Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (4 page)

THE SITUATION TURNS UGLY

One afternoon some freedom-loving colonists known as the Boston Patriots were sitting around their locker room, trying to think up ways to throw off the yolk of colonial oppression. Suddenly one of them, Bob, had an idea: “Hey!” he said. “Let’s dress up like the locals and throw tea into the harbor!”

Instantly the other Patriots were galvanized. “What was that?” they shouted. “A galvanic reaction,” responded Bob. “Named for the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), who conducted experiments wherein he sent electrical currents through the legs of frogs.”

But the Boston Patriots were not the only people engaging in inhumane scientific research during the colonial era. Another person doing this was Benjamin Franklin, who, in a famous experiment, sought to prove his theory that if you flew a kite in a rainstorm, a huge chunk of electricity would come shooting down the string and damage your brain. Sure enough, he was right, and he spent the rest of his days making bizarre, useless, and unintelligible statements such as: “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Eventually he became so dodderingly pathetic that he had to be placed in charge of the U.S. Postal Service. Also around this time women and minority groups were accomplishing a great many achievements.

But getting back to the Boston Patriots: Later that night, they boldly carried out Bob’s bold plan of dressing up as Native Americans and throwing tea into the harbor, but for some reason this did not result in Independence. “Maybe we should also toss in some lemon,” somebody suggested. And so they did this, and then they tried some Sweet ‘n’ Low; still no sign of Independence. Also the harbor was starting to look like a toxic-waste dump, which did not go unnoticed by early ancestors of future president George Herbert Walker Piedmont Harrington Armoire Vestibule Bush.

This angered the king, so he ordered Parliament to pass the Stamp Act, under which every time the colonists made a purchase, the cashier would give them some stamps, and they had to paste these into books, which was even more boring than churning butter. When the colonists had acquired a certain number of stamps, they were required to go down to the Royal Stamp Redemption Center and exchange them for cheap cookware (4.5 million) or tacky folding card tables (13 billion). As you can imagine, this was less than popular with the colonists, whose anger was eloquently expressed by Tom Paine in his fiery pamphlet Common Sense, which, in its most famous passage, states: “How many fondue sets does any one colonial family need?”

This further enraged the king, who, as you have probably gathered by now, had the political savvy of a croissant. He ordered Parliament to pass the Irritation Acts, whose entire purpose was to make life in the colonies even more miserable. These included:

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

shields suspended over them—allegedly for “sanitary” purposes, but

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

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

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

inaccessible, especially to colonists with hangovers. 3. The Eternal Container Act, requiring that colonists who purchased

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

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

warranties.

All of these factors caused the tension in the colonies to mount with each passing day.

It was amid this climate of rising tension and anger, with a 50 percent chance of lingering afternoon and evening violence, that the First Continental Congress was held. It met in Philadelphia, and its members, realizing that the actions they took in this hour of crisis could very well determine the fate of the New World, voted, after many hours of angry debate, to give themselves a pay raise. There was no turning back now. Clearly, the stage had been set for the Discussion Questions.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Do you think Unitas should have started for the Colts? 2. What the hell are chick-peas, anyway?

The Revolutionary War began with the famous Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, immortalized in the well-known verse:

Out of the bed and onto the floor; Fifty-yard dash to the bathroom door!

Whoops! Our mistake. This verse comes from the famous song “Midnight Attack of Diarrhea,” which used to absolutely slay us when we were campers at Camp Sharparoon (1953-1956.). The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere is also very inspirational. By day, Revere was a Boston silversmith (A person who smithed silver.), but by night, like so many patriots during the Revolutionary era, he had insomnia. He would lie awake, tossing and turning, until finally one night, irritated by lights that somebody kept shining in his window from the Old North Church, he just flipped out. He leaped onto his horse and raced off into the night, shrieking. This infuriated a group of British soldiers, who marched out after him, but they, too, were noisy, because in those days—remember, this was literally centuries before the discovery of the Rolling Stones—the British had a terrible sense of rhythm (they were mostly white guys) and could march only with the aid of drums.

So what would happen is, Paul Revere would come shrieking through a picturesque slumbering New England town at 2:30 A.m., and the townspeople, who were already uptight because of the mounting tension described previously, would come rushing out in their pajamas, really ticked off, and the first thing they’d see were these British soldiers barging down the street, whanging on their drums as though it were halftime at the Rose Bowl, and as you can imagine it was not long before violence erupted in the form of the Battle of Lexington.

Battles in those days took longer than they do today. First off, it took a while for the British to form into strict military formations, which, when viewed from the air, spelled out nationalistic slogans such as GO BRITS! This delay caused a great deal of irritation among the patriots:

PATRIOTS: C’mon! Aren’t you guys ready yet?? BRITISH: Not yet! Say, can you chaps give us a hand? We need two more men to

cross the “T.”

Another problem was that the guns they used in those days, called muskets, took forever to load. First you had to put your powder in, then you had to put in a little piece of flint, then you had to ram some wadding down there, then you had to put in about a quarter teaspoon of paprika, and finally you had to put in your musket ball, which usually popped right back out again because there was hardly any room. It took so long to complete the Battle of Lexington that the two sides were nearly four hours late to the next scheduled event, the Battle of Concord. This was where the Americans invented the innovative guerrilla tactic of rushing up to the British, who were still dithering around with their formation (“Dammit, Nigel! You’re supposed to be part of the ‘O’!”), and bonking them manually over the heads with their unloaded muskets.

And thus the first round of the Revolutionary War went to the rebels. But Independence was not to be bought cheaply, for soon the king was sending reinforcements, seasoned troops who could form not only words, but also a locomotive with moving wheels. The rebels, realizing that they were in for a long, hard fight, decided to form the Second Continental Congress, whose members voted, after a long and stormy session, to grant themselves only a cost-of-living increase.

But this Continental Congress also knew that they would need an army, and they knew just the man to lead it—a man who was universally respected and admired, a man who had the experience and leadership needed to organize troops and lead them into battle. That man, of course, was: Dwight Eisenhower. Unfortunately, he would not be born for at least another dozen chapters, so they decided to go with George Washington, known as “The Father of His Country” because of such exploits as throwing a cherry bomb across the Potomac.

As leader of the American forces, Washington faced a most difficult task, because the Continental Army was poorly equipped. Just to cite one example, it had no soldiers. When Washington wanted to do the “Cadence Count” marching song, he would have to do both the “Sound off.” and the “One! Two!” part.

Eventually, however, Washington was able to recruit some troops via a promotion wherein if you enlisted in the army, you and a friend got an all-expenses-paid Winter for Two at Valley Forge. Nonetheless, the American troops were poor and ill trained. Many of them wore rags on their feet. They also wore their shoes on their heads. These were not exactly nuclear physicists, if you sense our meaning. But they were patriotic men, and they had a secret weapon that the king had not bargained on: “Yankee Doodle.” This was the Official Theme Song of the American Revolution, and when the Americans Marched into battle singing the inspirational part about how Yankee Doodle “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni,” the effect on the British troops was devastating. “He called it what?” they would ask each other in confusion, thus giving the Americans the opening they needed to rush up and whack them with muskets.

This forced the king to try a new ploy: He sent over the Hessians, who spoke no English and consequently paid little attention to “Yankee Doodle.” That was the good news for the British side. The bad news was, the Hessians were actually German, which meant that the words they formed in their battle formations were humongous. For example, their equivalent Of GO BRITS! was: WANN FAHRTDERSUGAB EIN UMWIEVIELUHRKOMMTERAN! It would sometimes take them days to form a simple preposition.

Meanwhile , in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress, in an atmosphere of crisis, was trying to write the Declaration of Independence. The responsibility for this task had originally been assigned to the Special Joint Committee for Writing the Declaration of Independence, whose members immediately voted to go on a fact-finding mission, with their spouses, to the French Riviera. It Soon became clear that it was going to take them a long time just to declare their souvenir purchases, let alone independence, so the task fell to Thomas Jefferson. On a historic night in 1776, the lanky red-haired Virginian picked up a quill pen and began scratching on a historic piece of parchment. He worked all night, and by morning he was ready to show his results to the others.

“Aren’t you supposed to dip the pen into the ink?” the others asked.

And so the lanky red-haired Virginian went back to work for another historic night, and by dawn he had produced the document that has come to express the ideals and hopes and dreams of an entire nation.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

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

for one people to dissolve the political bands which have

connected them with another, and to assume among the

powers of the earth the separate and equal station to

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

a decent respect to the opinions of mankind require that

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

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

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

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

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

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

way through these legal documents. Take leases. You take

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

them with a clause about halfway through stating that they

have to eat toasted moose doots for breakfast, and I

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

make any difference if they did, because tenants ignore

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

flushing inappropriate objects down the toilet. Ask any

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

odds are he’ll answer, “Pulling inappropriate objects out

of tenants’ toilets.” I know one landlord who found a

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

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

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

down.

The members of the Continental Congress were extremely impressed by what Jefferson had written, at least the part that they read, and on the following day, October 8, the nation celebrated its very first July Fourth. The members took turns lighting sparklers and signing their John Hancocks to the Declaration, with one prankster even going so far as to actually write “John Hancock.” But soon it was time for the Congress to return to the serious business at hand: issuing press releases.

Meanwhile, women and minority groups were making many important contributions. So were the French, who supported the patriot cause and sent over many invaluable fashion hints. But still the American troops were badly outnumbered, and they probably would never have won if not for the occurrence of:

THE TURNING POINT

This turning point occurred in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Hessians had decided to spend Christmas, which should give you an idea of how out of it they were. As night fell, they got to drinking heavily and singing “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” which takes forever in German, so it was the ideal time for the Americans to attack. Unfortunately, the ice-infested Delaware River lay between the two armies. The situation looked bleak, and all eyes turned to George Washington.

“We’ll row over there in boats,” he said, displaying the kind of leadership that he was famous for.

And so they climbed into some boats, and, after pausing briefly to pose for a famous oil painting by Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868.), they captured Trenton while suffering virtually no casualties, although a number of them did get urinated on. It was a major victory for the Americans.