Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (3 page)

Yet all was not well. Because at the same time the clouds of religious intolerance, propelled by a large arctic air mass of hatred, were forming a major storm front of persecution, which was to result in one of the most moving stories of courage and faith in all of American history, not to mention a four-day weekend. We refer, of course, to the Puritans.

THE STORY OF THE PURITANS

The Puritans were an extremely religious group who lived in England and did not believe in drinking or dancing or having sex with hooved animals. They were very unpopular. So they decided to sail over to the New World, where they would be free to worship as they chose and live in peace and harmony and set fire to suspected witches.

And thus it was that in some specific year, the Puritans, taking with them little more than stupid hats and an unwavering faith in Providence, (A city in Rhode Island that, unbeknownst to the Puritans, had not been founded yet.) set sail across the dark and treacherous North Atlantic in the Mayflower, a cramped, frail ship of Panamanian registry. The crossing was brutally harsh. Only two days out of port, a fierce storm destroyed most of the shuffleboard equipment. As giant waves washed over their tiny ship, tossing it about like a cork, the Puritans, realizing their fate was not in their own hands, got down on their knees and, drawing on some inner strength, threw up. Then they looked toward the heavens and vowed that if, by some miracle, they were able to make it safely to their destination, they were definitely going to get a new travel agent.

Finally, just when the Puritans were starting to think that maybe drinking and dancing wouldn’t be so bad after all, the lookout spotted the coast of Massachusetts. This resulted in a tremendous hue and of course cry aboard the ship as the Puritans rushed excitedly up on deck and shoved the navigator overboard, because he was supposed to be aiming for Virginia.

By that point, however, the Mayflower, which had no shower facilities, was starting to smell like the postgame laundry hamper of a professional ice-hockey team, so the Puritans decided to row ashore and land at Plymouth Rock (So called because it is shaped like a Plymouth.). But first, for insurance purposes, they all had to sign the Mayflower Compact. This was a historic document that set forth what would become some of our most fundamental and cherished principles of government, as is shown by this direct quotation:

6. No spitting on the sidewalk.

When the Puritans landed, they found themselves in a harsh and desolate world, and they probably would have starved to death if not for the help of a friendly local Native American named Squanto (Meaning “Native American.”). Squanto looked at the Puritans barging around the wilderness with their hats and their comical Puritan muskets shaped like trombones at the end, and he took pity on them. “Look,” he said, because fortunately he spoke English, “what you need to do is plant some corn.” And so they did, and after a couple of months it grew and ripened, and the Puritans, who by this time were hungrier than ever, boiled it and ate it with butter and a little salt. “Next time, you should try shucking it first,” advised Squanto. Eventually, as you would expect, a year went by. The Puritans decided that, all things considered it had been a pretty good year, except for the fact that the vast majority of them were at that point dead, so they decided to have the first traditional Thanksgiving. They invited Squanto over to help in eating a turkey (“Next time,” advised the ever-helpful Squanto, “try cooking it first”), after which they watched the Lions-Bears game. Then the Puritans told Squanto that they were very grateful for all he had done, but that frankly they would not be needing him anymore, so he and his tribe should go find some other area to be natives of. In the next several years the Puritans became prosperous and built New England, parts of which can still be seen today.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why only hooved animals? 2. Did any of your ancestors come over on the Mayflower? So what? 3. If you were on the Detroit Lions, would you be ticked off about always

having to play on Thanksgiving? Explain.

The typical life-style in the early colonies was very harsh. There was no such thing as the modern supermarket, which meant that the hardy colonists had to get up before dawn and spend many hours engaging in tedious tasks such as churning butter. They would put some butter in a churn, and they would whack it with a pole for several hours, and then they’d mop their brows and say, “Why the hell don’t we get a modern supermarket around here!” And then, because it was illegal to curse, they would be forced to stand in the stocks while the first tourists took pictures of them.

So it was harsh, all right, but nevertheless more and more persecuted religious minorities—Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Scientologists, Cubs fans—were flocking to freedom and establishing religious colonies such as Maryland and Heritage Village, USA, site of the New World’s first known Christian water slide.

THE ENGLAND-HOLLAND RIVALRY

Meanwhile, England got into a rivalry with Holland. Although today Holland is known primarily for being underwater and making Heineken beer, in those days it claimed a great deal of land in the New World because of the important explorations of the brave Dutch explorer for whom the Hudson River is named, Henry Hudson River (should have been in Chapter Two, but we forgot.). Based on these explorations, Holland claimed all of the land west of the Atlantic Ocean and north of the equator. This angered the English, who claimed all of the land in the world and a substantial section of Mars, and so on October 8 a rivalry broke out between the two nations.

The largest Dutch settlement at the time was New Amsterdam, located on the site of what is now New York City and which had established a thriving economy based on illegal parking. So one day an English individual named James “Duke of” York sailed into the harbor with his fleet and captured New Amsterdam without the Dutch firing a single shot. He was able to do this because at the time the city’s commissioner for the Department of Firing Back was testifying before the Special Grand Jury to Investigate Municipal Corruption, which is Still in session. And thus was the name of New Amsterdam changed to “The Big Apple.”

Meanwhile, more colonists were arriving, a good example being William Penn, who founded the colony that still bears his name, New Jersey. But life in the New World continued to be harsh, with most colonists leading a hand-to-mouth existence. “Take your hand out of your mouth!” their mothers were always shouting, but you know how it is with colonists. What they really needed, to get themselves off their duffs, was for trade to develop. Luckily, several days later this occurred.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADE

One morning the colonists noticed that the New World contained a number of products that were not available in Europe, such as turpentine, which could easily be obtained in the colonies simply by boiling trees. Soon the colonists were sending barrels of turpentine across to England, where the English people would dump it on the ground, because, let’s face it, a little turpentine goes a long way. Then the English people would fill the boat up with some product they had a surplus of, such as used snuff, and they’d send it back to the colonies; and then the colonists would retaliate with, say, barrels of dirt, and so on, until trade had escalated to the point where the two sides were sending entire boatloads of diseased rats back and forth.

But life was not all hard work in the colonies. Culture was also starting to rear its head, in the form of the Early American Novel. The most famous novelist of this era was Cliff, the author of the famous Cliff Notes, a series of works that are still immensely popular with high school students. The best known, of course, is The Scarlet Ladder, which tells the story of a short man named Miles Standish, who lived in a tall house with seven people named Gable, only to be killed in a sled crash with an enormous white whale. This was to become a recurring theme in colonial literature.

But little did the colonists realize, as these cultural and economic developments were taking place, that they were about to become involved in friction with the French. The cause of this was … Hold it! We have just received the following:

EDUCATIONAL ADVISORY ALERT

A REVIEW COMMITTEE CONSISTING OF EDUCATION PROFESSIONALS

WITH DOCTORATE DEGREES AND INITIALS AFTER THEIR NAMES HAS

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

ENOUGH OF AN EFFORT TO INCLUDE THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF WOMEN

AND MINORITY GROUPS. UNLESS SOME EFFORT Is UNDERTAKEN TO

CORRECT THIS SITUATION, THIS BOOK WILL NOT BE APPROVED FOR

PURCHASE BY PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEMS IN ABSOLUTELY VAST

QUANTITIES.

Another important fact we just now remembered is that during the colonial era women and minority groups were making many contributions, which we are certain that they will continue to do at regularly spaced intervals throughout the course of this book. But right now, let’s get back to:

FRICTION WITH THE FRENCH

French traders came to the northern part of the New World to barter with the Native Americans for their pelts of beavers, minks, otters, elks, muskellunges, and so forth. The two sides quickly learned to communicate with each other using a stripped-down bartering language, as shown by this painstakinly researched historical recreation:

FRENCH TRADER: How does this look? NATIVE AMERICAN: Honey, that pelt is you! FRENCH TRADER: Really, Red? You don’t think it’s too bunched at the hips? NATIVE AMERICAN: Listen, bunched at the hips is the look in the New World. FRENCH TRADER: I’ll take it!

Soon the French, aided by Native American guides, were penetrating deep into North America in search of matching belts, shoes, and other accessories. By the late seventeenth century, pioneering French designers such as Marquette and Joliet (most of them went by only one name) had made a number of major fashion advances in the New World. The basis of the entire French colonial philosophy was natural fibers, in stark contrast to the British, who were already using water-driven looms to make primitive polyesters. It was only a matter of time before friction broke out in the form of:

The French and Indian War

The French and Indian War is highly significant because, as David Boldt (A friend of ours. You don’t know him.) points out, it had a stupid name. It sounded like the French were fighting the Indians, whereas in fact they were supposed to be on the same side. The British didn’t even realize they were supposed to be in this war until several years after it started, by which time the French and the Indians, totally confused, had inflicted heavy casualties upon each other. So England won the war, and on October 8 the French king, Louis the Somethingth, signed the Treaty of Giving Away Canada, under which he gave away Canada. “Que enfer,” he remarked at the time, “cest seulement Canada” (“What the hell, it’s only Canada.”).

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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

“Dutch”? 2. Have you ever noticed that on those rare occasions when you do need

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

household to household ever since, is always empty? 3. Do you feel that people who insist upon referring to themselves as “doctor”

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

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

the word “professional,” as in “automotive sales professional”? Does

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

What caused the American Revolution? This is indeed a rhetorical question that for many years historians have begun chapters with. As well they should. For the American Revolution is without doubt the single most important historical event ever to occur in this nation except of course for Super Bowl III (Jets 16, Colts 7. This historian won $35.).

One big causal factor in the Revolution was that England operated under what political scientists describe as “The Insane Venereally Diseased Hunchbacked Homicidal King” system of government. This basically means that for some reason, again possibly the food, the English king always turned out to be a syphilitic hunchbacked lunatic whose basic solution to virtually all problems, including humidity, was to have somebody’s head cut off. There was one king, Henry “Henry the Eighth” Viii, who could barely get through a day without beheading a wife. It reached the point, with Henry, where the clergyman had difficulty completing the wedding ceremony:

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

This style of government was extremely expensive, especially in terms of dry-cleaning costs, and as a result the kings were always trying to raise money from the colonies by means of taxation. This was bad enough without representation, but what really ticked the colonists off were the tax forms, which were extremely complicated, as is shown by this actual example:

To determineth the amounteth that thou canst claimeth for

depreciation to thine cow, deducteth the amount showneth

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

showneth on Line CVXILIIVMM of Schedule XVVII … No,

waiteth, we meaneth Line XCII of Schedule CXVIILMM …

No, holdeth it, we meaneth …

And so on. In 1762 the king attempted to respond to the colonists’ concerns by setting up a special Taxpayer Assistance Service, under which colonists with questions about their tax returns could get on a special toll-free ship and sail to England, where specially trained Tax Assistors would beat them to death with sticks. But even that failed to satisfy the more radical colonists , and it soon became clear that within a short time—possibly even in the next page—the situation would turn ugly.