Dave Barry - Dave Barry Slept Here

(and we quote): “Beep.” This came as a severe shock to Americans, because at that point the best our space scientists had been able to come up with was a walnut-size object that went: “Moo.” And thus began the Space Race which was to have an enormous worldwide impact on Mrs. DeLucia’s fifth-grade class, which was where we were at the time. All of a sudden Mrs. DeLucia was telling us we were going to have to study a LOT more science and math, including such concepts as the “cosine.” As if the whole thing were our fault.

So it was a difficult time, but by 1960 the nation was starting to feel a little better. “Well,” we said brightly in unison, “at least there haven’t been any crises for a while!” Which was of course the signal for the International Crisis Promotion Council to swing into action and produce:

This crisis occurred when the Russians shot down an American U-2

reconnaissance plane flying deep into their airspace, and then accused us—this is the kind of paranoid thinking that makes the Russians so untrustworthy—of conducting aerial reconnaissance. Our government offered a number of highly plausible and perfectly innocent explanations for the flight, such as:

It was a weather plane. It was a traffic plane. It was swamp gas. The dog ate our homework.

But eventually President Eisenhower, emerging from a high-level nap, was forced to admit that it was in fact a spy plane, at which point the Russians, led by Nikita “The Human Potato” Khrushchev, stomped Out of the Paris summit conference before the appetizers had even arrived, leaving “Ike” with nobody to negotiate with except himself. And although he won several major concessions, the feeling was becoming widespread among the American People that maybe it was time for a change—time to get some “new blood” in the White House and “get the country moving again.” And it just so happened that at that very moment, a new “star” was rising on the public scene—a young man whose boyish good looks, energy, quick wit, and graceful charm would soon capture the hearts of the nation and even the world: Pat Boone. Or maybe that was 1955.

1. Do you think we’ve had enough Winston Churchill jokes? Explain.

2. Have you, or has anybody you have ever met, ever found any use for the cosine? We didn’t think so.

Try to think up a campaign slogan even more inane than “I like Ike.” (Hint: This is not possible.)

What does one do with extra credit, anyway?

The sixties was a unique era in American history. Mention the sixties to any middle-aged urban professional, and he’ll transform himself into something worse than one of those Depressionites, droning away about his memories until you think up an excuse to leave. Such is the impact that this exciting era still has on the American consciousness. Because it was a time of truth, but also of lies; of love, but also of hate; of peace, but also of war; of Otis Redding, but also of Sonny Bono. There was a “new feeling” in the land, especially among the young people, who joined the “hippie movement” to express their need to be free, to challenge the traditional values of American culture, to order some pizza right now. Yes! the “times they were a changin’” and nobody expressed the spirit of the sixties better than the brilliant young poet-songwriter-irritatingly-nasal-whiner Bob Dylan, when, with his usual insightfulness, he sang:

How many times can a man be a man Before a man is a man?

Moved by the power of this message, tens of thousands of young people rejected the trappings of a grasping greedy society to live simple, uncluttered lives dedicated to meditation and spirituality and listening to sitar music and ingesting random substances and becoming intensely interested in the ceiling and driving home at one mile per hour. As a result of these experiences, the “Flower Children” of the sixties developed a unique set of values, a strong sense of idealism and social awareness that still exerts a powerful influence over their decisions in such philosophical areas as what radio stations to listen to when driving their Jaguars to their brokerage firms.

In 1960 the Democratic candidate was the rich, witty, graceful, charming, and of course, boyishly handsome Massachusetts senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who gained voter recognition by having his face on millions of souvenir plates and being married to the lovely and internationally admired Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Kennedy’s major political drawback was that the nation had never elected a Roman Catholic; on the other hand, the nation had never elected a total dweeb, either, and the Republicans had for some reason nominated “Dick” Nixon. So it was a very close race.

The turning point was a series of nationally televised debates, in which Kennedy, who looked tanned and relaxed, seemed to have an advantage over Nixon, who looked as though he had been coached by ferrets. Kennedy held a slight lead going into the bonus round, where he chose Category Three (Graceful Handsome Boyish Wittiness) and won the Matching luggage plus Texas plus Illinois, thus guaranteeing his victory in the November election. This was widely believed to be the end of Nixon’s career.

Kennedy had pledged, during the 1960 election campaign, to “get the country moving again”—to get it out of the Eisenhower doldrums, to bring back

its vigor, to reinstill its pride, to reassert its leadership around the world, maybe even to get it into a dumbfounding, unwinnable war. And under the gracefully boyishly handsomely witty charmingness of his leadership, America began to do just that. Kennedy immediately set the tone in his inaugural address, in which he promised that the country would land a Peace Corps volunteer on the Moon, and ended with the stirring words of the famous challenge “Ask not what your country cannot do that you cannot do, nor what cannot be done by neither you nor your country, whichever greater.” The Kennedys also captivated the nation With their unique style, which soon earned the young administration the nickname “Camelot” (from the popular Broadway musical Guys and Dolls). The Kennedy style was an eclectic blend of amusing and graceful activeties that ranged from taking fifty-mile hikes to inviting cellist Pablo Casals to perform at the White House to playing touch football on the lawn. As the Kennedy mystique grew, the first family’s activities were widely imitated: Before long, millions of Americans were taking Pablo Casals on fifty-mile hikes. When he begged for a chance to rest, they laughed and threw footballs at him. Such was the vigor of the times.

So everything would probably have been ideal if the Red Communists had not decided to be their usual party-pooper selves by causing new international tension in the form of ...

In 1960 there was considerable concern about the fact that Fidel Castro, a known beard-wearing Communist, had taken over Cuba, which is a mere ninety miles from Key West, Florida, site of America’s largest strategic stockpile of tasteless T-shirts. This alarmed the U.S. intelligence Community, whose crack team of analysts developed a Shrewd plan under which the U.S. would secretly train an army to invade Cuba; which then according to the plan, would cause the population to rise up in revolt and throw Castro out of power. This plan worked smoothly, with everything going exactly as planned, except the part about the population rising up in revolt, and so forth. It turned out that large segments of the population had already risen up in revolt just a short time earlier to put Castro into power, but unfortunately our intelligence community had misplaced the file folder containing this tidbit of information. So the invasion failed and the U.S. got some international egg on its face. But Kennedy took it with his usual boyishly witty graceful handsome charminghood, and the intelligence community, showing admirable spunk, quickly discovered an exciting new place to think up Shrewd plans about: Southeast Asia.