The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  61 There was a really cool Twilight Zone episode, later parodied on The Simpsons, where a guy builds a bomb shelter with enough room for his family, but not enough room for anyone else. The neighbors decide they want in, too, and bust their way in with a makeshift battering ram. Apparently, it didn’t occur to these guys that a shelter that doesn’t stand up to three guys with a battering ram is going to be useless against a nuclear bomb.

  62 The official lyrics say “Dancron,” not Dacron. However, as none of our interns could figure out what Dancron is, we assume it’s a typo.

  63 See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Urban Legends About Einstein, one of our longest books!

  64 “Squares” were uncool people. Like this one intern …

  Probably.

  66 Neatly explaining our joke about Napoléon in Chapter 3.

  67 Most investigations now say that there probably was some cheating, but not nearly enough to actually alter the results of the election. But in 1960, Nixon told friends, “We won, but they stole it from us.” Some think he felt that since Kennedy cheated, he was entitled to cheat later in life, too. In any case, he certainly went on to fight dirty.

  68 Again, we’re not totally following the order of history as dictated by Dr. Joel here—“British Beatlemania” is a couple of lines off. Again, we’re so, so, sorry.

  69 A British term meaning “pimply.” They also call French fries chips!

  70 Another theory: Arlo Guthrie, the son of Woody Guthrie, says that a copy of his humorous antidraft song “Alice’s Restaurant” was found in the Nixon Library, and points out that the song is, amazingly enough, almost exactly the length of the “missing minutes.” Few believe that Nixon actually erased those minutes to cover up the fact that he liked Arlo Guthrie, but, hey, who knows?

  71 If you’re keeping track, this is the 9,876,587,236th time someone has said something would be the end of society so far.

  72 Okay, so Keith Richards isn’t a properly licensed historian, but the quote is too good for us to ignore, and it does sum up what many people felt had happened: culture, not politics, won the Cold War.

  73 Others didn’t think their kids were dumb but thought the heavy-metal bands were hiding subliminal messages in the music. Back in the 1950s, a guy named James Vicary said he had run tests showing that if you flashed messages about popcorn in movies so quickly that people didn’t notice them, it could raise sales of popcorn by 58 percent, because viewers’ brains would pick the messages up “subliminally.” Some people believe that music, movies, commercials, and even Ritz crackers. have been full of subliminal messages ever since. Actually, though, Vicary’s results were falsified, and no other tests have ever shown that subliminal messages are actually effective. See The Smart Aleck’s Guide to Getting All Freaked Out over Nothing.

  “Contrary to the rumors that you’ve heard, I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-el, to save the planet Earth.”

  —Barack Obama, smart aleck, during his 2008 campaign

  INTRODUCTION

  We were going to end the guide right here. We really were. History books almost never go right up to the present day. After all, the dust hasn’t settled from more recent events enough for us to judge them and make fun of them properly. And it’s not like your teacher will get past about 1950 in history by the end of the school year, anyway, because you’ll be too busy getting ready for standardized tests to learn anything historical.

  But then we realized something: if we stopped history with the moment Billy Joel decided that he couldn’t take it anymore, not only would we be leaving out the 2008 election (making us instantly out-of-date; even more so than most history books, which are all at least a little out of date), we wouldn’t have a chance to make fun of Dan Quayle. Clearly, one last, short chapter is necessary.

  In case you hadn’t noticed, the Smart Aleck staff is really a bunch of comedians who snuck into being historians through the back door. And no comedian can resist the urge to make fun of Dan Quayle. Or anyone else whose real first and middle names are James and Danforth, for that matter. James Danforth Quayle is a name that just screams “Give me a wedgie,” isn’t it?

  Dan Quayle: one of history’s easier targets.

  After Reagan left office, his vice president, George Bush, ran for president against Michael Dukakis, the Democratic governor of Massachusetts, and brought a handsome young senator named Dan Quayle along as his running mate to inject some excitement into the ticket. It must have worked, too, because he managed to win the election and become our forty-first president.

  If Bush’s son hadn’t become president twelve years later, Bush himself would have been on the fast track to becoming just another forgettable one-term president. About the most memorable thing he did (besides, you know, the Gulf War) was puking at a really hoity-toity dinner in Japan.

  George H. W. Bush emits an eerie glow, possibly due to the aftereffects of an alien probe.

  But his vice president, Quayle, became God’s own gift to comedians. It wasn’t that Quayle was actually stupid—he just had a real tendency to say things that made him sound stupid. One of his more memorable blunders came when he was serving as the judge at a spelling bee. A contestant spelled the word “potato” correctly, and Quayle said it was wrong and that it should have been “potatoe.” He later said that that seemed wrong to him, but that was what it said on the sheet, so he went with it. It’s true that being vice president doesn’t give you a whole lot of real power, but we’re pretty sure he could have overruled an obvious typo on a spelling sheet.

  And that was just the start of a long list of misstatements Quayle made. Something about being on TV just seemed to make the guy uncomfortable. When asked if the United States should send someone to Mars, Quayle said, “Mars is essentially in the same orbit (as Earth)… . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If (there is) oxygen, that means we can breathe.” Scientists honestly didn’t know where to begin saying what was wrong with that.

  When the 1992 elections rolled around, many people believed that keeping Quayle was a bad idea, but Bush was determined to keep him on the ticket. Bush might have won reelection, too, except for a short, wrinkly guy with big ears—not unlike Yoda—named Ross Perot, who ran as a third-party candidate and split the Republican vote. Democratic candidate William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton won the most votes and ended up president.

  THE 1990S:

  WILL WE EVER FORGET BILL CLINTON?

  Bill Clinton was the third-youngest president ever, after Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt. His two terms could have been a lot worse; he presided over eight years of relative peace and prosperity. However, his second term, in particular, was marred by one scandal after another, and he became only the second president in history to be impeached. (The first, if you remember, was Andrew Johnson, who was impeached for breaking a law Congress wrote specifically to get him to break it.) Clinton was impeached for lying about cheating on his wife. Eventually, he admitted that he had had an affair with an intern. When the sordid details of the affair were made public, many wished he had just kept on lying about it. Congress acquitted him, and though many felt he should resign, he stayed in office for the remainder of his second term.

  The world changed greatly during the Clinton years. People stopped buying vinyl records altogether, and CDs overtook the sales of tapes. The number of TV channels available sky-rocketed (though it seemed like there was still never anything good on). Mobile phones, which were once the size of shoe boxes and cost a fortune, became increasingly common. And perhaps most importantly, the middle of the 1990s saw the rise of the Internet.

  Bill Clinton: the face that launched a thousand radio talk-show hosts’ careers. He was a popular president, but many people who disliked him made lucrative careers out of it. His well-known love of Big Macs made him a pretty easy
target, as did the fact that, as a teenager, he had lined the bed of his pickup truck with Astroturf. Yeeee-haw!

  The Internet had existed for years, of course. But at the beginning of the Clinton era, it was mostly used by the truly geeky. Throughout the 1992 campaign, Clinton’s running mate, Senator Al Gore, spoke about building up the “information superhighway,” which still sounded like science fiction to most people at the time. But during the 1990s, computers and Internet access grew cheaper and easier to use (ask anyone who was online in 1992 what a pain in the neck it was to get connected back then).

  Before the end of Clinton’s term, the Internet would revolutionize the way people communicated, as well as the way people found information, were entertained, and browsed for pornography. When the Clinton era began, teenagers who wanted to see naked people had to rely on begging their parents to let them rent Revenge of the Nerds for the ninth time, or on sneakily browsing through artistic photography books at the bookstore. The Internet changed everything.

  But the 1990s weren’t all about peace, prosperity, and nudity. There was a downside as well. Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, had been defeated by American forces in the brief Gulf War in 1991, which began after he took over nearby Kuwait, but throughout the nineties, it seemed like Clinton would have to consider sending troops back to Iraq every six months or so. The way we here at the Smart Aleck staff recall it, Iraqi planes would be seen in the no-fly zone every now and then, and Clinton would have to start threatening to send in the troops. Saddam would say, “No-fly zone? Oh! I thought it was the no pie zone! No pies here!” or something to that effect. And then things would quiet down for another few months before starting all over again.

  In 1999, after years of anticipation, the first new Star Wars movie since 1983 came out, and wasn’t the greatest film of all time. That was a crushing disappointment. Spider-Man comic books were stuck in the seemingly endless “clone” saga that no one really liked. Most of the popular “grunge” music of the day was really pretty awful when we look back on it. And though New Year’s Eve 1999 had plenty of good parties, it wasn’t nearly as big a deal as people had imagined it would be, partly because we had to listen to people pointing out that “year 2000 is not the millennium, year 2001 is” (as if anyone really cared), and partly because we were thrust into a decade whose name no one could ever agree on (The zeroes? The aughts?).

  Still, it was eight years without any big wars, and the economy was in pretty good shape. Looking back, it’s hard to complain too much; despite all the scandals, Clinton finished out his term as one of the most popular presidents of all time. Of course, how popular a president is in his lifetime doesn’t have much of an effect on how historians will view him. So, will Clinton be yet another forgotten president? Only time will tell.

  Clinton is only the second president to have changed his last name (the first was Gerald Ford, who was named Leslie King at birth).

  George “Dubya” Bush, in a flight suit worn, we think, to make voters think he just blew up the Death Star.

  AND ON TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?…

  The 2000 election was quite a circus. George Bush’s son, George W. Bush, ran against Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, in what turned out to be the closest election in decades. Gore got about half a million more votes than Bush, but on the day after the election, no one was exactly sure who had won more electoral votes. The ballots in Florida had to be recounted, and the election dragged on for days before the Supreme Court ordered the recount to be stopped, handing the presidency to Bush.

  Bush’s first few months in office were fairly calm, but on September 11, 2001, terrorists hijacked commercial airplanes and crashed them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in the most devastating attack on American soil in the modern era. Though it was clearly an act of war, no one could quite say which country we should declare war on, since we had been attacked by terrorists, not a foreign government.

  Bush launched a war against Afghanistan, which had been taken over by the Taliban, a radical religious group that had been allowing terrorists to set up camp within the country. Before that war was even over, Bush launched another war on Iraq, a country his father had waged a war against twelve years earlier when Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had taken over Kuwait. That had been a short, successful war, but Saddam Hussein remained in power.

  When the second Iraq war started, George W. Bush’s approval rating was higher than 80 percent. Most assumed that the war would be another quick one—indeed, Saddam Hussein’s forces were overtaken very quickly, and Hussein himself was eventually captured and put to trial. However, defeating Saddam didn’t end the war, as other groups within Iraq began fighting for power. And many of the reasons Bush had given to justify the war (most notably that Iraq was hiding “weapons of mass destruction”) turned out not to be true, which didn’t do much for Bush’s approval ratings.

  His popularity had already taken a real nosedive following his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. Most thought the response was badly botched, and Bush spent most of his second term with an approval rating in the twenties and thirties. As the economy fell into worse shape than it had been in since the days of the Great Depression, the unpopular war in Iraq dragged into its sixth year, America’s national debt soared, and things began to look bleaker and bleaker, environmentally speaking, Bush’s approval rating only got worse.

  YOUR LIFE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  What would your life be like today? You tell us! We don’t understand you kids nowadays, with your skatin’ boards and your digitile downloads! Why, when we were your age, we had values! We were allowed to walk to school without parental supervision, and our youth soccer leagues were only loosely organized!

  Bush was so unpopular by 2008 that even his own party’s candidate for president used the word “change” in its slogan—something the incumbent party (i.e., the party currently in office) generally doesn’t do. The Democratic primaries that year dragged on for months as Hillary Clinton (former president Bill Clinton’s wife, who had become a senator in New York a few years earlier) battled for the nomination against Barack Obama, a junior senator from Illinois. Obama won the nomination in what some said was the biggest primary upset in decades, and though the 2000 and 2004 elections had been very, very close ones, Obama’s soaring speeches, bold ideas, and ability not to be George W. Bush helped him defeat Republican nominee John McCain handily in the general election.

  The election of Obama would have been unimaginable a century or so before; after all, Obama had no facial hair. In fact, he told reporters he couldn’t grow facial hair at all! Somewhere on election night, the ghost of Chester A. Arthur was shaking his head, tearing at his ghostly muttonchops, and wondering if the election of a man who couldn’t grow a beard would be the end of society.

  Crowds in Chicago gather to hear Barack Obama’s victory speech on election night 2008. Even the buildings got into the spirit.

  Obama had only a couple of years’ experience as a politician on the national stage when he announced that he was running for president, but he succeeded at something that most of the more memorable presidents had succeeded at before him: he captured the imagination of, and inspired optimism in, the American people.

  The number of people who came to see Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009, was estimated to be upward of two million. One member of the Smart Aleck Staff who attended sent a text message back to headquarters saying, “Astounding. I’m in awe … but I’m still an engineer, so I’m worrying about infrastructure. Two million people? That’s a lot of pee.”

  A FEW QUESTIONS ABOUT THE 1990s and 2000s

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  1. Why does The Smart Aleck’s Guide to American History stop when it does?

  President Barack Obama. Some people said that a man with such an unusual name could never win the election. These people had apparently forgotten that we’d had presidents named Rutherford, Ulysse
s, Millard, Grover, and Lyndon. They were all part of our “forgotten presidents” sections.

  Adam of the Smart Aleck staff in Chicago on election night 2008, experiencing history instead of just making fun of it (for once).

  Because we don’t have a time machine (yet).

  Because we are quitters who don’t give 110 percent.

  Because we always leave ’em wanting more.

  Because January 20, 2009, is the end of history and the beginning of the future.

  (ANSWER: AS OF THIS WRITING, D.)

  2. Would Clinton have been impeached if he had lied about his personal high score on Pac-Man instead of lying about having an affair?

  Yes.

  No.

  Maybe.

  (ANSWER: PROBABLY B, BUT C IS ACCEPTABLE, WE SUPPOSE. ESPECIALLY IF YOU’RE AN ASPIRING LAWYER.)

  3. True or False: Obama was the first Irish president.

  True.

  False.

  (ANSWER: B.)

  ESSAY

  Briefly outline the causes of the recession that struck America around the end of Bush’s second term and suggest punishments for the people you blame.

  Find out if Richard Nixon would be eligible to run for president again if he were still alive, and briefly outline a strategy for how you would run his campaign.

  ONE LAST MNEMONIC!

  Here’s an easy way to remember all of the presidents in order! Look at this list of presidents, and the word (starting with the same letter as the corresponding president’s last name) at the right. Memorize the (somewhat coherent) paragraph formed by the list of new words, and you just might have an easier time remembering your presidents. But as usual, we aren’t taking responsibility if you don’t.