Dave Barry: Dave Barry Slept Here

Sincerely,

The VISA Corporation “More Powerful than God”

Fortunately, one of the Founding Fathers was a shrewd financial thinker named Alexander Hamilton, who came up with an idea for repayment of the debt based on a concept so brilliant—and yet so simple—that it remains extremely popular with governments to this very day.

“Let’s print money with our pictures on it,” Hamilton suggested.

And so they did. The hardest part was deciding which Founding Father would get to be on which denomination of bill, an issue that led to the infamous duel between Hamilton and Aaron Burr, both of whom wanted to be on the fifty. Burr won the duel in overtime, although years later he died anyway, little realizing that his great-great-grandson Raymond Burr would go on to become one of the widest actors in American history.

George Washington decided to run for reelection in 1792, because he felt that his work was not finished. In fact, it wasn’t even started, because, the roads being what they were, he had spent his entire first term en route from his Virginia home to the temporary U.S. capital in Philadelphia. His slogan was:

VOTE FOR GEORGE WASHINGTON

“He’s Almost As Far As Baltimore.”

Washington was reelected unanimously and reached Philadelphia several months later, only to learn that the capital was now operating out of Washington, D.C., which he managed to reach just in time to deliver his famous farewell address, containing the prophetic warning “We should get [something] has to [something] these darned [something] complex all over the place.”

With Washington no longer on the scene, political parties began to form, the main ones being the Republicans, the Federalists, the Sharks, the Home Boys, the Del-Vikings, and the Church of Scientology. The major issue dividing these parties was whether the United States should enter into an alliance with France in its war with Britain. It was not an easy decision: On the one hand, France had provided invaluable support during the Revolutionary War, support without which the colonies might never have achieved their independence from the brutal tyranny of England; on the other hand, France contained a lot of French people. You tried to form an alliance with them, and all they did was smirk at your pronunciation. Ultimately a compromise was reached under which the United States signed a treaty with brutal, tyrannical old England, and sent the wily veteran diplomat Benjamin Franklin over to mollify France with a nice basket of apples, which he ate en route.

In 1796 John Adams was elected as the nation’s second president, thanks to the support of the Anal Compulsive Party, whose members believed that henceforth presidents should be elected in alphabetical order so that it would be easier to remember them all during history tests. It was during Adams’s administration that the famous “XYZ Affair” took place. What happened was, Adams sent a diplomatic mission over to France to protest the fact that the French were seizing American ships and redecorating them by force. When the Americans got to France, the French foreign minister told them to meet with three secret agents, known only as “X,” “Y,” and “z.”

“If you can guess their real names and occupations,” the French foreign minister said, “you’ll receive diplomatic recognition and the Brunswick pool table!

Unfortunately the Americans could correctly identify only one agent (Kitty Carlisle.) and never reached the bonus round, but they did receive some lovely consolation prizes.

Another major event to occur around this time was the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which made it illegal to engage in acts of sedition with an alien unless you were both consenting adults. This so enraged the voters that they elected Thomas Jefferson as the third president, thus ruining the alphabetical-order concept and plunging the nation into what historians refer to as the Era of Presidents Whose Names Nobody Can Remember, which did not end until President Evelyn Lincoln.

But this did not stop women and minority groups from continuing to achieve many noteworthy achievements.

Meanwhile, Jefferson faced the issue of what to do about the Barbary States, a group of small pirate nations on the Mediterranean that were preying on international commerce by sailing out to passing merchant ships and demanding spare change. Most major nations were paying bribes, or “tribute,” to the Barbary States in exchange for safe passage, but Jefferson angrily rejected this idea with his famous epigram “The hell with those dirtbags.”

So he sent some warships over there to explain to the pirates, in diplomatic terms, the various international diplomatic implications of having their bodies perforated by eight-inch cannonball holes, and the pirates agreed to cool it. This bold action by Jefferson established an honorable American tradition of “getting tough” with terrorists that continued in the United States until the latter half of the twentieth century, when it was replaced by the tradition of “calling a press conference and threatening to get tough” with terrorists.

While this was going on, England and France were at war with Spain. Or perhaps England and Spain were at war with ... No! This is it: France and Spain were at war with England. But only because Germany did not exist at the time. As far as we know.

Anyway, the result was that for some reason France decided to sell a large piece of property in North America. The French government put the following advertisement in The New York Times real estate section:

NICE PIECE OF LAND approx. 34 hillion jillion acres convenient to West perfect for growing nation.

So Jefferson did a little checking and he found that this property was in fact zoned for Westward Expansion, and he made an offer of $12 million. The French countered with $15 million, but they also threw in the appliances, and they had themselves a deal. After the closing ceremony, Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark off to hold the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was hard going: The land was wild and untamed; there were hostile Americans around; and Clark bitched constantly because he thought it should be called “The Clark and Lewis Expedition.” Nevertheless, they were able to explore the entire region, and when they returned to Washington on October 8 they reported that it contained not just Louisiana; but a whole bunch of other states as well, although some of them, such as South Dakota, needed work.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the situation worsened as England joined France in declaring war against Spain, unaware that France had joined Spain in declaring war against England, and that Spain, acting in haste, had accidentally declared war against itself. The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812. A worried nation turned its eyes anxiously toward Thomas Jefferson, then had a good laugh at its own expense when it realized that he was no longer the president. He had been replaced by President James Something, Monroe or Madison, who immediately placed the country on a war footing (Whatever that means.).

The War of 1812 began very badly, with British troops marching right into Washington and setting fire to it, severely disrupting restaurant operations and forcing hundreds of lobbyists to eat in the suburbs. But soon the tide started to turn the Americans’ way, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the nation’s first defense contractor, Ye Old General Dynamics Corporation, which signed a $23.7 million contract to produce a vital new weapons system, the X-97 laser-controlled “Thunderfire” Musket , an innovative concept that promised to give U.S. soldiers a real technical edge on the field of battle. Unfortunately it was not ready for actual testing until 1957, when it blew up.