashore and had the following

historic conversation with a local tribal chief:

COLUMBUS: You guys are Indians, right?

TRIBAL CHIEF: Kham anonoda jawe. ("No. We came over from Asia about twenty

thousand years ago via the Land Bridge.")

COLUMBUs: Listen, we have spent many weeks looking for India in these three

storm-tossed, vomit-encrusted ships, and we have cannons pointing at your

wigwams, and we say you are Indians.

TRIBAL CHIEF: B'nomi kawa saki! ("Welcome to India!")

Thus the white men and the Native Americans were able, through the spirit

of goodwill and compromise, to reach the first in what would become a long

series of mutually beneficial, breached agreements that enabled the two

cultures to coexist peacefully for stretches of twenty and sometimes even

thirty days, after which it was usually necessary to negotiate new agreements

that would be even more mutual and beneficial, until ultimately the Native

Americans were able to perceive the vast mutual benefits of living in

rock-strewn sectors of South Dakota.

THE AGE OF EXPLORATION

When Columbus returned to Spain with the news of his discovery, everybody

became very excited and decided to have an Age of Exploration. Immediately, a

great many bold adventurers--Magellan, da Gama, de Soto, Chrysler, Picasso,

and others--set forth on Voyages of Discovery, only to have their ships bang

into each other and sink at the harbor entrance. But they boldly set out

again, this time in alphabetical order, and soon they had made some important

discoveries, the most important one being that what Columbus had discovered

was not India at all, but America, which explained why the inhabitants were

called "Native Americans." In Mexico and South America, the Spanish also

discovered highly advanced civilizations, which they wisely elected to convert

into ruins for use as future tourist attractions.

One of the most famous Spanish explorers was Juan Ponce de Leon

(literally, "John Punched the Lion"), who came to Florida seeking the mythical

Fontainebleau Hotel, where, according to legend, if you had one drink, you

could have another one for half price on weekdays between 4:00 and 5:30 P.m.

He never found it, but he did meet some natives who at first seemed

friendly--they gave him a free meal and guided tour of the area--but who then

subjected him to a vicious primitive ritual wherein they trapped him in a

small room and repeatedly explained to him the benefits of "time-sharing" in a

"vacation resort community" and refused to let him leave, until ultimately he

was forced to take his own life.

THE DECLINE OF SPAIN

On October 8, 1565, Spain declined.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. There's no IRT stop at 104th Street, is there?

2. Did you ever purchase time in a time-sharing resort? You did? Ha-ha!

3. This question is not technically related to the early Spanish explorations,

but we are curious: In the song "luie luie," by the Kingsmen, do you

think they are singing dirty words? Cite examples.

MAKE A SIMPLE COMPASS

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is

absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar

magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then

drop it into the water, and vola (literally, "you have a compass")--you have a

compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you

turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet

is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were

able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

CHAPTER THREE

England Starts Some Fun Colonies

By the sixteenth century at approximately 4:30 P.m., England was

experiencing a Renaissance. This took the form of Ben Jonson and of course

William Shakespeare, the immortal "Barge of Avon," whose plays continue to

amuse us to this very day with such hilarious and timely lines as:

What dost thine tinder knowest of thine face?

The weg-barrow canst not its row'l misplace!!

(From Antony and Cleopatra IV. Return of the Fungus People, Act II, Scene

III, seats 103 and 104.)

Ha-ha! Whew! Excuse us while we wipe away several tears of helpless

laughter! This Golden Age in England was called the "Elizabethan Era" after

the queen, Elizabeth Ann Era, who was known as the "Virgin Queen" because it

was not considered a tremendously smart move to call her the "Really Ugly

Queen." She inspired many men to leave England on extremely long voyages,

which led to expansion.

The first prominent expanding English person was Sir Francis Drake, who,

on one of the most famous dates in English history, October 8, defeated the

Spanish Armada ("El Armadillo de Espana"). This was a biggish armada that had

ruled the seas for many years, and nobody could defeat it until Sir Francis

Drake employed the classic military maneuver of hiding his entire fleet inside

a gigantic horse shaped like a Trojan. As you can imagine, this maneuver

worked to perfection, and soon the English "ruled the waves," which led to the

writing of the hit song "Hail Britannica":

Hail Britannica!

Britannica dum de dum.

Dum dum, da de dum dum

Da DEE dum DUM!

(repeat chorus)

(and books, a series of twenty-four unopened volumes.)

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE LOST COLONY

Another English person who existed at around this time was Sir Walter

Raleigh, who invented chivalry one day when he encountered the Virgin Queen

trying to get across a mud puddle, and he put his cloak over her head. She

was very grateful and would have married him immediately, except that he

suddenly remembered he had an appointment to sail to North America and found a

Lost Colony. He went to an area that he called Virginia, in honor of the fact

that it was located next to West Virginia, and he established a colony there,

and then--this was the darnedest thing--he lost it. "Think!" his friends

would say. "Where did you see it last?" But it was no use, and this

particular colony is still missing today. Sometimes you see its picture on

milk cartons.

Still, the English were undaunted. "Who the hell needs daunts?" was the

English motto in those days. And so a group of merchants decided to start

another colony, which they called Jamestown (later known as "Jimtown," and

still later, "JimBobtown"), located on an estuary (A person who works for an

insurance company.) of the Lester A. Hockermeyer, Jr., River. The leader of

Jamestown was "John Smith" (not his real name), under whose direction the

colony engaged in a number of activities, primarily related to starving. They

also managed to form the first primitive corporation, and, despite the fact

that they lacked food and clothing and housing, they courageously engaged in

various corporate activities. They would lie around in the snow, dictating

primitive memoranda to each other about the need to look into the feasibility

of forming a committee to examine the various long-term benefits and drawbacks

of maybe planting some corn. Somehow, they managed to survive those first few

harsh years, although at one point they were forced to eat their own

appointment calendars.

There is an old Virginia saying that goes: "The darkest part of the

tunnel is always just before the tollbooth." And this indeed turned out to be

true, for just when the Jamestown colonists were about to give up, they came

up with a promising new product concept: tobacco. With remarkable foresight,

these early executives recognized that there was a vast untapped market for a

product that consumers could set on fire and inhale so as to gradually turn

their lungs into malignant lumps of carbon. Soon the Jamestown colony was

shipping tons of tobacco back to England, and had even begun to develop

primitive advertising campaigns featuring pictures of rugged men on horseback

and slogans such as:

SMOKE TOBACCO

"It won't gradually turn your lungs into malignant lumps

of carbon!"

Although of course there have been many scientific advances in

advertising, such as having the rugged men ride in helicopters, this basic

message remains in use to this very day.

Another concept that was in the early stages of development in Virginia

was democracy. By 1619, a rudimentary legislature had formed, and several

years later it had mutated into two houses, called "the upper house" and

"Steve." For a bill to become law, it had to be passed by a two-thirds

majority of both houses, after which it was sent back to the king, James II,

who would tear it into pieces the size of postage stamps and feed them to his

dog, Bart XI. So it was not total democracy as we know it today, but it was a

start.

Yet all was not well. Because at the same time the clouds of religious

intolerance, propelled by a large arctic air mass of hatred, were forming a

major storm front of persecution, which was to result in one of the most

moving stories of courage and faith in all of American history, not to mention

a four-day weekend. We refer, of course, to the Puritans.

THE STORY OF THE PURITANS

The Puritans were an extremely religious group who lived in England and

did not believe in drinking or dancing or having sex with hooved animals.

They were very unpopular. So they decided to sail over to the New World,

where they would be free to worship as they chose and live in peace and

harmony and set fire to suspected witches.

And thus it was that in some specific year, the Puritans, taking with

them little more than stupid hats and an unwavering faith in Providence, (A

city in Rhode Island that, unbeknownst to the Puritans, had not been founded

yet.) set sail across the dark and treacherous North Atlantic in the

Mayflower, a cramped, frail ship of Panamanian registry. The crossing was

brutally harsh. Only two days out of port, a fierce storm destroyed most of

the shuffleboard equipment. As giant waves washed over their tiny ship,

tossing it about like a cork, the Puritans, realizing their fate was not in

their own hands, got down on their knees and, drawing on some inner strength,

threw up. Then they looked toward the heavens and vowed that if, by some

miracle, they were able to make it safely to their destination, they were

definitely going to get a new travel agent.

Finally, just when the Puritans were starting to think that maybe

drinking and dancing wouldn't be so bad after all, the lookout spotted the

coast of Massachusetts. This resulted in a tremendous hue and of course cry

aboard the ship as the Puritans rushed excitedly up on deck and shoved the

navigator overboard, because he was supposed to be aiming for Virginia.

By that point, however, the Mayflower, which had no shower facilities,

was starting to smell like the postgame laundry hamper of a professional

ice-hockey team, so the Puritans decided to row ashore and land at Plymouth

Rock (So called because it is shaped like a Plymouth.). But first, for

insurance purposes, they all had to sign the Mayflower Compact. This was a

historic document that set forth what would become some of our most

fundamental and cherished principles of government, as is shown by this direct

quotation:

6. No spitting on the sidewalk.

When the Puritans landed, they found themselves in a harsh and desolate

world, and they probably would have starved to death if not for the help of a

friendly local Native American named Squanto (Meaning "Native American.").

Squanto looked at the Puritans barging around the wilderness with their hats

and their comical Puritan muskets shaped like trombones at the end, and he

took pity on them. "Look," he said, because fortunately he spoke English,

"what you need to do is plant some corn." And so they did, and after a couple

of months it grew and ripened, and the Puritans, who by this time were

hungrier than ever, boiled it and ate it with butter and a little salt. "Next

time, you should try shucking it first," advised Squanto. Eventually, as you

would expect, a year went by. The Puritans decided that, all things

considered it had been a pretty good year, except for the fact that the vast

majority of them were at that point dead, so they decided to have the first

traditional Thanksgiving. They invited Squanto over to help in eating a

turkey ("Next time," advised the ever-helpful Squanto, "try cooking it

first"), after which they watched the Lions-Bears game. Then the Puritans

told Squanto that they were very grateful for all he had done, but that

frankly they would not be needing him anymore, so he and his tribe should go

find some other area to be natives of. In the next several years the Puritans

became prosperous and built New England, parts of which can still be seen

today.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why only hooved animals?

2. Did any of your ancestors come over on the Mayflower? So what?

3. If you were on the Detroit Lions, would you be ticked off about always

having to play on Thanksgiving? Explain.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Colonies Develop a Life-style

The typical life-style in the early colonies was very harsh. There was

no such thing as the modern supermarket, which meant that the hardy colonists

had to get up before dawn and spend many hours engaging in tedious tasks such

as churning butter. They would put some butter in a churn, and they would

whack it with a pole for several hours, and then they'd mop their brows and

say, "Why the hell don't we get a modern supermarket around here!" And then,

because it was illegal to curse, they would be forced to stand in the stocks

while the first tourists took pictures of them.

So it was harsh, all right, but nevertheless more and more persecuted

religious minorities--Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Scientologists, Cubs

fans--were flocking to freedom and establishing religious colonies such as

Maryland and Heritage Village, USA, site of the New World's first known

Christian water slide.

THE ENGLAND-HOLLAND RIVALRY

Meanwhile, England got into a rivalry with Holland. Although today

Holland is known primarily for being underwater and making Heineken beer, in

those days it claimed a great deal of land in the New World because of the

important explorations of the brave Dutch explorer for whom the Hudson River

is named, Henry Hudson River (should have been in Chapter Two, but we

forgot.). Based on these explorations, Holland claimed all of the land west

of the Atlantic Ocean and north of the equator. This angered the English, who

claimed all of the land in the world and a substantial section of Mars, and so

on October 8 a rivalry broke out between the two nations.

The largest Dutch settlement at the time was New Amsterdam, located on

the site of what is now New York City and which had established a thriving

economy based on illegal parking. So one day an English individual named

James "Duke of" York sailed into the harbor with his fleet and captured New

Amsterdam without the Dutch firing a single shot. He was able to do this

because at the time the city's commissioner for the Department of Firing Back

was testifying before the Special Grand Jury to Investigate Municipal

Corruption, which is Still in session. And thus was the name of New Amsterdam

changed to "The Big Apple."

Meanwhile, more colonists were arriving, a good example being William

Penn, who founded the colony that still bears his name, New Jersey. But life

in the New World continued to be harsh, with most colonists leading a

hand-to-mouth existence. "Take your hand out of your mouth!" their mothers

were always shouting, but you know how it is with colonists. What they really

needed, to get themselves off their duffs, was for trade to develop. Luckily,

several days later this occurred.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE

One morning the colonists noticed that the New World contained a number

of products that were not available in Europe, such as turpentine, which could

easily be obtained in the colonies simply by boiling trees. Soon the

colonists were sending barrels of turpentine across to England, where the

English people would dump it on the ground, because, let's face it, a little

turpentine goes a long way. Then the English people would fill the boat up

with some product they had a surplus of, such as used snuff, and they'd send

it back to the colonies; and then the colonists would retaliate with, say,

barrels of dirt, and so on, until trade had escalated to the point where the

two sides were sending entire boatloads of diseased rats back and forth.

But life was not all hard work in the colonies. Culture was also

starting to rear its head, in the form of the Early American Novel. The most

famous novelist of this era was Cliff, the author of the famous Cliff Notes, a

series of works that are still immensely popular with high school students.

The best known, of course, is The Scarlet Ladder, which tells the story of a

short man named Miles Standish, who lived in a tall house with seven people

named Gable, only to be killed in a sled crash with an enormous white whale.

This was to become a recurring theme in colonial literature.

But little did the colonists realize, as these cultural and economic

developments were taking place, that they were about to become involved in

friction with the French. The cause of this was ... Hold it! We have just

received the following:

EDUCATIONAL ADVISORY ALERT

A REVIEW COMMITTEE CONSISTING OF EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS

WITH DOCTORATE DEGREES AND INITIALS AFTER THEIR NAMES HAS

DETERMINED THAT, SO FAR, THIS HISTORY BOOK is NOT MAKING

ENOUGH OF AN EFFORT TO INCLUDE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WOMEN

AND MINORITY GROUPS. UNLESS SOME EFFORT Is UNDERTAKEN TO

CORRECT THIS SITUATION, THIS BOOK WILL NOT BE APPROVED FOR

PURCHASE BY PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS IN ABSOLUTELY VAST

QUANTITIES.

Another important fact we just now remembered is that during the colonial

era women and minority groups were making many contributions, which we are

certain that they will continue to do at regularly spaced intervals throughout

the course of this book. But right now, let's get back to:

FRICTION WITH THE FRENCH

French traders came to the northern part of the New World to barter with

the Native Americans for their pelts of beavers, minks, otters, elks,

muskellunges, and so forth. The two sides quickly learned to communicate with

each other using a stripped-down bartering language, as shown by this

painstakinly researched historical re-creation:

FRENCH TRADER: How does this look?

NATIVE AMERICAN: Honey, that pelt is you!

FRENCH TRADER: Really, Red? You don't think it's too bunched at the hips?

NATIVE AMERICAN: Listen, bunched at the hips is the look in the New World.

FRENCH TRADER: I'll take it!

Soon the French, aided by Native American guides, were penetrating deep

into North America in search of matching belts, shoes, and other accessories.

By the late seventeenth century, pioneering French designers such as Marquette

and Joliet (most of them went by only one name) had made a number of major

fashion advances in the New World. The basis of the entire French colonial

philosophy was natural fibers, in stark contrast to the British, who were

already using water-driven looms to make primitive polyesters. It was only a

matter of time before friction broke out in the form of:

The French and Indian War

The French and Indian War is highly significant because, as David Boldt

(A friend of ours. You don't know him.) points out, it had a stupid name. It

sounded like the French were fighting the Indians, whereas in fact they were

supposed to be on the same side. The British didn't even realize they were

supposed to be in this war until several years after it started, by which time

the French and the Indians, totally confused, had inflicted heavy casualties

upon each other. So England won the war, and on October 8 the French king,

Louis the Somethingth, signed the Treaty of Giving Away Canada, under which he

gave away Canada. "Que enfer," he remarked at the time, "cest seulement

Canada" ("What the hell, it's only Canada.").

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How come, if the country is called "Holland," the people are called

"Dutch"?

2. Have you ever noticed that on those rare occasions when you do need

turpentine, the can, which you bought in 1978 and have been moving from

household to household ever since, is always empty?

3. Do you feel that people who insist upon referring to themselves as "doctor"

simply because they hold Ph.D. degrees, which are about as rare as air

molecules, tend to be self-important weenies? And what about the use of

the word "professional," as in "automotive sales professional"? Does

that make you want to puke, or what? Explain.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Birthing Contractions of a Nation

What caused the American Revolution? This is indeed a rhetorical

question that for many years historians have begun chapters with. As well

they should. For the American Revolution is without doubt the single most

important historical event ever to occur in this nation except of course for

Super Bowl III (Jets 16, Colts 7. This historian won $35.).

One big causal factor in the Revolution was that England operated under

what political scientists describe as "The Insane Venereally Diseased

Hunchbacked Homicidal King" system of government. This basically means that

for some reason, again possibly the food, the English king always turned out

to be a syphilitic hunchbacked lunatic whose basic solution to virtually all

problems, including humidity, was to have somebody's head cut off. There was

one king, Henry "Henry the Eighth" Viii, who could barely get through a day

without beheading a wife. It reached the point, with Henry, where the

clergyman had difficulty completing the wedding ceremony:

CLERGYMAN: I now pronounce you man and ... WATCH OUT! (SLICE)

This style of government was extremely expensive, especially in terms of

dry-cleaning costs, and as a result the kings were always trying to raise

money from the colonies by means of taxation. This was bad enough without

representation, but what really ticked the colonists off were the tax forms,

which were extremely complicated, as is shown by this actual example:

To determineth the amounteth that thou canst claimeth for

depreciation to thine cow, deducteth the amount showneth

on Line XVLIICX-A of Schedule XIV, from the amount

showneth on Line CVXILIIVMM of Schedule XVVII ... No,

waiteth, we meaneth Line XCII of Schedule CXVIILMM ...

No, holdeth it, we meaneth ...

And so on. In 1762 the king attempted to respond to the colonists'

concerns by setting up a special Taxpayer Assistance Service, under which

colonists with questions about their tax returns could get on a special

toll-free ship and sail to England, where specially trained Tax Assistors

would beat them to death with sticks. But even that failed to satisfy the

more radical colonists , and it soon became clear that within a short

time--possibly even in the next page--the situation would turn ugly.

THE SITUATION TURNS UGLY

One afternoon some freedom-loving colonists known as the Boston Patriots

were sitting around their locker room, trying to think up ways to throw off

the yolk of colonial oppression. Suddenly one of them, Bob, had an idea:

"Hey!" he said. "Let's dress up like the locals and throw tea into the

harbor!"

Instantly the other Patriots were galvanized. "What was that?" they

shouted. "A galvanic reaction," responded Bob. "Named for the Italian

physiologist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), who conducted experiments wherein he

sent electrical currents through the legs of frogs."

But the Boston Patriots were not the only people engaging in inhumane

scientific research during the colonial era. Another person doing this was

Benjamin Franklin, who, in a famous experiment, sought to prove his theory

that if you flew a kite in a rainstorm, a huge chunk of electricity would come

shooting down the string and damage your brain. Sure enough, he was right,

and he spent the rest of his days making bizarre, useless, and unintelligible

statements such as: "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he became

so dodderingly pathetic that he had to be placed in charge of the U.S. Postal

Service. Also around this time women and minority groups were accomplishing a

great many achievements.

But getting back to the Boston Patriots: Later that night, they boldly

carried out Bob's bold plan of dressing up as Native Americans and throwing

tea into the harbor, but for some reason this did not result in Independence.

"Maybe we should also toss in some lemon," somebody suggested. And so they

did this, and then they tried some Sweet 'n' Low; still no sign of

Independence. Also the harbor was starting to look like a toxic-waste dump,

which did not go unnoticed by early ancestors of future president George

Herbert Walker Piedmont Harrington Armoire Vestibule Bush.

This angered the king, so he ordered Parliament to pass the Stamp Act,

under which every time the colonists made a purchase, the cashier would give

them some stamps, and they had to paste these into books, which was even more

boring than churning butter. When the colonists had acquired a certain number

of stamps, they were required to go down to the Royal Stamp Redemption Center

and exchange them for cheap cookware (4.5 million) or tacky folding card

tables (13 billion). As you can imagine, this was less than popular with the

colonists, whose anger was eloquently expressed by Tom Paine in his fiery

pamphlet Common Sense, which, in its most famous passage, states: "How many

fondue sets does any one colonial family need?"

This further enraged the king, who, as you have probably gathered by now,

had the political savvy of a croissant. He ordered Parliament to pass the

Irritation Acts, whose entire purpose was to make life in the colonies even

more miserable. These included:

1. The Sneeze Shield Act, requiring that all colonial salad bars had to have

shields suspended over them--allegedly for "sanitary" purposes, but

actually intended to make it difficult for short colonists to reach the

chick-peas.

2. The Pill Blockade Act, requiring that colonial aspirin bottles had to come

with wads of Cotton stuffed in the top, making the aspirin virtually

inaccessible, especially to colonists with hangovers.

3. The Eternal Container Act, requiring that colonists who purchased

appliances had to save the original packing cartons forever and ever,

passing them down through the generations, or else they would void their

warranties.

All of these factors caused the tension in the colonies to mount with

each passing day.

It was amid this climate of rising tension and anger, with a 50 percent

chance of lingering afternoon and evening violence, that the First Continental

Congress was held. It met in Philadelphia, and its members, realizing that

the actions they took in this hour of crisis could very well determine the

fate of the New World, voted, after many hours of angry debate, to give

themselves a pay raise. There was no turning back now. Clearly, the stage

had been set for the Discussion Questions.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you think Unitas should have started for the Colts?

2. What the hell are chick-peas, anyway?

CHAPTER Six

Kicking Some British Butt

The Revolutionary War began with the famous Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,

immortalized in the well-known verse:

Out of the bed and onto the floor;

Fifty-yard dash to the bathroom door!

Whoops! Our mistake. This verse comes from the famous song "Midnight

Attack of Diarrhea," which used to absolutely slay us when we were campers at

Camp Sharparoon (1953-1956.). The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is also very

inspirational. By day, Revere was a Boston silversmith (A person who smithed

silver.), but by night, like so many patriots during the Revolutionary era, he

had insomnia. He would lie awake, tossing and turning, until finally one

night, irritated by lights that somebody kept shining in his window from the

Old North Church, he just flipped out. He leaped onto his horse and raced off

into the night, shrieking. This infuriated a group of British soldiers, who

marched out after him, but they, too, were noisy, because in those

days--remember, this was literally centuries before the discovery of the

Rolling Stones--the British had a terrible sense of rhythm (they were mostly

white guys) and could march only with the aid of drums.

So what would happen is, Paul Revere would come shrieking through a

picturesque slumbering New England town at 2:30 A.m., and the townspeople, who

were already uptight because of the mounting tension described previously,

would come rushing out in their pajamas, really ticked off, and the first

thing they'd see were these British soldiers barging down the street, whanging

on their drums as though it were halftime at the Rose Bowl, and as you can

imagine it was not long before violence erupted in the form of the Battle of

Lexington.

Battles in those days took longer than they do today. First off, it took

a while for the British to form into strict military formations, which, when

viewed from the air, spelled out nationalistic slogans such as GO BRITS! This

delay caused a great deal of irritation among the patriots:

PATRIOTS: C'mon! Aren't you guys ready yet??

BRITISH: Not yet! Say, can you chaps give us a hand? We need two more men to

cross the "T."

Another problem was that the guns they used in those days, called

muskets, took forever to load. First you had to put your powder in, then you

had to put in a little piece of flint, then you had to ram some wadding down

there, then you had to put in about a quarter teaspoon of paprika, and finally

you had to put in your musket ball, which usually popped right back out again

because there was hardly any room. It took so long to complete the Battle of

Lexington that the two sides were nearly four hours late to the next scheduled

event, the Battle of Concord. This was where the Americans invented the

innovative guerrilla tactic of rushing up to the British, who were still

dithering around with their formation ("Dammit, Nigel! You're supposed to be

part of the 'O'!"), and bonking them manually over the heads with their

unloaded muskets.

And thus the first round of the Revolutionary War went to the rebels.

But Independence was not to be bought cheaply, for soon the king was sending

reinforcements, seasoned troops who could form not only words, but also a

locomotive with moving wheels. The rebels, realizing that they were in for a

long, hard fight, decided to form the Second Continental Congress, whose

members voted, after a long and stormy session, to grant themselves only a

cost-of-living increase.

But this Continental Congress also knew that they would need an army, and

they knew just the man to lead it--a man who was universally respected and

admired, a man who had the experience and leadership needed to organize troops

and lead them into battle. That man, of course, was: Dwight Eisenhower.

Unfortunately, he would not be born for at least another dozen chapters, so

they decided to go with George Washington, known as "The Father of His

Country" because of such exploits as throwing a cherry bomb across the

Potomac.

As leader of the American forces, Washington faced a most difficult task,

because the Continental Army was poorly equipped. Just to cite one example,

it had no soldiers. When Washington wanted to do the "Cadence Count" marching

song, he would have to do both the "Sound off." and the "One! Two!" part.

Eventually, however, Washington was able to recruit some troops via a

promotion wherein if you enlisted in the army, you and a friend got an

all-expenses-paid Winter for Two at Valley Forge. Nonetheless, the American

troops were poor and ill trained. Many of them wore rags on their feet. They

also wore their shoes on their heads. These were not exactly nuclear

physicists, if you sense our meaning. But they were patriotic men, and they

had a secret weapon that the king had not bargained on: "Yankee Doodle." This

was the Official Theme Song of the American Revolution, and when the Americans

Marched into battle singing the inspirational part about how Yankee Doodle

"stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni," the effect on the British

troops was devastating. "He called it what?" they would ask each other in

confusion, thus giving the Americans the opening they needed to rush up and

whack them with muskets.

This forced the king to try a new ploy: He sent over the Hessians, who

spoke no English and consequently paid little attention to "Yankee Doodle."

That was the good news for the British side. The bad news was, the Hessians

were actually German, which meant that the words they formed in their battle

formations were humongous. For example, their equivalent Of GO BRITS! was:

WANN FAHRTDERSUGAB EIN UMWIEVIELUHRKOMMTERAN! It would sometimes take them

days to form a simple preposition.

Meanwhile , in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress, in an atmosphere

of crisis, was trying to write the Declaration of Independence. The

responsibility for this task had originally been assigned to the Special Joint

Committee for Writing the Declaration of Independence, whose members

immediately voted to go on a fact-finding mission, with their spouses, to the

French Riviera. It Soon became clear that it was going to take them a long

time just to declare their souvenir purchases, let alone independence, so the

task fell to Thomas Jefferson. On a historic night in 1776, the lanky

red-haired Virginian picked up a quill pen and began scratching on a historic

piece of parchment. He worked all night, and by morning he was ready to show

his results to the others.

"Aren't you supposed to dip the pen into the ink?" the others asked.

And so the lanky red-haired Virginian went back to work for another

historic night, and by dawn he had produced the document that has come to

express the ideals and hopes and dreams of an entire nation.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary

for one people to dissolve the political bands which have

connected them with another, and to assume among the

powers of the earth the separate and equal station to

which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that

they should get some sleep. Because I have been up for

two nights now, declaring independence, and I may be a

lanky Virginian but I am not a machine, for heaven's sake,

and it just doesn't make sense to sit here scrawling away

these compound-complex sentences when I just know nobody's

going to read them, because nobody ever does read all the

way through these legal documents. Take leases. You take

the average tenants, and you could put a lease in front of

them with a clause about halfway through stating that they

have to eat toasted moose doots for breakfast, and I

guarantee you they'll never read it. Not that it would

make any difference if they did, because tenants ignore

most of the rules anyway, such as the rules about not

flushing inappropriate objects down the toilet. Ask any

landlord what he spends most of his time doing, and the

odds are he'll answer, "Pulling inappropriate objects out

of tenants' toilets." I know one landlord who found a

gerbil in there. Who the hell would do a thing like that?

A cat, yes. I could see that. I could see giving a

modest rebate for that. But not a gerbil. I gotta lie

down.

The members of the Continental Congress were extremely impressed by what

Jefferson had written, at least the part that they read, and on the following

day, October 8, the nation celebrated its very first July Fourth. The members

took turns lighting sparklers and signing their John Hancocks to the

Declaration, with one prankster even going so far as to actually write "John

Hancock." But soon it was time for the Congress to return to the serious

business at hand: issuing press releases.

Meanwhile, women and minority groups were making many important

contributions. So were the French, who supported the patriot cause and sent

over many invaluable fashion hints. But still the American troops were badly

outnumbered, and they probably would never have won if not for the occurrence

of:

THE TURNING POINT

This turning point occurred in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Hessians

had decided to spend Christmas, which should give you an idea of how out of it

they were. As night fell, they got to drinking heavily and singing

"Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," which takes forever in German, so

it was the ideal time for the Americans to attack. Unfortunately, the

ice-infested Delaware River lay between the two armies. The situation looked

bleak, and all eyes turned to George Washington.

"We'll row over there in boats," he said, displaying the kind of

leadership that he was famous for.

And so they climbed into some boats, and, after pausing briefly to pose

for a famous oil painting by Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868.), they captured

Trenton while suffering virtually no casualties, although a number of them did

get urinated on. It was a major victory for the Americans.

But the Revolutionary War was not over yet. No, the historic Treaty of

Ending the Revolutionary War was not to be signed for five more long years,

years of pain, years of sacrifice, and--above all--years that will not be

included in this book, because at the rate we're going through history here,

we're never even going to get to the Civil War.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Have you ever flushed anything inappropriate down a toilet? Explain.

2. How come, in the famous oil painting by Emanuel Leutze, it looks like

George Washington has a group the size of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in

his rowboat?

3. Whatever happened to the Hessians, anyway? You never see them around.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Forging of a Large, Wasteful Bureaucracy

Against all odds, the colonists had won the war against England; now they

faced an even greater task: planning the victory party. Who should be

invited? Where would they put their coats? These were just two of the

questions confronting the leaders of the fledgling nation. Also, extreme

factions in several states felt that there should be some kind of government.

And so the leading statespersons from all thirteen states gathered in

Philadelphia for a Constitutional Convention. There, over the bitter

objections of conservatives, they voted to approve the historic Fashion

Statement of 1787, under which delegates were required to wear knee pants,

tight stockings, and wigs accessorized with ribbons. It was a radical

pronouncement, and the delegates paid a high price for it--nearly half had to

purchase completely new wardrobes. The convention had established that the

old way of doing things was not going to be acceptable, which meant that they

also had to come up with a bold new designer look for the government.

But there was much disagreement among the delegates about exactly what

this look should be. Some wanted a weak president and a strong legislature.

Some wanted a smart president and a dumb legislature. Some wanted a very

short president and a deaf legislature. The New York delegation, typically,

wanted a loud president and a rude legislature. Day after day the delegates

argued, but they seemed to be getting no closer to agreement, and the new

nation was in danger of collapsing before it ever really had a chance to get

started. But just when the convention appeared to be at a total impasse, the

aging statesman Benjamin Franklin rose to his feet and, as the other delegates

listened raptly, emitted a three-foot streamer of drool. The others alertly

took this to be a sign from the wily veteran Communicator that it was time to

ratify the U.S. Constitution, and so they did.

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION

The Constitution divides the federal government into three equal

branches:

1. Mammoth, labyrinthian departments set up for purposes that no individual

taxpayer would ever in a million years voluntarily spend money on.

2. Mammoth, labyrinthian departments set up for purposes that probably made a

lot of sense originally, but nobody can remember what they are.

3. Statuary.

This separation of powers creates a system of checks and balances, which

protects everybody by ensuring that any action taken by one part of the

government will be rendered utterly meaningless by an equal and opposite

reaction from some other part.

The highest-ranking officer in the government is the president, who is

elected to a four-year term after a three-year, nine-month campaign in which

he is required to state that he has a Vision and plans to provide Leadership.

The president's primary duties are to get on helicopters; bitch about

Congress; and send the vice president abroad to frown with sorrow at the

remains of deceased foreign leaders.

The Constitution also provides for the election of a Senate, which

consists of two white men in gray suits from each state; and a House of

Representatives, which consists of three or four hundred men named "Bob" or

"Dick" with blond wives whose hobbies are gardening, furniture, and the

mentally retarded. The primary duties of the members of both houses of

Congress are:

1. Running for reelection.

2. Having staffs.

3. Getting subsidized haircuts.

4. Sending out newsletters featuring photographs of themselves standing next

to the president, designed to create the impression that the president is

relying upon them for advice and counsel, when he is in fact trying to

remember who the hell they are.

How a Bill Becomes a Law

First the bill secretes a substance that it uses to form a cocoon, and

then it ... No, sorry. That'S how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. The

way a bill becomes a law is:

1. A member of Congress notices that there is some problem afflicting the

nation. For example, he might notice that the nation is not observing a

sufficient quantity of idiot official days and weeks, such as National

Tractor Mechanic Awareness Week, and so he introduces a bill to correct

this problem.

2. The bill is referred to a committee, which forms a subcommittee for the

purpose of going to Geneva, Switzerland, to see if there are any facts

there that might be useful.

3. The bill is reported back to the committee, which holds hearings and

receives testimony from interested parties such as the American Aspirin

Bottle Manufacturers Association.

4. Needed amendments are attached to the bill, for example an amendment

designed to protect the American consumer from the potential dangers of

aspirin bottles manufactured by unfair foreign competitors.

5. The bill is reported out of the committee.

6. Everybody goes on vacation for a couple of weeks.

7. The bill is reported back to the committee.

8. The bill is reported to the police.

9. The Supreme Court declares the bill to be unconstitutional.

10. The Cheese stands alone.

The Bill of Rights

The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as "The Bill of

Rights," because that is what everybody calls them. These amendments spell

out the basic rights that all of us enjoy as Americans:

The First Amendment states that members of religious groups, no matter how

small or unpopular, shall have the right to hassle you in airports.

The Second Amendment states that, since a well-regulated militia is necessary

to the security of a free state, you can buy high-powered guns via mail

order and go out into the woods with your friends and absolutely vaporize

some deer.

The Third Amendment states that you don't have to quarter troops inside your

house. "You troops are just going to have to sleep on the patio" is a

perfectly constitutional thing for You to tell them.

The Fourth Amendment states that if your aunt had testicles, she would be your

uncle.

The Fifth Amendment states that your Fifth Amendment rights cannot be violated

until you are advised of them.

The Sixth Amendment states that if you ar accused of a crime, you have the

right to a trial before a jury of people too stupid to get out of jury

duty.

The Seventh Amendment states that if you are in the Express Lane, and you have

more than one item of produce of the same biological type, such as two

grapefruit, you have the right to count these as one item in order to

keep yourself under the ten-item limit.

The Eighth Amendment states that if You are seated directly in front of a

person who has to comment on every Single scene in the movie--and we are

talking here about Perceptive Comments, such as when a movie character is

getting into his car and the person behind you says, "He's getting into

his car now!"--then you have the right to go "SSSHHHHH?" two times in a

warning manner, after which you have the right to kill this person with a

stick.

The Ninth Amendment states that you shall not covet your neighbor's wife.

The Tenth Amendment states that, OK, if your neighbor's wife is dropping a lot

of hints, really coming on to you, that is a different matter.

Ratification of the Constitution

it took a long time for the states to ratify the Constitution, because in

those days communication was difficult. After a state legislature had voted

for ratification, a messenger would be dispatched on horseback to carry the

word to the new nation's capital. Often he would ride for days over poor

roads through sparsely populated wilderness areas until he realized that the

new nation had no capital. "Ha-ha!" he would remark to his horse. "That

darned legislature has tricked me again!" Then he would be attacked by bears.

Clearly a capital was needed. The logical choice seemed to be Washington,

D.C., a city blessed with a natural beltway teeming with consultants.

Also we should keep in mind that women and minority groups were

continuing to make some gigantic contributions.

THE ELECTION OF THE FIRST PRESIDENT

The leading contender in the first presidential election race was George

Washington, who waged a campaign based on heavy exposure in media such as

coins, stamps, and famous oil paintings. This shrewd strategy carried him to

a landslide victory in which he carried every state except Massachusetts,

which voted for George McGovern.

And thus it was that on October 8, the newly sworn-in president stood

before a large cheering throng of his fellow countrymen and delivered his

famous inaugural address, in which he offered the famous stirring words "We

cannot [something] the [machines? birds?] of [something] will never

[something]. As far as I know." Unfortunately, there were no microphones

back then. This was only one of the problems facing the fledgling nation, as

we shall see.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How come history books never have sex scenes? You know, like: "James

Madison, unable to restrain his passion any longer, thrust his

ink-engorged pen into the second draft of the Federalist papers.

2. Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, With a top speed of

120 feet per second, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter.

How long, traveling at top speed, will it take the cow to travel 360

feet?

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Brash Young Nation Gets into Wars and Stuff

Once the federal government was organized, the biggest problem was how to

pay off the fledgling nation's massive war debt. The Founding Fathers were

starting to get disturbing letters like this:

Dear Mr. Father:

This is the fourth time we've written regarding your outstanding balance

of $23,784,982.34. While we certainly value your fledgling business, we must

inform you that unless you immediately make arrangements to repay this amount,

we will regretfully have to return you to British rule.

Sincerely,

The VISA Corporation

"More Powerful than God"

Fortunately, one of the Founding Fathers was a shrewd financial thinker

named Alexander Hamilton, who came up with an idea for repayment of the debt

based on a concept so brilliant--and yet so simple--that it remains extremely

popular with governments to this very day.

"Let's print money with our pictures on it," Hamilton suggested.

And so they did. The hardest part was deciding which Founding Father

would get to be on which denomination of bill, an issue that led to the

infamous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr, both of whom wanted to be on

the fifty. Burr won the duel in overtime, although years later he died

anyway, little realizing that his great-great-grandson Raymond Burr would go

on to become one of the widest actors in American history.

THE ELECTION OF 1792

George Washington decided to run for reelection in 1792, because he felt

that his work was not finished. In fact, it wasn't even started, because, the

roads being what they were, he had spent his entire first term en route from

his Virginia home to the temporary U.S. capital in Philadelphia. His slogan

was:

VOTE FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON

"He's Almost As Far As Baltimore."

Washington was reelected unanimously and reached Philadelphia several

months later, only to learn that the capital was now operating out of

Washington, D.C., which he managed to reach just in time to deliver his famous

farewell address, containing the prophetic warning "We should get [something]

has to [something] these darned [something] complex all over the place."

THE RISE OF POLITICAL PARTIES

With Washington no longer on the scene, political parties began to form,

the main ones being the Republicans, the Federalists, the Sharks, the Home

Boys, the Del-Vikings, and the Church of Scientology. The major issue

dividing these parties was whether the United States should enter into an

alliance with France in its war with Britain. It was not an easy decision: On

the one hand, France had provided invaluable support during the Revolutionary

War, support without which the colonies might never have achieved their

independence from the brutal tyranny of England; on the other hand, France

contained a lot of French people. You tried to form an alliance with them,

and all they did was smirk at your pronunciation. Ultimately a compromise was

reached under which the United States signed a treaty with brutal, tyrannical

old England, and sent the wily veteran diplomat Benjamin Franklin over to

mollify France with a nice basket of apples, which he ate en route.

In 1796 John Adams was elected as the nation's second president, thanks

to the support of the Anal Compulsive Party, whose members believed that

henceforth presidents should be elected in alphabetical order so that it would

be easier to remember them all during history tests. It was during Adams's

administration that the famous "XYZ Affair" took place. What happened was,

Adams sent a diplomatic mission over to France to protest the fact that the

French were seizing American ships and redecorating them by force. When the

Americans got to France, the French foreign minister told them to meet with

three secret agents, known only as "X," "Y," and "z."

"If you can guess their real names and occupations," the French foreign

minister said, "you'll receive diplomatic recognition and the Brunswick pool

table!

Unfortunately the Americans could correctly identify only one agent

(Kitty Carlisle.) and never reached the bonus round, but they did receive some

lovely consolation prizes.

Another major event to occur around this time was the passage of the

Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to engage in acts of sedition

with an alien unless you were both consenting adults. This so enraged the

voters that they elected Thomas Jefferson as the third president, thus ruining

the alphabetical-order concept and plunging the nation into what historians

refer to as the Era of Presidents Whose Names Nobody Can Remember, which did

not end until President Evelyn Lincoln.

But this did not stop women and minority groups from continuing to

achieve many noteworthy achievements.

Meanwhile, Jefferson faced the issue of what to do about the Barbary

States, a group of small pirate nations on the Mediterranean that were preying

on international commerce by sailing out to passing merchant ships and

demanding spare change. Most major nations were paying bribes, or "tribute,"

to the Barbary States in exchange for safe passage, but Jefferson angrily

rejected this idea with his famous epigram "The hell with those dirtbags."

So he sent some warships over there to explain to the pirates, in

diplomatic terms, the various international diplomatic implications of having

their bodies perforated by eight-inch cannonball holes, and the pirates agreed

to cool it. This bold action by Jefferson established an honorable American

tradition of "getting tough" with terrorists that continued in the United

States until the latter half of the twentieth century, when it was replaced by

the tradition of "calling a press conference and threatening to get tough"

with terrorists.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

While this was going on, England and France were at war with Spain. Or

perhaps England and Spain were at war with ... No! This is it: France and

Spain were at war with England. But only because Germany did not exist at the

time. As far as we know.

Anyway, the result was that for some reason France decided to sell a

large piece of property in North America. The French government put the

following advertisement in The New York Times real estate section:

NICE PIECE OF LAND

approx. 34 hillion jillion acres convenient to West

perfect for growing nation.

So Jefferson did a little checking and he found that this property was in

fact zoned for Westward Expansion, and he made an offer of $12 million. The

French countered with $15 million, but they also threw in the appliances, and

they had themselves a deal. After the closing ceremony, Jefferson sent Lewis

and Clark off to hold the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was hard going: The

land was wild and untamed; there were hostile Americans around; and Clark

bitched constantly because he thought it should be called "The Clark and Lewis

Expedition." Nevertheless, they were able to explore the entire region, and

when they returned to Washington on October 8 they reported that it contained

not just Louisiana; but a whole bunch of other states as well, although some

of them, such as South Dakota, needed work.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the situation worsened as England joined France in

declaring war against Spain, unaware that France had joined Spain in declaring

war against England, and that Spain, acting in haste, had accidentally

declared war against itself. The United States tried, by depressing the

clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to

remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going

to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812. A worried nation

turned its eyes anxiously toward Thomas Jefferson, then had a good laugh at

its own expense when it realized that he was no longer the president. He had

been replaced by President James Something, Monroe or Madison, who immediately

placed the country on a war footing (Whatever that means.).

THE WAR OF 1812

The War of 1812 began very badly, with British troops marching right into

Washington and setting fire to it, severely disrupting restaurant operations

and forcing hundreds of lobbyists to eat in the suburbs. But soon the tide

started to turn the Americans' way, thanks in no small part to the efforts of

the nation's first defense contractor, Ye Old General Dynamics Corporation,

which signed a $23.7 million contract to produce a vital new weapons system,

the X-97 laser-controlled "Thunderfire" Musket , an innovative concept that

promised to give U.S. soldiers a real technical edge on the field of battle.

Unfortunately it was not ready for actual testing until 1957, when it blew up.

THE TREATY OF GHENT

This sounds pretty boring to us so we're just going to skip right over

it.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Define the following: "dirtbag."

2. Just who is Kitty Carlisle, anyway?

FASCINATING HISTORICAL SIDENOTE TO HISTORY

During the War of 1812, a young poet named Francis "Scott" Key watched

the battle for Fort "Mac" Henry, and he was so moved by the sight of the

American flag still waving in the dawn's early light that he wrote the

immortal words that Americans still proudly sing today:

Take me out to the ball game

Take me out with the croooowwwwd ...

CHAPTER NINE

Barging Westward

The first major president to be elected after the War of 1812 was

President Monroe Doctrine, who became famous by developing the policy, for

which he is named. This policy, which is still in effect today, states that:

1. Other nations are not allowed to mess around with the internal affairs of

nations in this hemisphere.

2. But we are.

3. Ha-ha-ha.

President Doctrine also purchased Florida from Spain for $5 million.

Unfortunately, like many first-time buyers of vast New World territories, he

failed to inspect the property first; by the time he found out that Florida

mostly consisted of swamps infested with armor-piercing mosquitoes the size of

Volvo station wagons, Spain had already deposited the check.

In 1816, a political party called the Federalists nominated for president

a man named Rufus King, then ceased to exist. The year 1819 saw the

occurrence of the aptly named Panic of 1819 which was caused when the growing

nation woke up in the middle of the night thinking it had a term paper due.

Fortunately this turned out to be just a dream, and things remained fairly

calm until 1825, which saw the election of yet another person named John

Adams, who was backed by the Party to Elect Only Presidents Named John Adams.

Meanwhile, hardy settlers continued to move westward and discover new

virgin lands, unconquered and unclaimed by anybody, unless you counted the

Native Americans, which these hardy settlers did not. And, anyhow, before

long there were even fewer to count. Soon they had settled a number of

territories--Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Guam--and they were clamoring to

become official states so they could start electing legislatures and having

state mottoes and official state insects and stuff. But Congress could not

readily agree on a procedure for admitting states to the union. The northern

politicians felt it should be a simple ceremony, with maybe a small reception

afterward; the southerners felt it should be more of a fraternity-style

initiation, with new states being forced to do wacky stunts such as get up and

sing "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain When She Comes" naked. Finally the

impasse was broken by means of the Missouri Compromise, under which it was

agreed that one half of the people would pronounce it "Missour-EE" and the

other half would pronounce it "Missour-UH."

In 1828 Andrew "Stonewall" Jackson was elected president with the support

of the Party to Elect Presidents with Stupid Nicknames. His running mate was

South Carolinian John C. "Those Little Flies That Sometimes Get in Your Nose"

Calhoun, a bitter rival of Secretary of State Martin "Van" Buren, who, with

the backing of the brilliant orator Daniel "The Brilliant Orator" Webster, was

able to persuade Jackson to replace Calhoun with Van Buren on the 1832 ticket,

little aware that Denise and her periodontist were secretly meeting at the

same motel where Rhonda had revealed to Dirk that she was in fact the

sex-changed former Green Beret who fathered the half-Vietnamese twins that

Lisa left in the O'Hare baggage-claim area the night she left to get her

Haitian divorce and wound up as a zombie instead, thus resulting in the

formation by Henry Clay of the Whig party. Their slogan was "Tippecanoe and

Tyler, Too," and they meant every word of it.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without the continued

contributions of women and minority groups.

THE FEDERAL BANKING CRISIS OF 1837

Trust us: This was even more boring than the Treaty of Ghent.

CULTURE

Meanwhile, culture was continuing to occur in some areas. In New

England, for example, essayist Henry David Thoreau created an enduring

masterpiece of American philosophical thought when, rejecting the stifling

influences of civilization, he went off to live all alone on Walden Pond,

where, after two years of an ascetic and highly introspective life, he was

eaten by turtles. That did not stop the march of culture. Authors such as

James Fenimore Cooper (Pippi Leatherstocking, Hiawatha, Natty Bumppo Gets

Drunk and Shoots His Own Leg), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Ludicrously

Repetitious Poems That Nobody Ever Finishes), and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick,

Moby-Dick II, Moby-Dick vs. the Atomic Bat from Hell) cranked out a series of

literary masterpieces that will be remembered as long as they are required

reading in high school English classes.

Tremendous advances were also being made in technology. A nautical

inventor named Robert Fulton came up with the idea of putting a steam engine

on a riverboat. Naturally it sank like a stone, thus creating one of many

underwater hazards that paved the way for a young man named Samuel Clemens,

who got a job standing on the front of riverboats, peering into the water, and

shouting out literary pseudonyms such as "George Eliot!" The steam engine

also played a vital role in the development of the famous "Iron Horse," which

could haul heavy loads, but which also tended to produce the famous "Monster

Piles of Iron Droppings" and thus was eventually replaced by the locomotive.

Tremendous strides were also being taken in the area of communication.

With the invention of the rotary press, newspapers were made available not

just to the wealthy literate elite, but also to the average low-life scum, who

were suddenly able to keep abreast, through pioneering populist papers like

the New York Post, of such national issues as NAB FAIR IN NUN STABandLINIK

PORN SLAY TO EYE SLICE MOB. Another major advance in communication was the

telegraph, which was invented by Samuel Morse, who also devised the code that

is named after him: "pig Latin." Wires were soon being strung across the vast

continent, and by October 8 a message could be transmitted from New York to

California, carried by courageous Pony Express riders, who galloped full speed

on courageous horses that would often get as far as thirty feet before they

would fall off the wires and splat courageously onto the ground.

This created a growing awareness of the practical value of roads, and in

1809 work began on the nation's first highway, the Long Island Expressway,

which is scheduled for completion next year (Barring unforeseen delays.). In

1825, New York completed the Erie Canal, which connected Buffalo and Albany,

thus enabling these two exciting Cities to trade bargeloads of slush. The

Erie Canal was an instant financial success, and became even more profitable

fourteen years later, when a sharp young engineer suggested filling it with

water.

"MANIFEST DESTINY"

"Manifest destiny" is a phrase you see in a lot of history books.

Another one is "Fifty-four-forty or fight."

THE FORMATION OF TEXAS

At this point Mexico owned the territory that we now call "Texas," which

consisted primarily of what we now call "dirt." Gradually, however, it began

to fill up with Americans, who developed a unique frontier life-style based on

drinking Pearl beer, going "wooo-EEEE!" real loud, and making cash payments

to football players. This irritated the Mexican government, which sent a

general named Santa Anna (SAN-TA ANN-A) up to attack the Texans at the Alamo

(AL-A-MO), where, in one of the most heroic, (HE-RO-IC) scenes in American

history, the legendary Davy Crockett (played by Fess Parker) used his

legendary rifle, "Betsy" (played by "Denise"), as a club in a futile (STUPID)

effort to fend off Santa Anna's troops. But the tragedy served as a blessing

in disguise, because a short time later the legendary Sam Houston, showing

that he had learned the harsh lesson of the Alamo, ordered his troops to try

using their rifles as rifles. Not only did they rout the Mexicans, but they

went on to defeat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. And thus Texas was born

although it was not permitted to enter the union for ten more years, because

of NCAA violations.

At this point the president of the United States, a stud named James K.

Polk, declared war against Mexico. Don't ask us why. We are a history book,

not a mind reader. This resulted in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (GUA-DA

... OH, NE-VER MIND), under which the uNited States got the rest of the

Southwest and California, and Mexico got smaller.

THE RUSH TO CALIFORNIA

One day in the winter of 1848, a worker was digging in a pond on the

northern California farm of Swiss immigrant Johann Sutter. Suddenly the man

stopped and stared, for there, gleaming through the muck on his shovel blade,

was a discovery that was to transform the entire California territory almost

overnight: a movie camera. Word of the discovery spread like wildfire, and

Soon thousands of actors, agents, producers, and so forth were rushing

westward, overburdening the territory's limited restaurant facilities and

causing the price of valet parking to skyrocket. Soon there were more than a

hundred thousand residents, which raised the issue: Should California be

declared a state? Or, in this case, maybe even a separate planet?

These were just some of the storm clouds now gathering over the nation's

political landscape. For meanwhile, back east, the cold front of moral

outrage was moving inexorably toward the low-pressure system of southern

economic interests, creating another of those frontal systems of conflict that

would inevitably result in a violent afternoon or evening thundershower of

Carnage. Also, it was time for the Civil War.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. In the song "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain When She Comes," why do

they announce so cheerfully that they intend to "kill the old red rooster

when she comes"? Is it some kind of ritual thing? Or is it that they

just hate the old red rooster, because maybe it pecked them or something

when they were children, and now they're just using the fact that she's

comin' 'round the mountain as an excuse to kill it?

2. An-cay oo-yay eak-spay ig-pay atin-lay? Explain.

3. Define the following: "Wooo-EEEE!

CHAPTER TEN

The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball

The seeds of the Civil War were sown in the late eighteenth century when

Eli Whitney invented the "Cotton gin," a machine capable of turning cotton

into gin many times faster than it could be done by hand. This created a

great demand for cotton-field workers, whom the South originally attempted to

recruit by placing "help wanted" advertisements in the newspaper:

ATTENTION SELF-STARTERS!

Are you that special "Can-do" kind of guy or gal who's

looking for a chance to work extremely hard under horrible

conditions for your entire life without getting paid and

being severely beaten whenever we feel like it, plus we

get to keep your children? To find out more about this

exciting career opportunity, contact: The South.

Oddly enough, this advertisement failed to produce any applicants, and so

the South decided to go with slavery. Many people argued that slavery was

inhuman and cruel and should be abolished but the slave owners argued that it

wasn't so bad, and that in fact the slaves actually were happy, the evidence

for this being that they sometimes rattled their chains in a rhythmic fashion.

By the mid-nineteenth century, slavery was the topic of heated debate

among just about everybody in the country except of course the actual slaves,

most of whom were busy either working or fleeing through swamps. The crisis

deepened in 1850, when President Zachary Taylor died of cholera, fueling fears

that we forgot to mention his election in the previous chapter. Taylor's

death led to the presidency of a man whose name has since become synonymous,

in American history, with the term "Millard Fillmore": Millard Fillmore.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FILLMORE ADMINISTRATION

1. The Earth did not crash into the Sun.

After Fillmore came Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, who as far as we

can tell were both president at the same time. This time-saving measure paved

the way for the election of Abraham Lincoln, who was popular with the voters

because he possessed an extremely rustic Set of origins.

THE ORIGINS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Lincoln's family was poor. He was born in a log cabin. And when we say

"a log cabin," we are talking about a cabin that consisted entirely of one

single log. That is how poor Lincoln's family was. When it rained, everybody

had to lie down under the log, the result being that Lincoln grew up to be

very long and narrow, which turned out to be the ideal physique for splitting

rails. Young Abe would get out there with his ax, and he'd split hundreds of

rails at a time, and people would come from miles around. "Dammit, Lincoln,"

they'd say, "those rails cost good money!" But in the end they forgave young

Abe, because he had the ax.

He was also known for his honesty. In one famous historical anecdote,

Lincoln was tending store, and a customer accidentally left his change on the

counter, and young Abe picked it up and walked fourteen miles with it, only to

glance down and realize that his face was on the penny. This anecdote gave

Lincoln the nickname that was to serve him so well in politics--"Old

Ironsides"--and it earned him an invitation to appear as a contestant on The

Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the most popular show of the era. Lincoln was able

to get to the bonus round, where he correctly answered the question "How much

is four score plus seven?" thus winning the Samsonite luggage and the

presidency of the United States.

This resulted in yet another famous historical anecdote. When Lincoln

assumed the presidency, he was clean-shaven, but one day he got a letter from

a little girl suggesting that he grow a beard. So he did, and he thought it

looked pretty good, so he decided to keep it. A short while later, he got

another letter from the little girl, this time suggesting that he wear mascara

and rouge and maybe a simple string of pearls. Fortunately, just then the

Civil War broke out.

THE CIVIL WAR

This was pretty depressing. Brother fought against brother unless he had

no male siblings, in which case he fought against his sister. Sometimes he

would even take a shot at his cousin. Sooner or later, this resulted in a

horrendous amount of devastation, particularly in the South, where things got

so bad that Clark Gable, in what is probably the most famous scene from the

entire Civil War, turned to Vivien Leigh, and said: "Frankly, my dear, I don't

think we're in Kansas anymore." This epitomized the feeling of despair that

was widespread in the Confederacy as the war ended, and it left a vast

reservoir of bitterness toward the North. But as the old saying goes, "Time

heals all wounds," and in the more than 120 years that have passed since the

Civil War ended, most of this bitterness gradually gave way to subdued

loathing, which is where we stand today.

RECONSTRUCTION

After the Civil War came Reconstruction, a period during which the South

was transformed, through a series of congressional acts, from a totally

segregated region where blacks had no rights into a totally segregated region

where blacks were supposed to have rights but did not. Much of this progress

occurred during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, who in 1868

defeated a person named Horatio Seymour in a race where both candidates had

the backing of the Let's Elect Presidents with Comical First Names party,

whose members practically wet their pants with joy in 1876 over the election

of Rutherford B. Hayes, who went on to die--you can look this up--in a place

called Fremont, Ohio. Clearly the troubled nation had nowhere to go except

up.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. If he had a beard, where would he apply the rouge?

FUN CLASSROOM PROJECT

See if you can name the causes of the Civil War.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven

The end of the Civil War paved the way for what Mark Twain, with his

remarkable knack for coining the perfect descriptive phrase, called "the

POst-Civil War era." This was a period unlike any that had preceded it. For

one thing, it occurred later on. Also it was an Age of Invention. Perhaps

the most important invention was the brain-child of Thomas "Alva" Edison, a

brilliant New Jerseyan who, in 1879, astounded the world when he ran an

electrical Current through a carbonized cotton filament inside a glass globe,

thus creating the first compact-disc player. Unfortunately it broke almost

immediately and did not come back from the repair shop for nearly a century

(And it still didn't work right.). But this did not stop the prolific Edison

from numerous other electronic breakthroughs that we now take for granted,

including: the Rate Increase; the Limited Warranty; the Eight "C" Batteries

That Are Not Included; the Instructions That Are Badly Translated from

Japanese; and the Newspaper Ad Featuring Four Thousand Tiny Blurred Pictures

of What Appears to Be the Same VCR. For these achievements, Edison was

awarded, after his death, one of the highest honors that can be bestowed upon

a dead American citizen: A service plaza off the New Jersey Turnpike was named

after him (The first is named for Marvin Kitman, the second for Al Capone.).

Parts of it still stand today.

Another famous genius of the era was Alexander Graham Bell System, who in

some specific year beginning with "18" invented "the area code," thus paving

the way for long distance, without which modern telephone-company commercials

would not be possible. Originally there was only one area code, called "1"

but over the years new ones were added steadily, and telephone-company

researchers now foresee the day when, thanks to modern computers, every

telephone in the nation will be a long-distance call from every other

telephone, even if it's in the same house.

Meanwhile, the nation's rural areas were being greatly affected by the

MeCormick reaper, which was invented by Cyrus McCormick and paved the way for

the Midwest, a group of flat Protestant states containing an enormous amount

of agriculture in the form of wheat. Formerly, to reap a single acre of

wheat, a farmer would have to work for four days, with the help of two

farmhands driving six mules. But now he could sit back and relax as the

reaper roared through as many as ten acres per hour, reaping the living hell

out of everything that stood in its path, occasionally spitting out bits of

mule fur or farmhand clothing, which could easily be reassembled thanks to the

sewing machine, invented by Elias Howe. "Don't ask me Howe it works!" he used

to say, over and over, until finally somebody, we think his wife, shot him in

the head with a revolver, invented by Samuel Colt.

McCormick's invention was so successful that by the early 1870s the

Midwest was disappearing under an enormous mound of reaped wheat, and it

became clear that some kind of efficient method was needed to get it to the

big cities, where it could be converted into sandwiches, which had been

invented earlier in England by Samuel Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato. This caused

Congress to authorize work on the first transcontinental railroad corporation,

Amtrak. Two work crews began laying rails, one starting on the East Coast and

the other on the West Coast. It was hard going. The crews endured broiling

heat and bitter cold, often simultaneously. But they persevered, and finally,

on October 8, the two crews met at Promontory Point, Utah, where, in a moving

and historic ceremony, top railroad executives gathered to explain to them

that they were supposed to be nailing the rails down, for God's sake. But

even this setback did not prevent women and minority groups from achieving

many notable achievements.

THE RISE OF HEAVY INDUSTRY

Around this time heavy industry started to rise, thanks to the work of

heavy industrialists such as Andrew "Dale" Carnegie, who made a fortune going

around the country holding seminars in which he taught people how to Win

friends by making steel. Another one was John D. Rockefeller, who invented

oil and eventually created a monopoly, culminating in 1884 when he was able to

put hotels on both Park Place and Boardwalk. This made him so rich that

everybody started hating him, and he was ultimately forced to change his name

to "Exxon."

As heavy industrialism became more popular, large horrible factories were

built in eastern cities. The workers--often minority women and

children--toiled under grueling, dangerous conditions for twelve hours a day,

seven days a week, for an average weekly salary of only $1.80, out of which

they had to "voluntarily" give 85 cents to the United Fund. On top of this,

the factory workers were subjected to one of the most cruel and inhumane labor

concepts ever conceived of by the mind of industrial man: vending-machine

food. The suffering this caused can only be imagined by us fortunate modern

corporation employees, but we can get some idea of what it was like by reading

this chilling excerpt from a nineteenth-century New York factory worker's

diary:

Nobody knows where the food comes from, or even if it

really is food. There is a machine that dispenses liquids

that are allegedly "coffee," "tea," "hot chocolate," and

even "soup," which all come from the same orifice and all

taste exactly the same. Another machine dispenses bags

containing a grand total of maybe three potato chips each,

and packages of crackers smeared with a bizarre substance

called "cheez," which is the same bright-orange color as

marine rescue equipment. The machine for some reason is

constructed in such a way that it drops these items from a

great height, causing the contents, already brittle with

age, to shatter into thousands of pieces. Also half the

time it just eats your money, and forget about getting a

refund ...

Conditions such as these resulted in the Labor Movement, the most

important leader of which was Samuel Gompers. And even if he wasn't the most

important, he definitely had the best name. We could just say it over and

over: Gompers Gompers Gompers. This would be an excellent name for a large

dog (Such as a Labrador retriever.). "Gompers!" we can just hear ourselves

yelling. "You put that Federal Express man down right now!" Nevertheless it

was to be a long, hard struggle before the Labor Movement was to win even

minimal concessions from the big industrialists--years of strikes and violence

and singing traditional Labor Movement protest songs such as "Take This Job

and Shove It." But it was the courage of these early labor pioneers that

ultimately made possible the woring conditions and wages and benefits that

American factory workers would probably be enjoying today if the

industrialists hadn't moved their manufacturing operations to Asia.

THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST

When the Civil War ended, the West was still a region of great wildness,

a fact that had earned it the nickname "The Great Plains." In this rough,

untamed environment had emerged the cowboy, a hard-ridin' straight-shootin'

rip-snortin' cow-punchin' breed of hombre who was to become the stuff of

several major cigarette promotions. To this day you can walk up to any

schoolboy and mention one of those legendary Old West names--Wyatt Earp, "Wild

Bill" Hickok, Gary Cooper, "Quick Draw" McGraw, Luke Skywalker--and chances

are the schoolboy, as he has been taught to do, will scream for help, and you

will be arrested on suspicion of being a pervert. So maybe you better just

take our word for it.

Nevertheless, the West was gradually being settled. The federal

government had acquired assorted western territories like Utah through

treaties with the Native American inhabitants under which the united States

got the land and the Native Americans got a full thirty minutes' head start

before the army came after them. In 1889 the U.S. government opened up the

Oklahoma territory, which resulted in the famous "Oklahoma land rush" as

thousands of would-be settlers came racing in to look around, resulting in the

famous "rush to get the hell back out of Oklahoma."

Another important acquisition was made in 1867, when Secretary of State

Seward Folly purchased Alaska for $7 million, which at the time seemed like a

lot of money but which today we recognize as being about one third the cost of

a hotel breakfast in Anchorage. Alaska was originally a large place located

way the hell up past Canada, but this proved to be highly inconvenient for

mapmakers, who in 1873 voted to make it smaller and put it in a little box

next to Hawaii right off the coast of California, which is where it is today.

While all this expansion was going on, presidents were continuing to be

elected right on schedule in 1868, 1872, 1876, and so on, and we're pretty

sure that at least one of them was named Rutherford. Also during this era the

large eastern cities began to experiment with a new form of government,

favored by newspaper cartoonists, called the Easily Caricatured Corrupt

Spherical Bosses Weighing a Minimum of 400 Pounds system. This system was

very unpopular, because it resulted in an unresponsive government filled with

overpaid drones and hacks who, no matter how little they did or how badly they

did it, could be removed from their jobs only by the unelected bosses. The

result of this discontent, the Reform Movement, produced the modern "Civil

Service" system, under which drones and hacks can be removed only by nuclear

weapons.

In 1880 the voters elected a president named Chester, and in 1884 they

elected one named Grover. We now think this might have been caused by a

comet. Also there was a hideous hassle involving William Jennings Bryan and

something called the "gold standard," but every time anybody tries to explain

it to us we get a terrible headache. We have the same problem with the

concept of "second cousins."

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Can you name another famous person for whom a service plaza is named?

(Hint: Vince Lombardi.)

2. What is "rip-snortin'," anyway? Do you think it should be legal?

3. Do you have any second cousins? So what?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Groping Toward Empire

By 1890 the west had been tamed and could even obey simple commands such

as "Sit!" Now the United States was no longer an infant nation but a mighty

young colossus, bestriding (Unless there is no such word.) the continent--in

the words of Mark Twain--"like some kind of mighty young colossus or

something." America was the Land of Opportunity, and its symbol was the

Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French that had been dedicated in 1886 in a

spectacular ceremony featuring a thousand John Philip Sousa impersonators.

The statue was placed in New York Harbor, where its raised torch served as a

welcoming beacon of hope andfreedom to millions of oppressed and downtrodden

fish. Then somebody came up with the idea of taking it out of the water and

putting it on an island, and from that day on it was a major tourist

attraction for European immigrants, who flocked to America by the millions,

drawn by the promise expressed in the stirring poem by Emma Lazerus:

Give me your low-income individuals

Tired of these dense tempest-tost huddles

Yearning to get the hell off the boat

And retch all over the teeming shore

And so they came--the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Germans, the

Greeks, the Klingons, the Marcoses--lured by tales of good jobs and streets

paved with gold and plenty of closet space. But what they found was quite

different. What they found was New York City--a frantic, bustling place; a

giant (to use Mark Twain's phrase) "fondue pot" in which people from many

nationalities, crowded together by necessity, gradually began to realize that

despite their differences in language, custom, and religion, they all, in the

end, hated each other. Also the Americans who already lived here, except for

Emma Lazarus, were not exactly crazy about immigrants either. And so the new

citizens formed neighborhoods, and they moved into cramped tenement

apartments, and a lot of them still live there. They don't move out even when

they die, because New York apartments are too valuable to give up.

As New York City grew and prospered, it began to form corporations,

enormous "super-companies" whose vast resources enabled them to do something

that smaller firms could only dream of: transfer people. This created a

demand for new Cities, which soon flourished in places such as Minneapolis,

Chicago, and even, for a brief period, Cleveland.

But perhaps the most important new industrial area was Detroit, founded

by Henry Ford I, who also invented the Ford, forerunner to today's Isuzu. The

key to Ford's success as an industrialist was his discovery of the assembly

line, which worked on a simple principle: Instead of having the workers move

from place to place to assemble the cars , he had the cars move from place to

place to assemble the workers. For some reason this proved to be extremely

efficient, and in 1913 the Ford Motor Company began cranking out thousands of

the famous "Model T." By modern automotive standards, the Model T was very

primitive: It had no electric starter, no radio, no heater, no air

conditioner, no brakes, no transmission, no engine, and no wheels. The only

way to get it to actually move was to have four or five burly men pick it up

and stagger down the street. But it was affordable, and people bought it like

crazy. "What the hell," they said. "There'S nowhere to go anyway, here in

1913."

Meanwhile, another historic transportation development was taking place

in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, a desolate spit of sand where two young bicycle

mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright Brothers had gone to escape from

people who teased them about their first names. Also they were interested in

heavier-than-air flight. They used to sit on the dunes for hours, studying

the soaring sea gulls, hoping to learn the aerodynamic secret that kept them

aloft. And then one historic day, a shout rang out: "I've got it, Wilbur!

They're using propellers driven by gasoline engines!" And then another shout:

"I'm not Wilbur! You're Wilbur!" This was after many days on the dunes.

Nevertheless they went ahead and built their "flying machine," and on

October 8, they were ready for their first flight. Unfortunately, it had to

be canceled because of equipment problems at O'Hare, but they persevered, and

finally came the historic moment when Wilbur, or possibly Orville, managed to

get the frail, odd-looking craft airborne as far as Atlanta, where he changed

to a connecting flight (Daily except Sunday; featuring "snack" service.), thus

successfully launching the Aviation Age, although his luggage was never found.

This new spirit of soaring optimism could also be detected in the arts,

most notably in the work of Horatio Alger, who wrote a series of very popular

"rags to riches" stories in which a poor but intelligent young man is able,

through hard work and honesty, to locate the Wizard of Oz. A number of

talented American painters whose names escape us at the moment sprang up and

created a number of important paintings that we probably still cherish today.

The same thing happened with sculpture, not to mention women and minority

groups, who continued to make gigantic contributions despite continuing to

have no more legal rights than gravel. All in all, the turn of the century

was an exciting, boisterous time for America, a raucous cacophony of energy

and invention, idealism and hucksterism--in short, to repeat the words of the

brilliant poet and chocolate manufacturer Walt Whitman, it was "loud." This

caused imperialism to wake up.

THE AWAKENING OF IMPERIALISM

The first thing American imperialism noticed when it woke up was Cuba.

At the time Cuba technically belonged to Spain, which alert readers will

remember as the country that, in previous Confrontations with the United

States, had proved to be about as effective, militarily, as a tuna Casserole.

So it seemed like the ideal time to barge down there and free Cuba from the

yoke of Spanish imperialism by placing it under the yoke of U.S. imperialism,

the only problem being that at the time the United States did not have what

international lawyers refer to, in technical legalistic terms, as a treason."

So things looked very bleak indeed until one day in 1898 when, in a surprise

stroke of good fortune, the U.S. battleship Maine exploded and sank in Havana

harbor.

Immediately the American news media, showing a dedication to accuracy and

objectivity that would not be surpassed until nearly a century later (when the

Weekly World News, available at supermarkets everywhere, reported that a

Turkish farmer and four of his cows had been eaten by a giant purple flower

from space), announced that the Maine had definitely, no question about it,

been sunk by Spain. Soon the rallying cry went up from coast to coast: "Give

'em hell Harry!" This inspired William McKinley, who had been elected

president of the United States earlier in this chapter while we were not

paying attention, to issue an ultimatum (From the Latin, meaning "a kind of a

thing that a person issues.") to Spain in which he demanded a number of

concessions.

Spain immediately agreed to all the demands, an act of treachery that the

United States clearly could not tolerate. It was time to declare:

THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

Although the Spanish-American War was over in less time than it takes to

order Oriental food for six people by telephone, it ranks with the successful

invasion of Grenada as one of the country's mightiest military

accomplishments. The highlight came when Teddy "Theodore" Roosevelt led his

band of rough-riding cavalry persons, nicknamed the "Boston Celtics," in the

famous Charge up San Juan Hill, which turned out to be unoccupied, thus paving

the way for the famous Charge Down the Other Side of San Juan Hill. After

suffering several such military setbacks, Spain surrendered and gave the

United States control of not only Cuba, but also Puerto Rico, the Philippines,

Guam, Wake Island, Australia, Snooze Island, Antarctica, France, and the Crab

Nebula. "Go ahead, take everything," said Spain. "We're going to get drunk

and become a third-rate power."

But not the United States. Having flexed the triceps of its newfound

military might and, aided by the steroidal substance of nationalistic

sentiment, successfully bench-pressed the five-hundred-pound weight of

international expansionism, the United States was now eager to play a dominant

role on the international stage, with an option for the film rights. What the

nation needed, as it entered this new era, was a dynamic leader capable of

commanding this globe-begirdling (Or whatever.) young empire, but who (or

possibly "whom?") That was the question everybody was standing around asking

him- or herself in 1901 when, in another amazing stroke of good luck, an

anarchist shot William McKinley, who revealed, on his deathbed, that he had

been elected president in 1900, and that his vice president was a man who

happened to be not only a war hero, but a descendant of a distinguished

family, a public servant, a statesman, a big-game hunter, a naturalist, a

husband, a father, a heck of a fine human being, and one of my closest

personal friends, I really love this guy, let's give a big Las Vegas welcome

to (drum roll) ...

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Roosevelt was a Man of Action, not words. The public loved the way he

took on the businessmen who ran the big monopolies, or "trusts." Roosevelt

would invite these men to the White House and speak very softly, forcing them

to lean forward, straining to hear, whereupon Roosevelt would hammer them over

the heads with a big stick (Nicknamed "Betsy.") that he always carried. This

was just one of his famous mannerisms, another one being that he often

referred to the presidency as a "bully pulpit." Nobody knew what on earth he

meant by this, but nobody asked him, either, because of the stick. Of all

Roosevelt's achievements, however, the most significant, as measured by total

gallonage, was:

THE PANAMA CANAL

In those days, there was no easy way for ships to get from the Atlantic

to the Pacific. The usual procedure was for a ship to start picking up a head

of steam as it went past Cuba, so it would be going full speed when it rammed

into the Isthmus of Panama, sometimes getting eight or even ten feet into the

jungle before shuddering to a halt. Clearly the United States needed to build

a canal. The problem was that Panama technically belonged to Colombia which

refused to sign a treaty leasing it to the United States. So Roosevelt sent a

gunboat filled with marines down to Panama, on the off chance that a

revolution might suddenly break out, and darned if one didn't, two days later.

Not only that, but the leaders of the new nation of Panama--talk about lucky

breaks!--were absolutely thrilled to have the United States build a canal

there. "Really, it's our pleasure," they told the marines, adding, "Don't

shoot."

Over the next few years the marines in their role as Heavily Armed

Ambassadors of Friendship and Fun, were to meet with similar outpourings of

cheerful cooperation in Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and

other Latin American countries that the United States decided to befriend as

complete diplomatic equals in a spirit of mutual respect and without regard

for the fact that we could squash them like dung beetles under a cement truck.

We were a Happy Hemisphere indeed. It was time to think about branching out.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. You know what really ticks us off? The way the Boston Celtics bitch and

moan whenever a foul is called against them.

2. What does "all in all" mean, anyway?

3. How about: "by and large"?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Deep International Doo-doo

The year 1908 saw the election of the first U.S. president to

successfully weigh more than three hundred pounds, William Howard Taft, who

ran on a platform of reinforced concrete and who, in a stirring inauguration

speech, called for "a bacon cheeseburger and a side order of fries." Another

important occurrence in the Taft administration was the famous

BallingerPinchot Affair, which is truly one of the most fascinating and

bizarre episodes in the nation's history, although it is quite frankly none of

your business (Especially the part about the dwarf goat.).

After that not much happened until approximately 1912, when Teddy

Roosevelt, who had gone over to Africa to unwind from the pressures of the

presidency by attempting to kill every animal on the entire continent larger

than a wristwatch, decided he wanted to be president again. So he came

barging back and formed a new party, which was called the Bull Moose party so

as to evoke the inspirational image of an enormous animal eating ferns and

pooping all over the landscape. Despite this concept, Teddy lost, which is a

real tragedy because a Bull Moose victory might have started a whole new trend

of giving comical animal names to political parties, and today we might be

seeing election battles between the Small Hairless Nocturnal Rodent party and

the Stench-Emitting Ox party, and this country would be a lot more fun.

The winner in the 1912 election was Woodrow Wilson, known to his close

friends as "Woodrow Wilson," who garnered many votes with the popular slogan

"Wilson: He'll Eventually Get Us into World War I." The appeal of this

concept was so strong that Wilson was easily swept into office despite

widespread allegations of vote-garnering.

THE SUFFRAGETTE MOVEMENT

Meanwhile, out on the streets, there was a lot of movement by

"suffragettes," a term meaning "girl suffrages." The suffragettes, led by

Susan B. Anthony Dollar, believed that women should be given the right to vote

on the grounds that they Could not possibly screw things up worse than men

already had. They ultimately achieved their goal by marching around in

public, wearing hats the size of elementary schools, a tactic later adopted,

for reasons that are still unclear, by Queen Elizabeth.

Another major social development of the time was the Temperance Movement,

led by Carrie Nation, who headed an organization called Scary-Looking Women

with Hatchets. They would swoop down upon saloons and smash all the whiskey

bottles, then go back to their headquarters, fire up reefers as big as Roman

candles, and laugh until dawn. This resulted in so much social turmoil that

in 1918 Congress decided to have a total prohibition on alcohol, which was

approved early on a Saturday morning by a vote of 9-2, with 416 members unable

to attend because of severe headaches. Thus began the nation's "Noble

Experiment," which was eventually judged to be a noble failure and replaced by

the current sensible and coherent alcohol policy of showing public-service TV

announcements wherein professional sports figures urge people not to drink,

interspersed with TV commercials wherein professional Sports figures urge

people to drink.

But all of this paled by comparison with international tension, which

was--get ready for a bulletin here--mounting.

THE CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL TENSION

The major cause of international tension was Europe, which in those days

was made up of the Five (or possibly Six) Major Powers: Great Britain, France,

Russia, Germany, the Ottomans, the Barca-Loungers, and the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, an alliance between Australia and Hungary that was not really all that

major a power but was allowed to participate in international tension anyway

because it had some pretty good restaurants. These powers had spent roughly

the past thousand years trying to see who could set the land speed record for

breaking treaties with each other, and they had been involved in so many

complex alliances and double crosses that in 1903, in one of the more

hilarious moments in international diplomacy, France accidentally declared war

on itself (And lost.). By 1914 Europe was, in the words of the bad writer

Elrod Stooble, "a tinderbox with a hair trigger just waiting for the other

foot to drop."

And thus the entire continent was extremely tense and irritable, just

generally in a bad mood, that fateful summer day, October 8, when a young

archduke named Franz Ferdinand chanced to pass by the fateful spot where a

young anarchist named Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing in a fateful

manner, and, through an unfortunate quirk of fate, got into an argument over

who had the silliest name. Not surprisingly, this caused Austro-Hungary to

declare war on Serbia, only to be ridiculed by France, Great Britain, and

Russia when it was discovered that there actually was no such place as

"Serbia." This discovery, needless to say, caused Germany to invade Belgium

(one key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or

evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium). Soon all of Europe

was at war.

In America , the prevailing mood was that this was a truly dumb war and

we should stay the hell out of it. Just about everybody agreed on this: the

public, the press, barnyard animals, even leading political figures. Anybody

who even talked about the possibility of the United States getting into this

war was considered to be a cretin. In the presidential election campaign of

1916 (Often referred to by historians as "The Election Where Both Candidates'

Names Could Be Read in Either Direction."), both President Woodrow Wilson and

the Republican nominee, Charles Evans Hughes, went around stating in loud,

emotion-choked voices that they were definitely by God not going to get the

country into the war. So it was clear that the United States had no choice

but to get into the war, which, in 1917, it did. And a darned good thing,

too, because the official title of the war turned out to be:

"The War to End All Wars"

President Wilson's theory at the time was that America would march over

there and help France and Britain win the war, and then the winners would be

extremely fair and decent and not take enormous sums of money or huge chunks

of land from the losers, plus the entire system of world government would be

reformed so that everybody would live in Peace and Freedom Forevermore.

Needless to say, France and Britain thought this was the funniest theory they

had ever heard, and they would beg Wilson to tell it again and again at dinner

parties. "Hey Woody!" they'd shriek, tears of laughter falling into their

cognac (CONEYAK). "Tell us the part where we don't take money or land!"

The Actual War Itself

The actual war itself was extremely depressing and in many cases fatal,

so we're going to follow Standard History Textbook Procedure for talking about

wars, under which we pretty much skip over the part where people get killed

and instead make a big deal over what date the treaty was signed.

The Treaty of Versailles

The Treaty of Versailles (PA-REE) was signed on a specific date--our

guess would be October 8--and it incorporated Wilson's basic proposals, except

that instead of not taking enormous sums of money and huge chunks of land from

the losers, the winners at the last minute decided that it would be a better

idea if they did take enormous sums of money and chunks of land from the

losers. Other than that the war accomplished all of America's major

objectives, and by 1919 Europe had been transformed, at a cost of only several

million dead persons, from a group of nations that hated each other into a

group of nations that really hated each other. Thus it came as no surprise

when, in 1920, American voters overwhelmingly voted to elect a president named

Warren G. Harding (Also known as G. Harding Warren.), who called for a return

to "normalcy," which as far as we know is not even a real word.

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

Standings as of 1920

COUNTRY WINS LOSSES

Austria 0 1

England 1 0

France 1 0

Germany 0 1

United States Did not, technically, participate in the league.

Serbia Did not, technically, exist.

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Somewhere along in here the Russians overthrew the corrupt murdering

scumball ruling aristocrats who for centuries had lived like kings while

brutally oppressing the masses, and replaced them with the communists, who did

the same thing but at least had the decency to wear ill-fitting suits.

Ultimately, of course, this event was to have a major impact on the United

States, but for right now, the hell with it.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. A dwarf goat?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A Nation Gets Funky

The era immediately after World War I came to be known as the "Roaring

Twenties," and with good reason: Each of the years had a "twenty" in it, as in

1923, 1925, and so forth. Also there was a lot of wild and zany activity,

with "flappers" going to "speakeasies" where they would listen to "jazz,"

dance the "Charleston," and drink "bathtub gin" until they "puked" all over

the "floor." It was a very exciting time, but it also made for an exhausting

life-style, which is why you will notice that any people who happened to live

through it tend to look kind of elderly.

But all was not fun and games during the twenties. There was also Labor

Unrest, caused by coal miners emerging from the ground and making radical

demands such as: (1) they should get paid; or, at least (2) they should not

have the tunnels collapse on them so often. The coal companies generally

responded by bringing in skilled labor negotiators to bargain with the miners'

heads using clubs. This often resulted in violence, which forced the federal

government, in its role as peacekeeper, to have federal troops shoot at the

miners with guns. Eventually the miners realized that they were safer down in

the collapsing tunnels, and there was a considerable decline in Labor Un rest.

Another significant accomplishment of the federal government during the

twenties was the refinement of high-level corruption, which peaked during the

administration of President Harding G. Harding with the famous ...

TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL

The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wyoming that

derives its unusual name from the fact that, if viewed from a certain angle,

it appears to be shaped like a scandal. The government had placed a large

amount of oil under this land for safekeeping, but in 1921 it was stolen. The

mystery was solved later that same evening when an alert customs inspector

noticed former Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall attempting to board an

oceanliner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum

products, which he claimed had been a "gift" from a "friend." At this point

President Harding, showing the kind of class that Richard Nixon can only dream

about, died.

Harding's successor was Calvin Coolidge, who was popularly known as

"Silent Cal" because that was his nickname. The major accomplishment of the

Coolidge administration is a group of humorous anecdotes revolving around the

fact that Coolidge hardly ever talked. For example, there's the famous story

of the time that Coolidge was sitting next to a woman at a White House dinner

and the following hilarious exchange took place:

WOMAN: So, Mr. President. How are you?

COOLIDGE:

WOMAN: Is there something wrong?

COOLIDGE:

WOMAN: WhY won't you answer me?

COOLIDGE:

WOMAN: What a cretin.

Another popular humorist of the day was Will Rogers, who used to do an

act where he'd twirl a lasso and absolutely slay his audiences with such wry

observations as: "The only thing I know is what I read in the papers." Ha-ha!

Get it? Neither do we. Must have been something he did with the lasso.

But there was more to the twenties than mere hilarity. A great deal of

important breakthroughs were being achieved in the field of culture by giants

such as F- Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, who, in 1924, after years of

experimentation at their laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, successfully

tested the modern American novel, which is still in widespread use today.

Poets such as T. S. Eliot and e. e. "buster" Cummings were producing a new

type of "free-form" verse designed to prove that a poem did not have to be

long to be boring. Then, too, in Memphis, Tennessee, the first supermarket, a

Piggly Wiggly, was opened. On the West Coast, the motion-picture industry was

producing "talkies" featuring such stars as Douglas Fairbanks, Edward G.

Robinson, the young Joan Collins, and numerous twitching pieces of film lint

magnified to the size of boa constrictors. It was also a Golden Age of

Sports, with the most famous hero of them all, of course, being the immortal

Babe "Herman" Ruth, who provided what is perhaps baseball's finest moment

during the seventh game of the 1927 World Series when with the score tied and

two out, he pointed his bat toward the left-field bleachers, and then, on the

very next pitch, in a feat that will live forever, he knocked out the immortal

Jack Dempsey.

But no achievement symbolized the spirit of the Roaring Twenties more

than that of a tall young American aviator named, simply, Charles A.

Lindbergh. Those of us who are fortunate enough to live in this era of modern

commercial aviation, where air travel is extremely safe, thanks to advanced

safety procedures such as making the airports so congested that airplanes

hardly ever take off, can little appreciate the courage it took for Lindbergh

to climb into the cramped cockpit of his single-engine plane, the Heidy-Ho IV,

and take off into the predawn October 8 gloom over Roosevelt Field, Long

Island, towing a banner that said, SIMPLY, TAN DON'T BURN WITH COPPERTONE.

It was not an easy flight. Because of air turbulence, there was no

beverage-cart service, and it turned out that Lindbergh had already seen the

movie (The Poseidon Adventure.). Nevertheless he persevered, and thirty-three

hours later, on the afternoon of October 8, he arrived at an airfield near

Paris, where, to the joy of a watching world, he Plowed into a crowd of French

persons at over 140 miles per hour. An instant hero, he returned in triumph

for a motorcade ride in New York City, where millions welcomed him, in typical

"Big Apple" style, by covering the streets with litter, much of which can

still be seen today. But little did the cheering crowds realize, as streams

of ticker tape fluttered down from office windows, that within just two years,

the falling paper would be replaced by falling stockbrokers. If the crowds

had realized this, of course, they would have stayed to watch.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. What do coal companies do with the coal, anyway? You never see it for

sale.

2. Is "Big Apple" a stupid nickname, or what?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Severe Economic Bummerhood

The day the stock market crashed--October 8, 1929--will forever be etched

on the Etch a Sketch of the American consciousness as "the day the stock

market crashed," or Sometimes "Black Tuesday." For on that fateful day, the

nation's seemingly prosperous economy Was revealed to be merely a paper tiger

with feet of clay living in a straw house of cards that had cried "wolf" once

too often. Although this would not become clear for some time.

Oh, there had been warning signs. Just a few weeks before Black Tuesday,

there had been Mauve Wednesday, which was followed, only two days later, by

Dark Navy Blue with Thin Diagonal Yellow Stripes Friday. But most Americans

paid little heed ("Little Heed" would be a good name for a rock band. Also

"Short Shrift.") to these events, choosing instead to believe the comforting

words of President Herbert Hoover Dam, who, in a reassuring nationwide radio

broadcast, said: "Everybody STAY CALM, because there is NOTHING TO WORRY

ABOUT! Do you HEAR ME?? NOTHING!! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA [click]."

What were the underlying causes of the Crash? To truly understand the

answer to this question, we must examine:

THE UNDERLYING CAUSES OF THE CRASH

The stock market of the 1920s was very different from the stock market of

today. Back then, the market was infested by greed-crazed slimeballs,

get-rich-quick speculators with the ethical standards of tapeworms, who

shrieked "buy" and "sell" orders into the telephone with no concern whatsoever

for the nation's long-term financial well-being. Whereas today they use

computers.

Another big flaw in the stock market of 1929 was the practice of "buying

on margin." To illustrate how this worked, let's take a hypothetical example.

Let's say Investor A had x amount of dollars that he wished to invest in the

stock market. He would pick up telephone B, dial 1234567, and tell

stockbroker C he wanted to buy stock "on margin" in Company D. And the

stockbroker would sell it to him, even though Company D did not really exist

(Although as of yesterday it was up two points in active trading.). We just

made it up, for this hypothetical example.

Clearly, this kind of thing Could not go on forever, and on Black

Tuesday, it did not. As stock prices plummeted, panic selling spread. A

number of speculators, realizing that their dreams of wealth had turned to

ashes and seeing no hope of repaying their debts, hurled themselves from their

office windows. Even this failed to brighten the national mood. Because it

was becoming increasingly apparent that the Roaring Twenties were over and

that a new era had arrived: an era of unemPlOYment, poverty, social turmoil,

despair, and--worst of all--Shirley Temple movies. And thus began what became

known, following a highly successful "Name That Era" contest sponsored by the

New York World Herald Journal Telegram Bugle and Harmonica, as:

THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The Great Depression was horrible. Ask the people who lived through it.

Or, don't even bother to ask. Just stand next to them for more than two

minutes, and they'll tell you about it. "It was hard, during the Great

Depression," they'll say. "We had nothing to eat except floor sweepings and

we walked eighteen miles to school. Even if the school was only two miles

away, we'd have to walk back and forth nine times, because times were bad, and

you had no choice, so you worked hard for every nickel, which in those days

would buy you two tickets to a movie plus four boxes of popcorn plus a used

Buick sedan, but of course we couldn't afford it because Dad only made two

dollars and fifty-seven cents per year and our shoes were made out of

grapefruit rinds, but we never complained, no, we were happy, because we had

values in those days, and if you had values you didn't need a lot of money or

food or toilet paper, which was a luxury in those days to the point where we'd

get through a whole year--this was a family of eleven--on just six squares of

toilet paper, because we had this system where if you had to ... HEY! Come

back here!"

As the federal government began to recognize the seriousness of the

situation, it swung into action with the historic enactment, in 1930, of ...

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

Quite frankly we have no idea what this is, but we think it has a

wonderful ring to it, and we just like to see it in large bold letters:

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

And yet, as the weeks dragged into months and the economy continued to

founder, it soon became clear that some economic "medicine" even more potent

than ...

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

would be needed to get the nation "back on its feet." This paved the way

for the historic election of 1932. The Republicans, showing the kind of

sensitivity they are famous for, renominated President Hoover Dam, who pledged

that, if elected, he would flee to the Bahamas. The Democrats countered by

nominating Franklin Delanor Roosevelt--or, as he was affectionately known,

"J.F.K."--who ran under the slogan "Let's Elect Another President Named

"Roosevelt" and Confuse the Hell out of Future Generations of Students." The

voters responded overwhelmingly, and Roosevelt was elected in a mammoth

landslide that unfortunately left him confined to a wheelchair for the rest of

his life.

Nevertheless he began immediately to Combat the Depression, implementing

a series of bold and sweeping new programs that came to be known,

collectively, as:

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

No! Sorry! We can't control ourselves. The programs implemented by

Roosevelt were of course called the "New Deal," which consisted of the

following:

1. Bank Protection--A major problem during the Depression was that people kept

trying to get their money out of banks. To put a stop to this kind of

thing, the government instituted modern banking regulations, under which:

The banks are never open when it might be convenient.

The customer is never sure what his bank's name is, since they keep changing

it, usually from something like "The First Formal Federal National State

Bank of Savings Loans and Of Course Trust" to something like

"InterContiBankAmeriTransWestSouthNorthCorp." There are always stupid people in line ahead of you trying to cash checks from

the Bank of Ye men and using underwear labels for identification.

2. Job Creation--The government instituted a massive program of public works,

under which tens of thousands of men and women were put to work strewing

barricades and traffic cones on all the major roads in America, then

using red flags to give halfhearted and confusing signals to motorists

and sometimes waving them directly into the path of oncoming traffic.

These projects are still fully operational today.

3. The Infield Fly Rule--Under this program, when there is a runner on first

or second base and there are fewer than two out, and the batter is the

son of the runner's first cousin, then the batter and the runner are

legally considered "second Cousins."

Not surprisingly, these programs had an immediate impact on the Great

Depression. And although some members of Congress charged that Roosevelt was

overstepping his legal authority, he was able to win them over by inviting

them to the White House for a series of "Fireside Chats" ("Perhaps, Senator,

You would understand these Policies better if Ernst and Victor moved you even

closer to the fire?" "NO! PLEASE!").

But even firm measures such as this did not prevent huge clouds of dust

kicked up by ...

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

from covering entire states such as Oklahoma and turning them into a

gigantic "Dust Bin," forcing tens of thousands of people to pack up and head

toward California, lured by the hope of finding jobs and a new life and maybe

some decent sushi. This troubled era was chronicled brilliantly by John

Steinbeck in his moving novel The Grapes of Wrath, part of a series that also

includes The Pinto Beans of Lust and Bloodsucking Death Cabbages from Hell.

And we could go on for days talking about the contributions being made during

this period by women and minority groups.

But the bottom line was, things were still not going well. The only

really positive aspect of the situation was that at least the nation was at

peace. Yet at that very same moment, across the dark, brooding waters of the

Atlantic, there was growing concern. "My God, look at those waters!" people

were saying. "They're brooding!" Clearly this did not bode well for the next

chapter, which would see the outbreak of the most terrible and destructive

event in the history of Mankind:

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Did you ever see the movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes ? Explain.

2. You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market

is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed

activity, or whatever? Well, who gives a shit?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Major Nonhumorous Events Occur

While the United states was struggling to get OUt of the Depression, the

nations of Europe were struggling to overcome the horror and devastation and

death of World War I so they could go ahead and have World War II. By the

1930s everybody was just about ready, so Germany, showing the kind of spunky

"can-do" spirit that has made it so Popular over the years, started invading

various surrounding nations. Fortunately these were for the most part Small

nations, but Germany's actions nevertheless alarmed Britain and France, which

decided to strike back via the bold and clever strategy of signing agreements

with Adolf Hitler. Their thinking was: If you can't trust an insane racist

paranoid spittle emitting criminal dictator, whom can you trust?

Shockingly, this strategy did not prove to be effective. In 1939 Germany

invaded Poland in retaliation for Poland's flagrant and provocative decision

to be right next door. Britain and France then declared war against Germany,

which immediately invaded France and managed to conquer it after an epic

battle lasting, by some accounts, as long as thirty-five minutes, with the

crushing blow coming near the end when Germany's ally, Italy, sent in its

much-feared troops, who penetrated nearly two hundred feet into southern

France before their truck broke down.

At this point things looked pretty bleak for the Allied or "good" side.

The last bastion of goodness was Great Britain, a feisty, plucky little island

in the North Atlantic led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had won the

respect and loyalty of the British people for his ability to come up with

clever insults at dinner parties. For example, there was the famous one where

this woman says to him, "Lord Churchill, you're drunk!" And he replies,

"Madam, I may be drunk, but BLEAAARRRGGGHHH" all over her evening gown.

Churchill used this gift of eloquence to rally his countrymen when Britain was

down to a three-day supply of pluck and a German invasion appeared imminent.

"We shall fight them on the beaches he said. "We shall fight them in the

streets, and in the alleys, and in those things where it's like a dead end,

only there's like a circle at the end, you know? Cul somethings." Thus

inspired, the British persevered, but by 1941 it was clear that they could not

hold out long without military support from the United States. At the time

Americans were strongly opposed to becoming directly involved, but that was to

change drastically on the fateful December morning of October 8, when the

Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful

strategy to dominate the U.S. consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl

Harbor. And so it was time to have ...

WORLD WAR II

The best evidence we have of what World War II was like comes from about

300 million movies made during this era, many of them featuring Ronald Reagan.

From these we learn that the war was fought by small groups of men called

"units," with each unit consisting of:

One Italian person

One Jewish person

One Southern person

One Tough but Caring Sergeant (Played by William Bendix.),

and of course

One African-American.

These men often fought together through an entire double feature, during

which they would learn, despite their differing backgrounds, how to trickle

syrup from the corners of their mouths to indicate that they had been wounded.

In the actual war of course, real blood was used. In fact, the actual war was

extremely depressing, which is why we're going to follow our usual procedure

here and skip directly to ...

The Turning Point

The turning point of the war came when the Allies were able to break the

code being used by the Axis high command. The way this happened was, a young

British intelligence officer was looking at some captured Nazi documents, and

suddenly it hit him. "Hey!" he said. "This is written in German!" From that

moment on, it was only a matter of time bef ore June 1944, which was when the

schedule called for the Normandy Invasion. The Germans knew it was coming,

but they didn't know where; thus it was that when, on the morning of October

8, thousands of ships disgorged tens of thousands of troops on the beaches of

NorMandy, the Germans felt pretty stupid. "So that's why they were calling it

the 'Normandy Invasion'!" they said (In German.). Stunned by this blow, the

Germans began a slow, bloody retreat before the forces of General George C.

Scott, and within months the Americans had liberated France, whose people

continue until this day to show their gratitude to American visitors by

looking at us as though we are total Piltdown men when we try to order food.

The Final Stages of the War

America entered the final stages of the war under the leadership of

Roosevelt's successor, Harry S Truman, a feisty, plucky little island in the

North Atlantic, who ... No, excuse us, we mean: a feisty, plucky native of

Missouri (the "Sho' Nuff'!" State) who grew up so poor that his family could

not afford to put a period after his middle initial , yet who went on to

become a failed haberdasher. It was Truman who made the difficult decision to

drop the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, the rationale

being that only such a devastating, horrendous display of destructive power

would convince Japan that it had to surrender. Truman also made the decision

to drop the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, the rationale being that, hey, we

had another bomb.

When the war finally ended, Truman shrewdly realized that it was time to

enter the Postwar Era. His first order of business was to work with the

leaders of the other devastated and war-weary nations to establish some kind

of mechanism to guarantee that there would be lasting world peace for a couple

of months while everybody developed better weapons. It was this idealistic

hope that gave birth to a noble organization that has survived and flourished

to this day, an organization that affords an opportunity for representatives

of virtually every nation on the globe to gather together for the purpose of

freely and openly using their diplomatic license plates to violate New York

City parking regulations. We refer, of course to ...

THE UNITED NATIONS

The U.N. consists of two main bodies:

The General Assembly, which is, in the generous spirit of the U.N. Charter,

open to just about every little dirtbag nation in the world. It has no

power. Its functions are to: (1) Have formal receptions; (2) Listen to

the Grateful Dead on headphones; and (3) Denounce Israel for everything,

including sunspots.

The Security Council, which is limited to nations that have mastered the

concept of plumbing. It is very powerful. Its functions are to: (1)

Pass sweeping resolutions intended to end bloody conflicts; and then (2)

Veto, ignore, or walk out on these resolutions.

But despite the presence of this potent force for peace, trouble was

looming between the United States and the Soviet Union. Indeed, even as the

final battles of World War II were still being fought, the battle lines were

being drawn for yet another struggle--an epic struggle between the archenemy

ideologies of communism and capitalism; a struggle that was to take many forms

and erupt in many places; a struggle that threatened and continues to threaten

the very survival of life on the planet; a Struggle that has come to be known

as ...

THE HAWLEY-SMOOT TARIFF

No! Sorry! That's it for the Hawley-Smoot Tariff; you have our word.

The struggle we are referring to is of course the Cold War, which we will

cover in extreme detail in the next chapter, but first let's pause for this:

TRICK DISCUSSION QUESTION

1. What did the "S" in Harry S Truman's name stand for? (Hint: "Lucille.")

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

International Tension City

The end of World War II brought an economic boom to America, as factories

that had been cranking out tanks and planes for the war effort were suddenly

free to produce for Mr. and Mrs. Joe Consumer (Not their real name. Their

real name was Mr. and Mrs. Bob Consumer.). This made for some pretty exciting

times, because Mr. and Mrs. Consumer had very little experience with tanks and

planes, and sometimes tempers would fray in traffic. ("Hey, that's my parking

space!" "Oh yeah?" "Look out! He's turning his turret!!" "KABLAMMMI!!"

"AIEEEEEEE ..." But while things were doing well on the domestic front,

problems were looming on the international front in the form of

THE COLD WAR

The Cold War gets its name from the fact that it was formed first in the

Soviet Union, also known as the "U.S.S.R." or simply the "Union of the

Society of Socialistic Soviet Union Communist Russians." The Soviet Union had

actually been our ally during World War II, although today many people do not

realize this, in large part because we forgot to mention it in the last

chapter.

What caused the Cold War? Why did two nations that had both spilt so

much blood in a common cause, suddenly become archenemies? And how come it's

acceptable to write "spilt"? We don't write: "I was truly thrilt when the

service-station attendant filt up my car with gasoline," do we? Of course

not! There are no service-station attendants anymore! This is just one of

the grim realities that we have been forced to learn to live with in the Cold

War era. But what--we are going to finish this paragraph if it kills

us--caused this to come about? Respected historians agree that many complex

and subtly interrelated factors were involved, which is why we never sit next

to historians at parties.

Speaking of parties, the soviet Union at this time was being run by the

Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously

bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas"), who

had risen quickly . through the party ranks on the basis of possessing a high

level of personal magnetism, as measured in armed henchpersons.

Stalin's strategy at the end of World War II was to acquire a small

"buffer zone" between Russia and Germany, consisting of Estonia, Latvia,

Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,

Albania, and most of Germany. In an effort to garner public support in these

nations, Stalin mounted a public-relations campaign built around the upbeat

theme "Maybe We Won't Have Your Whole Family Shot," and in 1945 Eastern Europe

decided to join the Communist bloc by a vote of 28,932,084,164,504,029-0.

Heartened by this mandate, Stalin immediately ordered construction work to

begin on the Iron Curtain, which was given its name by Sir Winston Churchill,

who, in a historic anecdote at a dinner party, said: "Madam, I may be drunk,

but an iron curtain has descended upon BLEAAARRRGGGHHH."

Alarmed by these prophetic words, the United States joined with eleven

other nations to form the North American Treaty Organization, or UNICEF.

Under this treaty, the United States agreed to station tens of thousands of

troops in Western Europe. In return, the Western Europeans agreed to station

tens of thousands of their troops in Iowa, but after a couple of weeks they

got bored and went home to make imported cars. (Our troops are still over

there; we keep trying to get them back, but they like the beer.) And thus the

Cold War continued to deepen and broaden and widen and become larger, and by

1948 it became clear that some kind of confrontation was inevitable, and so

the two Superpowers decided to hold one.

The Berlin Crisis

The Berlin Crisis was caused when Stalin, encouraged by the success of

his Iron Curtain, decided to set up a blockade cutting off the West's land

access to West Berlin, a city that was on the good side in the Cold War but

that was located, due to computer error, some 120 miles (325 kilograms)

(30936.54 hectares) (2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes) behind the Curtain. As

food supplies ran low, it began to appear as though the Berliners, despite the

fact that they were feisty and of course plucky, would be starved into

surrender. Just then (October 8.), President Truman had an idea, an idea that

showed the kind of straightforward, no-nonsense, homespun wisdom that had

served him so well in the past. "Let's drop an atomic bomb on Japan," he

said. His aides, however, detected several flaws in this plan, so instead

Truman decided to proceed with:

THE BERLIN AIRLIFT

This was one of the most dramatic feats in the history of dramatic

aviation feats. Day after day, around the clock, U.S. planes took off from

West Germany, carrying thousands of tons of clothing, medicine, fuel, and food

destined for besieged Berlin. It was a stirring sight indeed to watch these

mighty aircraft sweep over the surrounded city and open their cargo doors,

allowing the life-giving supplies to hurtle majestically toward the grateful

Berliners below. Individual cans of Spam were clocked at upward of 130 miles

per hour. Despite the casualties, it was a triumph of the "can-do" American

spirit, and when Truman threatened to escalate the relief effort by having the

planes fly over Soviet territory and drop huge amounts of cafeteria-grade

ravioli or even--remember, these were desperate times--fruitcake, Stalin had

no choice but to call off the blockade.

But it was clear by now that communism would continue to be a serious

threat abroad, and it was equally evident that the only intelligent way for

Americans to deal with it was to develop a firm yet cautious and intelligent

policy, based on a realistic assessment of the situation rather than blind

hatred, uncontrolled emotion, and shrill accusation. Still, that seemed like

an awful lot of work, so instead we had ...

The Red Scare

The Scare was started by Joseph McCarthy, who was a senator from

Wisconsin. That's the strange thing about Wisconsin: You think of it as being

this nice friendly state full of decent, God-fearing, cow-oriented people, and

here they elect this vicious alcoholic psychopathic lunatic. And it's not

just an isolated incident: In recent years, Wisconsin has also attempted to

elect Charles Manson, Hermann Goring, Jabba the Hutt, and, chillingly, Geraldo

Rivera. We think it's something in the cheese.

Anyway, McCarthy made a series of speeches in which he charged that

Communists had infiltrated the federal government to the point where the State

Department had an actual Communist dining room, Communist men's bowling team,

and so forth. At first, skeptics scoffed at these charges, but when McCarthy

produced solid evidence in the form of a piece of paper that appeared, at

least from a distance , to have something written on it, the press, displaying

the kind of journalistic integrity that we normally associate only with

restroom bacteria, had no choice but to print the story, and the Scare was on.

Speaking of bacteria, a highly active Communist-finder during this era

was a young attorney named Richard "Dick" Milhous "Milhous" Nixon, who had

gotten elected to Congress from a California district despite the handicap

that he reminded people of a nocturnal rodent. It was Nixon who nailed proven

suspected Communist and Red Fellow Traveler Alger Hiss, the turning point in

the case coming when Nixon, accompanied by reporters, went to a Maryland farm,

where he reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and, in a moment of high drama,

pulled out a cocker spaniel named Checkers. This was widely believed to be

the end of his career. (Nixon's.)

Eventually the public came to its senses and the Red Scare hysteria died

down, and today, thank goodness, we no longer see politicians attempting to

gain power by accusing their opponents of being unpatriotic, except during

elections. Speaking of which, we almost forgot to mention the dramatic ...

1948 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

in 1948 the Democrats had little choice but to nominate President Truman,

under the banner:

HE IS GOING TO LOSE.

Everybody felt this way: the politicians, the press, the pollsters, the

piccolo players, Peter Piper, everybody. The Republicans were so confident

that they nominated an individual named Thomas Dewey, whose lone

accomplishment was inventing the decimal system. Truman campaigned doggedly

around the nation, but his cause appeared to be hopeless. A Dewey victory

seemed so inevitable that on election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the

famous front-page headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This was because Dewey had

defeated Truman who immediately threatened to drop an atomic bomb on Chicago,

so everybody went ha-ha-ha-ha, just kidding, and wisely elected to let the

feisty ex-haberdasher have another term.

This was typical of the carefree attitude widespread in the nation during

the postwar years. Popular culture saw millions of "bobby soxers" (Not their

real names.) swooning over a feisty, skinny crooner named Frank Sinatra, while

young "hep cats" wore "zoot suits" and danced the "jitterbug" to "platters" on

the "jukebox." In short, the whole nation was behaving like "dorks," and it

was only a matter of time before some kind of terrible event occurred.

THE KOREAN WAR

The Korean War was, as is so often the case with wars, not especially

amusing, except for those soldiers who were fortunate enough to get in a fun

unit featuring Alan Alda and a host of wacky and zany characters and young

nurses with terrific bodies. So we're going to continue our policy of

skipping over the depressing parts and hasten ahead to the fifties, although

we would like to "toot our own horn" just a little bit here and point out that

we have managed to get through this entire chapter without once mentioning ...

THE H***-S**** T*****

If you get our drift.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Remember when the United States was supposed to switch over to the metric

system, and the federal government put up road signs in kilometers, and

in some areas people actually shot the signs down? Wasn't that great?

2. Do you think "Checkers" is a good name for a dog? What about "Booger"?

Explain.

EXTRA-CREDIT PROJECT

Think of a joke that starts this way: "Knock knock." "Who's there?"

"Lithuania." (Hint: This joke could involve lisping.)

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death

Because of scheduling problems, the fifties did not officially begin

until 1952. This, coincidentally, was the year of the 1952 presidential

election campaign, in which both parties, recognizing that the nation was

locked into a deadly Cold War struggle, when the slightest mistake could mean

the destruction of the entire planet, nominated bald men with silly names.

The Democrats went with Adlai Stevenson, a suspected intellectual, and the

Republicans went with Dwight "David" Eisenhower, who was extremely popular for

winning World War II and having the likable nickname "Ike," which he got from

a sound that his friend Sir Winston Churchill made just before pitching

face-first into his food at a dinner party.

Going into the race, Eisenhower had a strong tactical advantage stemming

from the fact that nobody, including himself, knew what his views were. But

his campaign quickly became enmeshed in scandal when it was discovered that

his running mate, Senator "Dick" Nixon, had received money from a secret fund.

Realizing that his career was at stake, Nixon appeared on a live television

broadcast and told the American people, with deep emotion in his voice, that

if they didn't let him be the vice president, he would kill his dog. This was

widely believed to be the end of his career.

Nevertheless, Eisenhower, buoyed by the inspirational and deeply

meaningful campaign theme "I like Ike," won the election and immediately

plunged into an ambitious and arduous schedule that often involved playing

golf and taking a nap on the same day. This resulted in a humongous economic

boom that caused millions of Americans to purchase comically styled big cars

and hightail it to the suburbs. Thus began a Golden Era in this country that

is still looked back upon with nostalgia by the millions of Americans who are

involved in the manufacture and sale of nostalgia-related products.

CULTURE IN THE FIFTIES

The fifties were an extremely important cultural era, because this was

the phase when the postwar "Baby Boom" generation grew up, and we Boomers are

quite frankly fascinated with anything involving ourselves. Like when we

started having our own babies, it was all we could talk about for years. We

went around describing our child -having and child-rearing experiences in

breathtaking detail, as though the rest of you had no experience whatsoever in

these fields. We're sorry if you find all this boring, but it's not our fault

that you were not fortunate enough to have been born into such an intriguing

and important generation. We Can only imagine how interesting we are going to

be at cocktail parties when we start getting into death.

But back to the fifties: The best archival source for accurate

information about life during this era is the brilliant TV documentary series

Ozzie and Harriet. From this we learn that the fifties were a time when once

per week some kind of epochal crisis would occur, such as Ricky borrowing

David's sweater without asking, and it would take a half an hour to resolve

this crisis, owing to the fact that the male head of household had the IQ of

dirt. But other than that, life was very good, considering it was filmed in

black and white.

Another important television show of the era was The Mickey Mouse Club,

which made enormous cultural contributions, by which we mean: Annette

Funicello. Annette had a major impact on many of us male Baby Boomers,

especially the part where she came marching out wearing a T-shirt with her

name printed on it, and some of the letters were considerably closer to the

camera than others. If you get our drift.

But the most truly wonderful fifties show was Queen for a Day, starring

Your Host, Jack Bailey. This was a kind of Game Show from Hell where three

women competed to see who had the most miserable life. We are not making this

show up. Contestant Number One would say something like, "Well I have

terminal cancer, of course, and little Billy's iron lung was destroyed in the

fire, and ..." and so on. Everybody in the audience would be weeping, and

then Contestant Number Two would tell a story that was even worse. And then

Contestant Number Three would make the other two sound like Mary Poppins.

After which Jack Bailey would have the members of the audience clap to show

which woman they thought was the most wretched, and she would receive some

very nice gifts including (always) an Amana freezer. It was fabulous

television, and a nice freezer, and it remained unsurpassed until three

decades later, with the emergence--probably as a result of toxic waste in the

water supply--of Geraldo Rivera.

Of course television was not the only cultural contribution of the

fifties. There was also the Hula-Hoop, and Marlon Brando. And let's not

forget the interstate highway system, which made it possible for a family to

hop into a car in Cleveland, and a little over four hours later, find

themselves still delayed by road construction just outside of Cleveland. We

are still benefiting from this system.

But the significant cultural innovation of the fifties was musical--a new

"sound" called "rock 'n' roll--an exciting, high-energy style of music that,

in its raucous disregard for the gentler, more complacent tastes of an older

generation, reflected the Young people's growing disillusionment With the

stultifying, numbing, bourgeois, and materialistic values of an increasingly

homogeneous society through such lyrics as:

Ba bomp ba bomp bomp

A dang a dang dang

A ding a dong ding,

Blue moon.

Of the many legendary rock "performers" to emerge during this era--"Fats"

Checker, the Pylons, the Gol-Darnits, Buster and the Harpoons, Bill Hawley and

the Smoots, and so on--the greatest of them all was "The King," Elvis Presley,

who went on to become the largest (Ha-ha!) (Get it?) record-seller of all

time, and who is to this very day sometimes seen shopping in rural

supermarkets.

So there's no question about it: By the mid-fifties, America was

definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all

citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the color happened to

be black. Then there was a problem. Because at the time the nation was

functioning under the racial doctrine of "Separate but Equal," which got its

name from the fact that black people were required to use separate facilities

that were equal to the facilities that white people kept for their domestic

animals. This system had worked for many decades, and nobody saw any real

reason to change until one day in 1954 when a group of outside agitators

arrived from outer space to file a suit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of

Education. This led to the historic and just Supreme Court ruling, a

landmark, that nobody, black or white, should have to go to school in Topeka,

Kansas. Thus was born the civil rights movement--an epic struggle that has

required much sacrifice and pain, but which has enabled the United States to

progress, in just three decades, from being a nation where blacks were forced

to ride in the back of the bus, to being a nation where, due to federal

cutbacks, there is no bus.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1956

Things were going so smoothly at this point that the voters didn't really

feel like going through a whole new presidential election, so they decided to

hold the 1952 election over again, and it came out the same. In a word,

everything seemed to be working out very well, and the fifties would probably

have been pure perfection except that--it seems like this always happens--all

these pesky foreign affairs kept occurring in the form of crises, starting

with ...

THE SUEZ CRISIS

This crisis involved the Suez Canal, which was built bY the French

("Suez!" is the word used to call French pigs.) (Not that they come.) and

which is extremely strategic because it is the only navigable water route

connecting the Red Sea with Albany, New York. Hence, you can imagine how

tense the world became on the morning of October 8 when this area became the

scene of a full-blown crisis, although we cannot for the life of us remember

what the hell it was. But we're fairly sure it's over. You never hear about

it on the news.

At around this same time a number of other international crises, most of

them also fully blown, occurred in Hungary, Poland, Lebanon, and the quiz-show

industry. But all of these paled by comparison to ...

THE SPUTNIK CRISIS

One day in 1957 everybody in the United States was minding his or her own

business when suddenly the Russians launched a grapefruit-size object called

Sputnik (literally, "Little Sput") into an Earth orbit, from which it began

transmitting back the following potentially vital intelligence information

(and we quote): "Beep." This came as a severe shock to Americans, because at

that point the best our space scientists had been able to come up with was a

walnut-size object that went: "Moo." And thus began the Space Race which was

to have an enormous worldwide impact on Mrs. DeLucia's fifth-grade class,

which was where we were at the time. All of a sudden Mrs. DeLucia was telling

us we were going to have to study a LOT more science and math, including such

concepts as the "cosine." As if the whole thing were our fault.

So it was a difficult time, but by 1960 the nation was starting to feel a

little better. "Well," we said brightly in unison, "at least there haven't

been any crises for a while!" Which was of course the signal for the

International Crisis Promotion Council to swing into action and produce:

THE U-2 CRISIS

This crisis occurred when the Russians shot down an American U-2

reconnaissance plane flying deep into their airspace, and then accused

us--this is the kind of paranoid thinking that makes the Russians so

untrustworthy--of conducting aerial reconnaissance. Our government offered a

number of highly plausible and perfectly innocent explanations for the flight,

such as:

It was a weather plane.

It was a traffic plane.

It was swamp gas.

The dog ate our homework.

But eventually President Eisenhower, emerging from a high-level nap, was

forced to admit that it was in fact a spy plane, at which point the Russians,

led by Nikita "The Human Potato" Khrushchev, stomped Out of the Paris summit

conference before the appetizers had even arrived, leaving "Ike" with nobody

to negotiate with except himself. And although he won several major

concessions, the feeling was becoming widespread among the American People

that maybe it was time for a change--time to get some "new blood" in the White

House and "get the country moving again." And it just so happened that at

that very moment, a new "star" was rising on the public scene--a young man

whose boyish good looks, energy, quick wit, and graceful charm would soon

capture the hearts of the nation and even the world: Pat Boone. Or maybe that

was 1955.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you think we've had enough Winston Churchill jokes? Explain.

2. Have you, or has anybody you have ever met, ever found any use for the

cosine? We didn't think so.

EXTRA CREDIT

Try to think up a campaign slogan even more inane than "I like Ike."

(Hint: This is not possible.)

BONUS QUESTION

What does one do with extra credit, anyway?

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Sixties: A Nation Gets High and Has Amazing Insights,

Many of Which Later On Turn Out to Seem Kind of Stupid

The sixties was a unique era in American history. Mention the sixties to

any middle-aged urban professional, and he'll transform himself into something

worse than one of those Depressionites, droning away about his memories until

you think up an excuse to leave. Such is the impact that this exciting era

still has on the American consciousness. Because it was a time of truth, but

also of lies; of love, but also of hate; of peace, but also of war; of Otis

Redding, but also of Sonny Bono. There was a "new feeling" in the land,

especially among the young people, who joined the "hippie movement" to express

their need to be free, to challenge the traditional values of American

culture, to order some pizza right now. Yes! the "times they were a

changin'" and nobody expressed the spirit of the sixties better than the

brilliant young poet-songwriter-irritatingly-nasal-whiner Bob Dylan, when,

with his usual insightfulness, he sang:

How many times can a man be a man

Before a man is a man?

Moved by the power of this message, tens of thousands of young people

rejected the trappings of a grasping greedy society to live simple,

uncluttered lives dedicated to meditation and spirituality and listening to

sitar music and ingesting random substances and becoming intensely interested

in the ceiling and driving home at one mile per hour. As a result of these

experiences, the "Flower Children" of the sixties developed a unique set of

values, a strong sense of idealism and social awareness that still exerts a

powerful influence over their decisions in such philosophical areas as what

radio stations to listen to when driving their Jaguars to their brokerage

firms.

THE 1960 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

In 1960 the Democratic candidate was the rich, witty, graceful, charming,

and of course, boyishly handsome Massachusetts senator John Fitzgerald

Kennedy, who gained voter recognition by having his face on millions of

souvenir plates and being married to the lovely and internationally admired

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kennedy's major political drawback was that the

nation had never elected a Roman Catholic; on the other hand, the nation had

never elected a total dweeb, either, and the Republicans had for some reason

nominated "Dick" Nixon. So it was a very close race.

The turning point was a series of nationally televised debates, in which

Kennedy, who looked tanned and relaxed, seemed to have an advantage over

Nixon, who looked as though he had been coached by ferrets. Kennedy held a

slight lead going into the bonus round, where he chose Category Three

(Graceful Handsome Boyish Wittiness) and won the Matching luggage plus Texas

plus Illinois, thus guaranteeing his victory in the November election. This

was widely believed to be the end of Nixon's career.

THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION

Kennedy had pledged, during the 1960 election campaign, to "get the

country moving again"--to get it out of the Eisenhower doldrums, to bring back

its vigor, to reinstill its pride, to reassert its leadership around the

world, maybe even to get it into a dumbfounding, unwinnable war. And under

the gracefully boyishly handsomely witty charmingness of his leadership,

America began to do just that. Kennedy immediately set the tone in his

inaugural address, in which he promised that the country would land a Peace

Corps volunteer on the Moon, and ended with the stirring words of the famous

challenge "Ask not what your country cannot do that you cannot do, nor what

cannot be done by neither you nor your country, whichever greater." The

Kennedys also captivated the nation With their unique style, which soon earned

the young administration the nickname "Camelot" (from the popular Broadway

musical Guys and Dolls). The Kennedy style was an eclectic blend of amusing

and graceful activeties that ranged from taking fifty-mile hikes to inviting

cellist Pablo Casals to perform at the White House to playing touch football

on the lawn. As the Kennedy mystique grew, the first family's activities were

widely imitated: Before long, millions of Americans were taking Pablo Casals

on fifty-mile hikes. When he begged for a chance to rest, they laughed and

threw footballs at him. Such was the vigor of the times.

So everything would probably have been ideal if the Red Communists had

not decided to be their usual party-pooper selves by causing new international

tension in the form of ...

The Bay of Pigs

In 1960 there was considerable concern about the fact that Fidel Castro,

a known beard-wearing Communist, had taken over Cuba, which is a mere ninety

miles from Key West, Florida, site of America's largest strategic stockpile of

tasteless T-shirts. This alarmed the U.S. intelligence Community, whose crack

team of analysts developed a Shrewd plan under which the U.S. would secretly

train an army to invade Cuba; which then according to the plan, would cause

the population to rise up in revolt and throw Castro out of power. This plan

worked smoothly, with everything going exactly as planned, except the part

about the population rising up in revolt, and so forth. It turned out that

large segments of the population had already risen up in revolt just a short

time earlier to put Castro into power, but unfortunately our intelligence

community had misplaced the file folder containing this tidbit of information.

So the invasion failed and the U.S. got some international egg on its face.

But Kennedy took it with his usual boyishly witty graceful handsome

charminghood, and the intelligence community, showing admirable spunk, quickly

discovered an exciting new place to think up Shrewd plans about: Southeast

Asia.

Once more everything seemed to be going pretty well, until, wouldn't you

know it, along came ...

The Berlin Crisis

This was caused when the Russians noticed that every morning

approximately 173,000 East Berlin residents commuted to work in West Berlin,

and every evening approximately 8 Of them commuted back. The Russians,

showing the kind of subtle public-relations skills that have made them so

popular everywhere they tromp, responded by building the Berlin Wall, which

created a crisis that was not resolved until President Kennedy went over there

in person and made the famous inspirational proclamation "Ich bin ein

Berliner" ("I wish to see a menu"). This calmed international tensions, but

only briefly, for in October 1962 a major event was to occur, an event that

would become the focus of the world's attention for several tense days. We

refer, of course, to the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants

four games to three. Also, there was a Cuban missile crisis, which the United

States won in the final minutes by going into a "prevent" defense.

Another shocking development that occurred at this time was that "Dick"

Nixon reached such a low level of credibility with the voters that even

California refused to elect him as governor. In his concession speech, Nixon

told the press: "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore," prompting

the reporters, in a fit of nostalgia, to batter him unconscious with their

wingtips. This was widely believed to be the end of his career.

So by 1963, all things considered, the sixties seemed to be going pretty

well. Which just goes to show that you can never tell, because except for the

discovery of Aretha Franklin, the rest of the decade turned out to be ...

A LONG STRING OF BUMMERS

First of all, Kennedy was assassinated, which was traumatic enough in

itself but was made even worse by the fact that we never did find out for sure

what happened, which means that for the rest of our lives we're going to be

opening People magazine and reading articles about Yet another conspiracy buff

claiming to have conclusive proof that Lee Harvey Oswald was actually working

for Roy Orbison or the Nabisco Corporation or whatever.

THEN we got President Lyndon Johnson, who tried his darnedest, by means

of looking somber to the point of intestinal discomfort, to convey integrity,

but who nevertheless made you think immediately of the large comically

dishonest Warner Brothers cartoon rooster Foghorn Leghorn. Plus his

wife--this is still difficult to believe even years later--was named "Lady

Bird." Johnson was nevertheless elected overwhelmingly in 1964, easily

defeating Republican nominee Barry Goldwater, who turned out to be an OK guy

but who at the time appeared to be perfectly likely to launch a nuclear first

strike against, say, New York.

THEN we got into the Vietnam War, which is still causing arguments

involving: the people who supported it but didn't fight in it, versus the

people who didn't support it but did fight in it, versus the people who didn't

support it and didn't fight in it, versus the people who supported it and

might have had to fight in it if ever the Indiana National Guard had been

called up, which was of course a distinct possibility, and so on.

THEN more people got assassinated and everybody started hating everybody

and there were riots in the streets. THEN Gilligan's Island was canceled.

So by 1968 things were really bad. They were so bad that it seemed

impossible for them to get any worse, unless something truly horrible

happened, something so twisted and sinister and evil that the human mind could

barely comprehend it.

THE NIXON COMEBACK

Yes. One day we turned on our televisions, and there he was, "Dick"

Nixon, looking stronger than ever despite the holes in his suit where various

stakes had been driven into his heart. He was advertised as a "new" Nixon

with all kinds of amazing features, including an illuminated glove compartment

and a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, but of course he couldn't tell

the voters what it was, because then it wouldn't have been a secret plan.

Nixon's running mate was an individual named Spiro Agnew, whose principal

qualification was that when You rearranged the letters of his name, You got

"grow a penis" (Dick Cavett discovered this. Really.). Their campaign

theme--we are not making this up--was "Law and Order."

The Democrats, meanwhile, were in trouble. The war had become extremely

unpopular, so President Johnson had decided not to seek reelection, which was

an act of great statesmanship in the sense that nobody except maybe Lady Bird

would have voted for him anyway. The process by which the Democrats decided

who their new nominee would be was about as organized as a tub of live bait,

culminating in the 1968 Chicago convention which consisted of spokespersons

for about 253 major ideological factions giving each other the finger through

clouds of tear gas. Out of this process emerged Hubert Humphrey, a nice man

with a lot of solid experience and an unfortunate tendency to sound like Porky

Pig, only not as dignified. On top of this, the Democrats had to contend with

the candidacy of Alabama governor George Wallace, who appealed to what the

political experts called "disaffected Democrats" defined as "Democrats missing

teeth."

And thus it was that on election day, October 8, 1968, the voters went to

the polls and elected, as leader of the greatest nation that the world has

ever seen, President Richard Milhous N ... President Richard M ... President R

... Please don't make us do this.

THE NIXON PRESIDENCY

Nixon's first official act as president was to sneak out behind the White

House and bury his secret peace plan to ensure that nobody would find out what

it was, which would have been a breach of national security. With that

important task accomplished, he swung into action, working feverishly to

accomplish his most important objective, to realize the cherished dream that

had driven him through all these years of disappointment, to reach the

long-sought goal that, thanks to his election was finally within his grasp,

namely: getting reelected.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Didn't you always, even when you were sitting around with your friends

pretending to be really enthralled, secretly hate sitar music? Admit it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Seventies: A Relieved Nation Learns That It Does Not Actually Need a

President

The seventies dawned with "Dick" Nixon riding high. The nation had

surged ahead in the space race through a series of courageous accomplishments

by astronauts such as Donald "Deke" Slayton, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, Scott

"Scotty" Carpenter, and Nicholas "Nicky the Squid" Calamari, climaxing with

the historic moment on October 8 when Neil "Satchmo" Armstrong became the

first human, with the possible exception of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, to set

foot on the Moon, where he expressed the emotions of an anxiously watching

world with the unforgettable statement "Hi Mom!"

On the foreign-policy front, Nixon continued to protect the national

security by not telling anybody, not even his secret wife, Pat, what his

secret plan to end the Vietnam War was. At the same time, he undertook a

major clandestine foreign-policy initiative by sending chocolates and

long-stemmed roses to legendary Communist Chinese revolutionary leader Mao

("Mo the Dong") Zedong. Helping him with this initiative was the brilliant,

avocado-shaped genius Henry Kissinger, who became the nation's top

foreign-policy strategist despite being born with the handicaps of a laughable

accent and no morals or neck.

The daring initiative came to fruition in 1972 when Nixon became the

first American president to visit China, where Mao , an avid prankster,

presented him with two giant pandas, named Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing. This

was actually a hilarious Communist joke, because "Ling-Ling" and "Hsing-Hsing"

are the words that Chinese children use to describe bodily outputs, as in

"Mommy, I have to make ling-ling." The Chinese officials just about died

laughing when Nixon was making his thank-you speech and Ling-Ling went

Hsing-Hsing on his shoe. (The pandas now reside in the National Zoo, where,

over the past eighteen years, nearly a third of the federal budget has been

spent on various elaborate schemes to get them to reproduce, which is also

pretty funny inasmuch as they are both males.)

The China initiative was a notable coup, and even though the darned pesky

Vietnam War was still going on, everybody knew that "Dick" had his secret

plan, which he could dig up and put into effect at any time. So things looked

very good indeed for him going into the 1972 election. He got a lot of help

from the Democrats, who, continuing the tradition they established in 1968 of

appearing to be incapable of operating an electric blanket, let alone the

country, nominated George McGovern, who had exhibited a wide-ranging appeal to

a broad cross section of nearly fourteen voters. The result was that in the

1972 election Nixon carried all the states and every major planet except

Massachusetts.

So by 1973 "Dick" Nixon was at the pinnacle of power and appeared poised

to become, against all odds, one of the most successful and respected

presidents in the nation's history. This was the signal for God to come into

the game and create ...

THE WATERGATE SCANDAL

The Watergate Scandal, which gets its name from the fact that it was a

scandal, began with a break-in of the Democratic National Committee

headquarters by a group of burglars so ludicrously incompetent that they

obviously had to have some connection with the federal government. Sure

enough, when two plucky and persistent Washington Post reporters, played by

Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, began poking around, a confidential source

named "Deep Throat"--whose identity remains a closely guarded secret to this

very day because it was Pat Nixon in drag--revealed to them a fascinating

tidbit of information: Some species of mollusk can actually change their

gender.

This was the "missing puzzle piece" that the two brash young journalists

needed to "break the story." Within days the scandal was such hot news that

it was turned into a highly popular television series called The Senate

Watergate Committee's Parade of Scuzzballs, starring genial host "Senator Sam"

Ervin (Okeefenokee), who had the entire nation listening with rapt attention

in an effort to figure out what the hell he was saying. Senator Sam spoke in

Deep Southern, which is similar to English, only unintelligible, so everything

he said came out sounding like "We go' heppin' wif de bane pone." But

everybody was on his side anyway, because the committee witnesses--a group of

high-level Nixon administration aides, all of them named Klaus--projected all

the warmth and personal integrity of eels. (We are pleased to report,

however, that while in federal prison they all found the Lord, who was serving

a six-year sentence for failing to file tax returns.)

So things looked very bad for the Nixon administration, and they got even

worse with the revelation that Nixon had secretly taped all the Oval Office

conversations that had taken place between him and the various Klauses. The

tapes contained many shocking and highly revealing exchanges, such as this

one, from October 8:

NIXON: Because you have, you have problems with the, with the [expletive

deleted], with the ...

KLAUS: Yeah [garbled], with the, uh, with the ...

NIXON: ... with, uh, with the [expletive deleted].

KLAUS: ... with the ...

NIXON: [Expletive deleted].

KLAUS: ... with the Smoot-Hawley.

NIXON: Shit.

As damaging as these revelations were, matters got even worse for Nixon

when one of the tapes was found to contain, at a crucial juncture, an

eighteen-minute gap where nothing could be heard except a hum. This was the

last straw: The American public, simply would not tolerate a president who

would fritter away eighteen minutes humming during a crucial juncture. The

next day, October 8, the Senate Watergate Committee voted 17-9 in favor of a

resolution proposed by Senator Ervin calling on the president to "Rang onsum

latmun sookles." Clearly the dice had been cast down onto the gauntlet.

Nixon appeared to have only two options left:

OPTION ONE: He could boldly remain as president and defend himself in the

now-inevitable impeachment proceedings.

OPTION TWO: He could spare the country further trauma by resigning in a

dignified manner.

Those of you who are well-schooled students of "Dick" Nixon will not be

surprised to learn that, after carefully weighing the alternatives, he decided

to go with Option Three: to stand in the Rose Garden and make a semicoherent

speech about his mother that may well rank as the single most embarrassing

moment in American history. Thoroughly humiliated, Nixon then went off to

live in a state of utter disgrace (New Jersey.). This was widely believed to

be the end of his career.

Nixon's resignation left the nation in shock, compounded when

enterprising Washington Post reporters revealed that, while nobody was paying

attention, Vice President Agnew had resigned to take a job clubbing baby

seals. This meant that the new president of the United States was--this all

seems like a dream now--Gerald Ford. Yes! The golf person!

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION

The major highlight was when Ford gave Nixon a full presidential pardon,

thereby sparing the nation the trauma of seeing "Dick" go to federal prison,

where there was every reason to fear that he would--this makes us shudder just

thinking about it--find the Lord. Ford also restored the nation's respect for

the office of the presidency by falling down and bonking his head a lot.

Another major Ford highlight was when he alerted the nation that there

was going to be an epidemic of "swine flu" and that everybody should get a

shot. As it turned out, there was less of a risk from the disease than from

the shots, but fortunately only a few high-level administration officials were

dumb enough to get them.

Of course there were many other Ford administration highlights, but

unfortunately we lost the matchbook we had them written on. Your best bet, if

you want more information on this topic, is to visit the official Gerald R.

Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which features among other

fascinating exhibits, all of the former chief executive's merit badges

(Really.).

So Ford made an important contribution as a "caretaker" president, but by

the time the 1976 election rolled around, America was ready to turn in an

entirely new direction for leadership. America had grown deeply suspicious of

establishment Politicians, and wanted a different kind of president, a

president who was not a Washington "insider," a president who rejected the

ostentatious trappings of power, a president who was moral and decent and

sensitive and kind and earnest and truthful and pious and had nice hair like

Phil Donahue. America was ready to be led by: a weenie.

"JIMMY" CARTER

jimmy Carter came from a simple God-fearing homespun southern family that

was normal in every respect except that many of its members, upon close

inspection, appeared to be crazy. After graduating from the U.S. Naval

Academy, he served as an officer aboard a nuclear submarine, where, due to an

unfortunate radiation leakage, he developed enormous mutant teeth.

Nevertheless he went on to become a successful peanut farmer and governor of

Georgia for an entire term, thus acquiring all of the major qualifications

that a modern politician needs to be president of the United States, namely:

blue suits. He easily won the Democratic nomination in 1976 to face Gerald

Ford, who won the GOP nomination after narrowly edging out former California

governor Ronald Reagan by a score of four brain cells to three.

During the election campaign, Carter performed many symbolic gestures to

show he was a regular person only much smarter. For example, he often carried

his own garment bag. This impressed the voters, although it was eventually

revealed by enterprising Washington Post reporters that the bag did not, in

fact, contain a single garment. Nevertheless Carter won the election and went

on to have several highlights.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION

The main one, without question, was when the president claimed that while

he was out in a canoe one day, he was attacked by an enormous swimming rabbit.

We swear we are not making this highlight up. Also there was an energy crisis

during which Americans, showing the sense of self-sacrifice and community

spirit that often emerges when the well-being of the nation is at stake,

closed ranks and shot at each other in gas lines.

The lowlight of the Carter administration was that the economy did

poorly. This troubled Jimmy a great deal, so much so that he gathered

together all of the nation's top thinkers for a special conference at Camp

David. They thought and thought and thought, and when they were finally done,

Jimmy came out and announced that the nation's problems were being caused by

"malaise." This puzzled the average American, who had never even heard of

"malaise, except on a sandwich, and who was under the impression that the

problem was that unemployment and inflation were running at about 652 billion

percent. "Any minute now," the average American thought, "he's gonna tell us

we have to get 'malaise' shots."

So there was much disillusionment among the voting public. The stage was

set for yet another dramatic change in the nation's political direction--a

shift away from the soul-searching, the uncertainty, the intellectual

complexity, and the multisylabic words of the Carter era; a shift toward a new

kind of leader, a man with a gift for communicating the kind of clear, direct,

uncomplicated message that had previously been associated only with Tide

commercials. It was time for the Reagan Revolution.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How do they know what gender a mollusk is?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Reagan-Bush Years: Napping Toward Glory

The 1980s will be remembered as a time when the nation broke free of the

confining chains of the left-leaning bleeding-heart gutless namby-pamby Mister

Pouty Pants Liberal school of political thought that had dominated the

American political landscape ever since the New Deal; a time when Americans

began Standing Tall, Talking Proud, Feeling Good, Sitting Straight, Pledging

Allegiance, and Eating More Fiber.

Who was responsible for this sweeping change in the national mood?

Amazingly, it was almost entirely the work of a single person, a strong,

dominant individual who was able to change the course of history through

steely determination, unflinching toughness, and sheer force of will: Nancy

Reagan. But you also have to give a lot of credit to her husband, Ron, a

distinguished war-movie hero who served, off and on, as president of the

United States during this era, and whose administration made many historically

crucial decisions, several of which he was aware of personally. Coinciding

with this national mood change was emergence and rapid cholera-like spreading

of the young urban professionals, also known as "yuppies" or, more

affectionately, "suspender-wearing wingtipped weenies," a new breed of

seriously ambitious humanoids whose idea of a really wild evening was to get

drunk and restructure a corporation. The role models for the eighties were

men like Donald Trump, who had made several jillion dollars in the lucrative

field of amassing wealth. But beyond being stupendously rich, Trump was also

truly a class individual, as he revealed in his best-selling book, Trump:

Truly a Class Individual, and in 1989 he captured the imagination of the

nation when, in the largest private financial transaction ever, he purchased

Ohio, the Coast Guard, the Italian Renaissance, and Mars (All of which he

classily renamed "Trump.").

Another major trend of the 1980s was the sudden ubiquitousness of the

personal computer, a tool that has freed millions of people to use words like

"ubiquitousness" without actually knowing how to spell them. In fact, the

book that you are now reading was written on a personal computer, which is why

it is devoid of the "typos" that were so common in the days of old-fashioned

wersp oidop gfegkog pl;gpp$R$%I%.

But all was not peaches and light on the 1980s economic front. After a

lengthy investigation, crack agents of the Securities and Exchange Commission

discovered that top Wall Street figures were using "inside information" to

make money, a revelation that came as a shock to those members of the public

who had mince pie for brains. Investor confidence was further shaken by the

stockmarket crash of October 8, 1987, caused by a herd of computers that were

panicked into the worst international electronic stampede in history when a

woman in Akron, Ohio, got angry and punched an automatic bank teller (Charging

it later with sexual harassment.).

Another major economic upheaval was the sudden end of the energy crisis,

which meant lower gas prices and harder times for wealthy Texans as well as

large oil companies, thereby causing alarmed, thoughtful Americans everywhere

to laugh until their garments were soaked with drool. Things were also very

bad for the American family farmer, whose fields, by the late 1980s, were

parched and dusty because of the bright lights being shone on them by

television news crews doing heartrending reports about the plight of the

family farmer.

Internationally, the major event of the eighties was that Prince Charles

married Diana Spencer, thus assuring that they would be featured on roughly

every third cover of People for the rest of our lives. But when all is said

and done, which, trust us, will be very soon now, the story of the eighties

will be the story of the Reagan administration and the many men and women who

served in it, some of whom are already out on parole.

THE 1980 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN

In 1980 the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Jimmy Carter and Walter

Mondale, who ran under the slogan "Four More Years?" The Republicans,

meanwhile, had a spirited primary-campaign season, which came down to a duel

between Reagan and George Herbert Walker Norris Wainright Armoire Vestibule

Pomegranate Bush IV, who had achieved a distinguished record of government

service despite having a voice that sounded like he had just inhaled an entire

blimpload of helium.

Reagan finally won the nomination by promoting "Reaganomics," an economic

program based on the theory that the government could lower taxes while

increasing spending and at the same time actually reduce the federal budget

deficit by sacrificing a live chicken by the light of a full moon. Bush

charged that this amounted to "voo-doo economics," which got him into hot

water until he explained that what he meant to Say was "doo-doo economics."

Satisfied, Reagan made Bush his vice-presidential nominee.

The turning point in the election campaign came during the October 8

debate between Reagan and Carter, when Reagan's handlers came up with a shrewd

strategy: No Matter what Carter Said, Reagan would respond by shaking his head

in a sorrowful but personable manner and Saying: "There you go again." This

was brilliant, because (a) it required the candidate to remember only four

words, and (b) he delivered them so believably that everything Carter said

seemed like a lie. If Carter had stated that the Earth was round, Reagan

would have shaken his head, saying, "There you go again" and millions of

voters would have said: "Yeah! What does Carter think we are? Stupid?"

And so the Reagan-Bush juggernaut easily swept to victory in all but a

handful of states (Which were immediately purchased by Donald Trump.), thus

paving the way for

THE REAGAN REVOLUTION

The Reagan Revolution was run by Staunch Conservatives who wanted the

government to stop wasting money on bloated, inefficient social programs and

start wasting it on bloated, inefficient military programs. Foremost among

these was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars," which is a

far-flung network of highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art "defense

contractors" orbiting a giant, five-sided structure called the "Pentagon,"

which constantly emits high-intensity beams of "money." In the event of a

nuclear attack, electronic communications devices called "telephones" would be

used to instantaneously alert the president and his top "defense strategists"

that it is time for them to be whisked to secret radiation-proof underground

"hideouts" stocked with food and water and recreational activities such as

"Ping-Pong" and protected by vicious biting dogs from intrusion by sick,

desperate, starving, and increasingly hairless "taxpayers." Thanks to the

miracle of computers, all this would take place in less time than it takes for

a family of four to order breakfast!

However, in the area of foreign policy, the major focus of the first

Reagan term was Central America, a region of immense strategic vitality to the

United States because if it were to ever fall into the hands of communist

troops, they would be eaten by insects. Thus it was with extreme interest

that Americans viewed the struggle between the "Sandinistas," a group of

anticommunist ex-military officers from Honduras, to overthrow the contras , a

group of pro -militarist ex-communists from El Salvador, in an effort to

control Nicaragua, the site of the vital Suez Canal, which ... No, wait a

minute. sorry. What we mean is Americans viewed with extreme interest the

struggle between the "Hondurans," a group of ex-Panamanian Nicaraguans, to

control the "Canal Zones" a group of pro-contra, ex-cathedral,

nondenominational ... No, hold it. Never mind. The Point is that there were

a great many strategic things going on down in this vital dirtball region,

which is why the Reagan administration called upon its crack intelligence

strategists to put down their bananas and get to work. It was clear that we

were going to take an active role in the region, a policy that soon led to the

turning point in the battle against communist infiltration in the Western

Hemisphere, namely:

THE WAR IN GRENADA

This war began when Cuban Communist Construction workers began actively engaging in suspected acts of construction on the island of Grenada which not

only contains an abundant natural supply of American medical students but also

happens to be in a very strategic and vital location.

Clearly some kind of action had to be taken, and on October 8, it was.

Backed by massive sea and air support, nearly two thousand marines stormed

onto the island, despite the very real danger that they might sink it.

Nevertheless, they were able to overcome not only armed resistance but

numerous loose goats, thus winning the war and paving the way for a peace

settlement under which we agreed to give the Grenadans upward of $100 million,

in return for which they agreed to be our friends, which they still were, we

think, last time anybody checked.

Another foreign-policy triumph for Reagan was his 1984 visit to China,

where he met for more than three hours with Mao Zedong before realizing that

Mao was dead. Aides described the talks as "frank."

This was exactly the kind of firm leadership that Americans had been

yearning for, so Reagan was extremely popular when the 1984 presidential

election campaign lumbered into view. And once again the Republicans got a

lot of help from the Democrats, who by this point were acting as though they

were conducting an experiment to see if it was possible to run a major

presidential camPaign without winning a single state.

The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale, who immediately announced in that

distinctive voice of his that sounded as if emanating from a nasal passage the

size of a gymnasium, that if he were elected, he would jack up taxes. This

shrewd move immediately earned him the support of more than half the members

of his immediate family, and he went on to lose so badly that people are

still, years later, showing up at the polls at all hours of the day and night

and demanding an opportunity to vote against him.

But Mondale can claim one major achievement: He chose as his running mate

Geraldine A. Ferraro, who will become a footnote (Geraldine A. Ferraro.) to

history.

THE SECOND REAGAN TERM

The big excitement in the second Reagan term was the "Iran-contra"

scandal, which was caused when somebody in the White House, we are still not

sure who, but definitely not the president, decided to sell arms to the

Iranian government, which is the same group of greaseballs who took American

hostages, which is why we have laws against selling arms to them, but this

case was an exception because the money was supposed to go to either the

Sandinistas or maybe the contras, some strategic group down there, so it was

perfectly OK to sell the arms, although we wish to stress once again that the

president knew nothing about it, and even if he did he later forgot, which is

no big deal because if a president clutters up his mind with every pesky

little detail such as what the foreign policy is, he has no room left for

important matters.

When news of this got out, there was a big scandal, culminating in

marathon hearings by the Joint House and Senate Committee to Bore Everybody to

Death. The highlight of these hearings was the testimony of Oliver North, a

marine lieutenant colonel who was considered the key witness because he had

been single-handedly operating the executive branch of the federal government

for several years while everybody else was in meetings. In a dramatic

televised moment, North, his eyes moist and his voice shaking, revealed to the

committee that he was a courageous patriot, after which he became so overcome

by emotion that he knocked over his bottle of Revlon eye moistener.

Eventually, the nation overcame the trauma of Iran-contra and went back

to reading the sports pages. And Reagan was soon able to "bounce back" from

the scandal by going to the Soviet Union, which is in Russia, and signing a

historic agreement with Mikhail Gorbachev that enormously enhanced the

prospects for world peace by prohibiting either side from ever publicly

noticing the huge mark on Mr. Gorbachev's head.

Meanwhile, however, new problems were beginning to form. Chief among

these was the federal budget deficit, which was mounting at an alarming rate.

Both the Reagan administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress had

tried a number of possible solutions--increased government spending, having

the government spend more money, increasing the amount of money being spent by

the government--but that darned ol' deficit just would not go away. On top of

that, there were other serious problems such as the AIDS epidemic, the

Greenhouse Effect, the trade imbalance, drugs, illiteracy, Geraldo Rivera

getting his own TV show, and so on. Obviously, the nation was in desperate

need of bold new leadership and vision, which was too bad because the next

scheduled event was ...

THE 1988 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

This time the Republicans, determined to show the nation that they liked

a joke as much as the next person, nominated George Bush, who selected as his

running mate young "Dan" Quayle, a Vietnam-era veteran who had received the

coveted Round Smiley Face decoration in recognition of the time he

accidentally stapled his sleeve to the desk and was trapped for nearly two

hours.

Clearly this was a ticket that even the Democrats would have a difficult

time losing to, but they worked at it and managed to come up with the ideal

candidate in the form of "Mike" Dukakis, a man who, because of a tragic

genetic defect, was limited to the same basic range of expressions as an

iguana. He'd be making a speech, and he'd start to raise his voice, and it

would look like there might be some actual emotion going on inside him, but

then suddenly his tongue would flick out to snare a passing insect, and the

whole effect would be ruined.

But you also have to give a large pile of credit to Bush and his top

political strategist, Darth Vader. Their campaign, conducted via highly

informative television commercials, focused on the issues that were certain to

be of vital concern to the nation in the years to come, especially:

The pledge of allegiance.

Furloughed rapist Willie Horton.

The budget deficit, and whether it could be corrected by forcing furloughed

rapist Willie Horton to say the pledge of allegiance over and over. For

fifty years.

When election day rolled around, tens of millions of American voters,

impressed by the level of debate, went to the mall. But some of them also

cast their ballots, and the Bush-Quayle ticket was swept into office with a

clear-cut popular mandate to please not have another election for at least

four years.

That is where we stand today. And what lies ahead? Will we be able to

solve our social and economic problems, clean up our environment? maybe even

improve our technology to the Point where we can land a manned spacecraft on

Trump? Unfortunately, we cannot know what will happen in the future. If this

book proves anything, it's that we don't even know what happened in the past.

But we do know this: America is a strong and great country, and her people

have withstood many trials and tribulations (More tribulations, actually,

because many never went to trial.). And whatever problems lie ahead, we may

be sure of one thing: that if we all work together and "hang tough," there

will come a day when this nation--maybe not in the next few years; maybe not

even in our lifetimes; but someday--will see the end of "Dick" Nixon's

political career. But we wouldn't bet on it.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How about we go get a beer?

INDEX

A

Anal Compulsive Party, 57

B

Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato, Samuel, 78

Bono, Sonny, 143

Booger, as dog name, 132

Buster and the Harpoons, 137

C

Calamari, "Nicky the Squid," 153

Camp Sharparoon, 37

Carlisle, Kitty, 57

Celtics, Boston, 91

Charles "Chuck" IV, King, IX

Consumer, Mr. and Mrs. Joe, 124

Cosine, the, 140

Cummings, e. e. "buster," 106

D

Dead, Grateful, 122

Del-Vikings, 56

De Rigeur, Juan Ponce, ix

"Doodle, Yankee," 41

E

Enormous swimming rabbit attacks Jimmy Carter, 161

F

Fashion Statement of 1787, 46

Fondue in the Colonial Era, 35

Franklin, Aretha, discovery of, 148

Franklin, Benjamin, emits drool streamer, 47

H

Harding, Harding G., 105

I

island, Gilligan's 150

J

Joke, knock-knock 132

L

Large, by and, 94

Leghorn, Foghorn 149

Long distance, invention of, 76

Louis the Somethingth, 29

M

McGraw, "Quick Draw," 81

Midnight Surprise Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping, VI

Moby-Dick vs. the Atomic Bat from Hell, 65

N

National Tractor Mechanic Awareness Week, 49

O

Orbison, Roy, and Kennedy assassination, 149

P

Pig, Porky, 151

Pinto Beans of Lust, The, 115

Piper, Peter, 130

Pistons, Detroit, 5

Pooper, party, 146

Pope Bilious XIV, IX

Pouty Pants, Mister, 163

S

Scary-Looking Women with Hatchets, 97

Skywalker, Luke, 81

Small Hairless Nocturnal Rodent party, 96

Soup, cock-a-leeky, 7

Spam, 128

Spasms,5

T

Tenants putting things in toilets, 43

Tuna casserole, military effectiveness of, 89

V

Vader, Darth, 174

W

Warren, G. Harding, 101

Z

Zedong, Mao, 154

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE Barry was described in The New York Times Book Review as "the

funniest man in America," a claim he has been quick to disavow, except for the

plaque on the front door. Nevertheless, the reviewer got there late: The

Pulitzer Prize Committee had cited him for commentary earlier in 1988, and he

got off with an appropriately light sentence (Even earlier, in 1986, he won

the Distinguished Writing Award of the American Association of Newspaper

Editors, but what do they know?). Apart from these facts--which, as Mr. Barry

occasionally Puts it--we are not making up, the relevant details seem to be

that he writes for The Miami Herald and is syndicated in approximately 150

other newspapers, several of which make money despite this.

Barry lives with his wife, Beth, and son, Robby, in a Coral Gables,

Florida, house surrounded by giant mutant spiders.