Those Who Do Not Know History . . .

[Marius]

Are doomed to read this thread.

Those of you who can't answer the Trivial Pursuit (tm) questions about American history, like, say, Europeans or folks who went to public schools, will appreciate this opportunity to learn.

[Spiral]

What opportunity to learn? Your post is devoid of useful information, Marius.

[Nexusvoid]

Yeah, well, my public school can beat up your preppie-ass private school any day!

[Marius]

[Some few thousand years ago] . . ., 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.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Two: Spain Gets Hot[/align]

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 67 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.

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.

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 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 in three tiny ships, the Ninja, the Pina Colada[/’I], and the Heidy-Ho III. 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: K’ham 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.

[FlakJacket]

This your own work or are you taking it from somewhere?

[Elldren]

Vaguely remeniscent of one of my favourite humour texts, <i>1066 and All That</i>.
Curious readers wish to know, Marius. Is it original? If so, keep up the good work. If not, whom should I praise? And where can I find more of it?

[Cash]

This kicks so much ass!

[Serious Paul]

Serious Paul erects a false Idol in Marius's image.

[Marius]

[align=center]THE DECLINE OF SPAIN[/align]

On October 8, 1565, Spain declined.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Three: England Starts Some Fun Colonies[/align]

By the sixteenth century at approximately 4:30 pm, 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 flinder 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.”


[align=center]THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE LOST COLONY[/align]

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:

[align=center]SMOKE TOBACCO
“It won’t gradually turn your lungs
into malignant lumps of carbon!”[/align]

Although 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 a 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 a total democracy as we know it today, but it was a start.

[Gunny]

*walks in, reads the thread, laughs, wrings out her panties, hands them to Marius as a parting gift and walks out laughing*

[Cazmonster]

There is an evil to Marius, one we should squeeze out of him and market as a novelty.

[Cash]

[align=center]THE DECLINE OF SPAIN[/align]

On October 8, 1565, Spain declined.

England:: I say, more tea?
Spain:: No, thank you.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Four: The Colonies Develop a Life-style[/align]

The typical lifestyle 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 stock 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.


[align=center]THE ENGLAND-HOLLAND RIVALRY[/align]

Meanwhile, England got into a rivalry with Holland. Although today Holland is primarily known 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. (He 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. Wheat they really needed, to get themselves off their duffs, was for trade to develop. Luckily, several days later this occurred.


[align=center]THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE[/align]

On morning the colonists noted 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 colonies 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 just about to become involved in friction with the French.

[Marius]

[align=center]FRICTION WITH THE FRENCH[/align]

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 painstakingly 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:


[align=center]The French and Indian War[/align]

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 the 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 l’enfer,” he remarked at the time, ”c’est seulement Canada.”

[Daki]

Damn you for making me laugh out loud at work.

[Gunny]

*raises her hand* teacher... teacher! I need to go to the nurse... my lunch is coming out of my nose....

[Ancient History]

Y'know, when I first saw this thread, i thought it had something to do with me.

[Dennis]

because of the important explorations of the brave Dutch explorer for whom the Hudson River is named, Henry Hudson River.

I know this is all not true, but this is _especially_ not true. Hudson was an English captain who had defected and went to work for the Dutch.

[Cash]

Duh, it's not all true.

[Instant Cash]

which had established a thriving economy based on illegal parking

LMFAO

[Cash]

Ok, that part is true.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Five: The Birthing Contractions of a Nation[/align]

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 a 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.

And so on. In 1762 the king attempted to respond to the colonists’ concerns by setting up a special Taxpayer Assistance Service, under which the 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.

[align=center]
THE SITUATION TURNS UGLY[/align]
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 yoke 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 cahier 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 pounds) or tacky folding card tables (3 billion pounds). 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 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, as could be seen from the following chart, if Marius were not too lazy to reproduce it.

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.

[align=center]DISCUSSION QUESTIONS[/align]
1. Do you think Unitas should have started for the Colts?
2. What the hell are chick-peas, anyway?

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Six: Kicking Some British Butt[/align]

The Revolutionary War began with the famous Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. By day, Revere was a Boston silversmith, 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 am, 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 formations (“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 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 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: WANNFAHRTDERSUGAB EIN UMWIEVEILUHRKOMMTERAN! 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 the Writing of the Declaration of Independence, whose members had 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.

[align=center]THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE[/align]

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 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:


[align=center]THE TURNING POINT[/align]

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.

[align=center]DISCUSSION QUESTIONS[/align]
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.

[Eva]

This is so funny, Marius. I know you didn't write this yourself, where's it from?

[Daki]

This is just wonderful stuff Marius.

[FlakJacket]

This is so funny, Marius. I know you didn't write this yourself, where's it from?

Oh well that's nice.

[null]

This is so funny, Marius. I know you didn't write this yourself, where's it from?

Oh well that's nice.

Honesty and truth should never be punished.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Seven: The Forging of a Large, Wasteful Bureaucracy[/align]

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 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.


[align=center]THE U.S. CONSTITUTION[/align]

The Constitution divides the federal government into three equal branches:

1. Mammoth, labyrinthine departments set up for purposes that no individual taxpayer would ever in a million years voluntarily spend money on.
2. Mammoth, labyrinthine 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.

[align=center]How a Bill Becomes a Law[/align]

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 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.

[align=center]The Bill of Rights[/align]

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 are 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.

[align=center]The Ratification of the Constitution[/align]

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.


[align=center]THE ELECTION OF THE FIRST PRESIDENT[/align]

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 hi 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.

[align=center]DISCUSSION QUESTIONS[/align]
1. 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?

[Eva]

This is so funny, Marius. I know you didn't write this yourself, where's it from?

Oh well that's nice.

I'm not saying that Marius isn't funny, or because this text is funny it can't be Marius'. It's just that this text is quite obviously not his style.

Unless, of course, it is, in which case I just made a giant ass of myself. ;o)

[FlakJacket]

Oh I know that. Just came off as kinda funny.

[Szechuan]

Want to read more of this stuff?

Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States

[Marius]

Not that you'll need to, because unless I lose interest I'll probably have typed out the whole book in another few days.

[Bishop]

This kind of goes along with the "What boredom can do to a person" thread over in BD.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Eight: A Brash Young Nation Gets into Wars and Stuff[/align]

Once the federal government was organized, the biggest problem was how to pay off the fledgling nation’s massive war debt. 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.


[align=center]THE ELECTION OF 1792[/align]

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: [align=center]

VOTE FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON
“He’s Almost As Far As Baltimore.”

[/align]

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.”


[align=center]THE RISE OF POLITICAL PARTIES[/align]

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 even 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 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 Sates, 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. [Ed note: As we all know, Jefferson’s original diplomatic stance has seen renewed popularity in recent years.]


[align=center]THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE[/align]

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 his property was in fact zoned for Westward Expansion, and he made an offer of $12 million. The French countered with $15, 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.


[align=center]THE WAR OF 1812[/align]

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 Olde 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.


[align=center]THE TREATY OF GHENT[/align]

This sounds pretty boring to us so we’re just going to skip right over it.

[Cash]

Not that you'll need to, because unless I lose interest I'll probably have typed out the whole book in another few days.

Keep it up.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Nine: Barging Westward[/align]

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. 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 had 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.


[align=center]THE FEDERAL BANKING CRISIS OF 1837[/align]
Trust us: This was even more boring than the Treaty of Ghent.


[align=center]CULTURE[/align]

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 Fennimore Cooper (Pippi Leatherstocking, Hiawatha, Natty Bumppo Gets Drunk and Shoots His Own Leg), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Ludicrously Repetitive 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 PAIR IN NUN STAB and LINK 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 of 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.


[align=center]THE FORMATION OF TEXAS[/align]

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 up to attack the Texans at the Alamo, where, in one of the most heroic 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 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, under which the United States got the rest of the Southwest and California, and Mexico got smaller.


[align=center]THE RUSH TO CALIFORNIA[/align]

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 discover 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.

[Instant Cash]

where Rhonda had revealed to Dirk that she was in fact the sex-changed former Green Beret who had 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,

LMFAO!!!!!

/Please/ keep going.

[Jackal]

I'll never be able to look at October 8th the same again.

[Gunny]

that's it. I'm just gonna stop wearing panties when I read this thread!!

*wrings out yet another pair of ruined panties*

[MooCow]

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)

So true... so true....

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Ten: The Civil War: A Nation Pokes Itself in the Eyeball[/align]

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 deal of demand for cotton-field workers, whom the South originally attempted to recruit by placing “help wanted” advertisements in the newspaper:

[align=center]ATTENTION SELF-STARTERS[/align]
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.

[align=center]HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FILLMORE ADMINISTRATION[/align]1. The Earth did not crash into the Sun.

After Fillmore cam 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.


[align=center]THE ORIGINS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN[/align]

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. “Damnit, 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.


[align=center]THE CIVIL WAR[/align]

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 an enormous 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.

[align=center]
RECONSTRUCTION[/align]

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 but up.

FUN CLASSROOM PROJECT

See if you can name the causes of the Civil War.



Answer: “Earl” and “Dexter.”

[Instant Cash]

Answer: “Earl” and “Dexter.”

Ok, just a tad creepy. Hilarious, but creepy.

[Marius]

That's the line that made me think of posting this thread.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Eleven: The Nation Enters Chapter Eleven[/align]

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 brainchild 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 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. 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” (see map Marius was too lazy to reproduce, showing the entire continental nation as a white area labeled “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 McCormick 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.

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.


[align=center]THE RISE OF HEAVY INDUSTRY[/align]

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 come 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. . . .

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. 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 working 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.


[align=center]THE SETTLEMENT OF THE WEST[/align]

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 highly inconvenient for map makers, 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 un popular, 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 this 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.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Twelve: Groping Toward Empire[/align]


[align=center]THE AWAKENING OF IMPERIALISM[/align]

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 “reason.” 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 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:


[align=center]THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR[/align]

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) . . .


[align=center]THEODORE ROOSEVELT[/align]

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, either, because of the stick.

Of all Roosevelt’s achievements, however, the most significant, as measured by total gallonage, was:


[align=center]THE PANAMA CANAL[/align]

In those days, there was not 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, just 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.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Thirteen: Deep International Doo-Doo[/align]

The year of 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 Ballinger-Pinchot 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 (particularly 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 pressure 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.


[align=center]THE SUFFRAGETTE MOVEMENT[/align]

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 whisky 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 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.


[align=center]THE CAUSES OF INTERNATIONAL TENSION[/align]

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 Austria 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 ense 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 houng 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-Hungrary 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 he possibility of the United States getting into this war was considered to be a cretin. In the presidential election campaign of 1916, 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:

[align=center]“The War to End All Wars”[/align]

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 governemtn would be reformed so that everybody would live in Peace and Freedom Forevermore. Nedless to say, France and Britain thought this was the funnies 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. “Tell us the part where we don’t take money or land!”

[align=center]The Actual War Itself[/align]

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, underwhich we pretty much skip over the part where people get killed and instead make a big deal over what date the treaty was signed.

[align=center]The Treaty of Versailles[/align]

The Treaty of Versailles 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 the 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 work.

[align=center]THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
Standings as of 1920[/align]

• Austria: W-0, L-1
• England: W-1, L-0
• France: W-1, L-0
• Germany: W-0, L-1
• United States: Did not, technically, participate in the League.
• Serbia: Did not, technically, exist.

[Marius]

[align=center]Chapter Fourteen: A Nation Gets Funky[/align]

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 be 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 Unrest.

Another significant accomplishment of the federal government t during the twenties was the refinement of high-level corruption, which peaked during the administration of President Harding G. Harding with the famous


[align=center]TEAPOT DOME SCANDAL[/align]

The Teapot Dome Scandal involved a plot of federal land in Wy9oming 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 ocean liner with a suitcase containing 3.256 trillion barrels of petroleum products, which 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 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 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.

[3278]

I'm trying to find material for signatures, but it's impossible not just to pick one sentence from every paragraph.