by Dave Barry
The Berlin Crisis
The Berlin Crisis was caused when Stalin, encouraged by the success of his Iron Curtain, decided to set up a blockade cutting off the West’s land access to West Berlin, a city that was on the good side in the Cold War but that was located, due to computer error, some 120 miles (325 kilograms) (30936.54 hectares) (2,342,424,323.3432 millipedes) behind the Curtain. As food supplies ran low, it began to appear as though the Berliners, despite the fact that they were feisty and of course plucky, would be starved into surrender. Just then (October 8.), President Truman had an idea, an idea that showed the kind of straightforward, no-nonsense, homespun wisdom that had served him so well in the past. “Let’s drop an atomic bomb on Japan,” he said. His aides, however, detected several flaws in this plan, so instead Truman decided to proceed with:
The Berlin Airlift
This was one of the most dramatic feats in the history of dramatic aviation feats. Day after day, around the clock, U.S. planes took off from West Germany, carrying thousands of tons of clothing, medicine, fuel, and food destined for besieged Berlin. It was a stirring sight indeed to watch these mighty aircraft sweep over the surrounded city and open their cargo doors, allowing the life-giving supplies to hurtle majestically toward the grateful Berliners below. Individual cans of Spam were clocked at upward of 130 miles per hour. Despite the casualties, it was a triumph of the “can-do” American spirit, and when Truman threatened to escalate the relief effort by having the planes fly over Soviet territory and drop huge amounts of cafeteria-grade ravioli or even—remember, these were desperate times—fruitcake, Stalin had no choice but to call off the blockade.
But it was clear by now that communism would continue to be a serious threat abroad, and it was equally evident that the only intelligent way for Americans to deal with it was to develop a firm yet cautious and intelligent policy, based on a realistic assessment of the situation rather than blind hatred, uncontrolled emotion, and shrill accusation. Still, that seemed like an awful lot of work, so instead we had ...
The Red Scare
The Scare was started by Joseph McCarthy, who was a senator from Wisconsin. That’s the strange thing about Wisconsin: You think of it as being this nice friendly state full of decent, God-fearing, cow-oriented people, and here they elect this vicious alcoholic psychopathic lunatic. And it’s not just an isolated incident: In recent years, Wisconsin has also attempted to elect Charles Manson, Hermann Goring, Jabba the Hutt, and, chillingly, Geraldo Rivera. We think it’s something in the cheese.
Anyway, McCarthy made a series of speeches in which he charged that Communists had infiltrated the federal government to the point where the State Department had an actual Communist dining room, Communist men’s bowling team, and so forth. At first, skeptics scoffed at these charges, but when McCarthy produced solid evidence in the form of a piece of paper that appeared, at least from a distance , to have something written on it, the press, displaying the kind of journalistic integrity that we normally associate only with restroom bacteria, had no choice but to print the story, and the Scare was on.
Speaking of bacteria, a highly active Communist-finder during this era was a young attorney named Richard “Dick” Milhous “Milhous” Nixon, who had gotten elected to Congress from a California district despite the handicap that he reminded people of a nocturnal rodent. It was Nixon who nailed proven suspected Communist and Red Fellow Traveler Alger Hiss, the turning point in the case coming when Nixon, accompanied by reporters, went to a Maryland farm, where he reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and, in a moment of high drama, pulled out a cocker spaniel named Checkers. This was widely believed to be the end of his career. (Nixon’s.)
Eventually the public came to its senses and the Red Scare hysteria died down, and today, thank goodness, we no longer see politicians attempting to gain power by accusing their opponents of being unpatriotic, except during elections. Speaking of which, we almost forgot to mention the dramatic ...
1948 Presidential Election
in 1948 the Democrats had little choice but to nominate President Truman, under the banner:
HE IS GOING TO LOSE.
Everybody felt this way: the politicians, the press, the pollsters, the piccolo players, Peter Piper, everybody. The Republicans were so confident that they nominated an individual named Thomas Dewey, whose lone accomplishment was inventing the decimal system. Truman campaigned doggedly around the nation, but his cause appeared to be hopeless. A Dewey victory seemed so inevitable that on election night, the Chicago Tribune printed the famous front-page headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. This was because Dewey had defeated Truman who immediately threatened to drop an atomic bomb on Chicago, so everybody went ha-ha-ha-ha, just kidding, and wisely elected to let the feisty ex-haberdasher have another term.
This was typical of the carefree attitude widespread in the nation during the postwar years. Popular culture saw millions of “bobby soxers” (Not their real names.) swooning over a feisty, skinny crooner named Frank Sinatra, while young “hep cats” wore “zoot suits” and danced the “jitterbug” to “platters” on the “jukebox.” In short, the whole nation was behaving like “dorks,” and it was only a matter of time before some kind of terrible event occurred.
The Korean War
The Korean War was, as is so often the case with wars, not especially amusing, except for those soldiers who were fortunate enough to get in a fun unit featuring Alan Alda and a host of wacky and zany characters and young nurses with terrific bodies. So we’re going to continue our policy of skipping over the depressing parts and hasten ahead to the fifties, although we would like to “toot our own horn” just a little bit here and point out that we have managed to get through this entire chapter without once mentioning ...
THE H***-S**** T*****
If you get our drift.
Discussion Questions
1. Remember when the United States was supposed to switch over to the metric system, and the federal government put up road signs in kilometers, and in some areas people actually shot the signs down? Wasn’t that great?
2. Do you think “Checkers” is a good name for a dog? What about “Booger”? Explain.
Extra-Credit Project
Think of a joke that starts this way: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Lithuania.” (Hint: This joke could involve lisping.)
Chapter Eighteen. The Fifties: Peace, Prosperity, Brain Death
Because of scheduling problems, the fifties did not officially begin until 1952. This, coincidentally, was the year of the 1952 presidential election campaign, in which both parties, recognizing that the nation was locked into a deadly Cold War struggle, when the slightest mistake could mean the destruction of the entire planet, nominated bald men with silly names. The Democrats went with Adlai Stevenson, a suspected intellectual, and the Republicans went with Dwight “David” Eisenhower, who was extremely popular for winning World War II and having the likable nickname “Ike,” which he got from a sound that his friend Sir Winston Churchill made just before pitching face-first into his food at a dinner party.
Going into the race, Eisenhower had a strong tactical advantage stemming from the fact that nobody, including himself, knew what his views were. But his campaign quickly became enmeshed in scandal when it was discovered that his running mate, Senator “Dick” Nixon, had received money from a secret fund. Realizing that his career was at stake, Nixon appeared on a live television broadcast and told the American people, with deep emotion in his voice, that if they didn’t let him be the vice president, he would kill his dog. This was widely believed to be the end of his career.
Nevertheless, Eisenhower, buoyed by the inspirational and deeply meaningful campaign theme “I like Ike,” won the election and immediately plunged into an ambitious and arduous schedule that often involved playing golf and taking a nap on the same day. This resulted in a humongous economic boom that caused millions of Americans to purchase comically styled big cars and hightail it to the suburbs. Thus bega
n a Golden Era in this country that is still looked back upon with nostalgia by the millions of Americans who are involved in the manufacture and sale of nostalgia-related products.
Culture In The Fifties
The fifties were an extremely important cultural era, because this was the phase when the postwar “Baby Boom” generation grew up, and we Boomers are quite frankly fascinated with anything involving ourselves. Like when we started having our own babies, it was all we could talk about for years. We went around describing our child—having and child-rearing experiences in breathtaking detail, as though the rest of you had no experience whatsoever in these fields. We’re sorry if you find all this boring, but it’s not our fault that you were not fortunate enough to have been born into such an intriguing and important generation. We Can only imagine how interesting we are going to be at cocktail parties when we start getting into death.
But back to the fifties: The best archival source for accurate information about life during this era is the brilliant TV documentary series Ozzie and Harriet. From this we learn that the fifties were a time when once per week some kind of epochal crisis would occur, such as Ricky borrowing David’s sweater without asking, and it would take a half an hour to resolve this crisis, owing to the fact that the male head of household had the IQ of dirt. But other than that, life was very good, considering it was filmed in black and white.
Another important television show of the era was The Mickey Mouse Club, which made enormous cultural contributions, by which we mean: Annette Funicello. Annette had a major impact on many of us male Baby Boomers, especially the part where she came marching out wearing a T-shirt with her name printed on it, and some of the letters were considerably closer to the camera than others. If you get our drift.
But the most truly wonderful fifties show was Queen for a Day, starring Your Host, Jack Bailey. This was a kind of Game Show from Hell where three women competed to see who had the most miserable life. We are not making this show up. Contestant Number One would say something like, “Well I have terminal cancer, of course, and little Billy’s iron lung was destroyed in the fire, and ...” and so on. Everybody in the audience would be weeping, and then Contestant Number Two would tell a story that was even worse. And then Contestant Number Three would make the other two sound like Mary Poppins. After which Jack Bailey would have the members of the audience clap to show which woman they thought was the most wretched, and she would receive some very nice gifts including (always) an Amana freezer. It was fabulous television, and a nice freezer, and it remained unsurpassed until three decades later, with the emergence—probably as a result of toxic waste in the water supply—of Geraldo Rivera.
Of course television was not the only cultural contribution of the fifties. There was also the Hula-Hoop, and Marlon Brando. And let’s not forget the interstate highway system, which made it possible for a family to hop into a car in Cleveland, and a little over four hours later, find themselves still delayed by road construction just outside of Cleveland. We are still benefiting from this system.
But the significant cultural innovation of the fifties was musical—a new “sound” called “rock ‘n’ roll—an exciting, high-energy style of music that, in its raucous disregard for the gentler, more complacent tastes of an older generation, reflected the Young people’s growing disillusionment With the stultifying, numbing, bourgeois, and materialistic values of an increasingly homogeneous society through such lyrics as:
Ba bomp ba bomp bomp A dang a dang dang A ding a dong ding, Blue moon.
Of the many legendary rock “performers” to emerge during this era—”Fats” Checker, the Pylons, the Gol-Darnits, Buster and the Harpoons, Bill Hawley and the Smoots, and so on—the greatest of them all was “The King,” Elvis Presley, who went on to become the largest (Ha-ha!) (Get it?) record-seller of all time, and who is to this very day sometimes seen shopping in rural supermarkets.
So there’s no question about it: By the mid-fifties, America was definitely in a Golden Era, an era of excitement and opportunity for all citizens, regardless of race or creed or color, unless the color happened to be black. Then there was a problem. Because at the time the nation was functioning under the racial doctrine of “Separate but Equal,” which got its name from the fact that black people were required to use separate facilities that were equal to the facilities that white people kept for their domestic animals. This system had worked for many decades, and nobody saw any real reason to change until one day in 1954 when a group of outside agitators arrived from outer space to file a suit against the Topeka, Kansas, Board of Education. This led to the historic and just Supreme Court ruling, a landmark, that nobody, black or white, should have to go to school in Topeka, Kansas. Thus was born the civil rights movement—an epic struggle that has required much sacrifice and pain, but which has enabled the United States to
progress, in just three decades, from being a nation where blacks were forced to ride in the back of the bus, to being a nation where, due to federal cutbacks, there is no bus.
The Presidential Election Of 1956
Things were going so smoothly at this point that the voters didn’t really feel like going through a whole new presidential election, so they decided to hold the 1952 election over again, and it came out the same. In a word, everything seemed to be working out very well, and the fifties would probably have been pure perfection except that—it seems like this always happens—all these pesky foreign affairs kept occurring in the form of crises, starting with ...
The Suez Crisis
This crisis involved the Suez Canal, which was built by the French (“Suez!” is the word used to call French pigs.) (Not that they come.) and which is extremely strategic because it is the only navigable water route connecting the Red Sea with Albany, New York. Hence, you can imagine how tense the world became on the morning of October 8 when this area became the scene of a full-blown crisis, although we cannot for the life of us remember what the hell it was. But we’re fairly sure it’s over. You never hear about it on the news.
At around this same time a number of other international crises, most of them also fully blown, occurred in Hungary, Poland, Lebanon, and the quiz-show industry. But all of these paled by comparison to ...
The Sputnik Crisis
One day in 1957 everybody in the United States was minding his or her own business when suddenly the Russians launched a grapefruit-size object called Sputnik (literally, “Little Sput”) into an Earth orbit, from which it began transmitting back the following potentially vital intelligence information
(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:
The U-2 Crisis
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 “Th
e 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.
Discussion Questions
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.
