Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus Read Online Free PDF

Whip Lite?”
    Of course they will. Even though, if my plan works as expected, an addict would be unable to consume his heroin purchase, he still has a vital right to know, as an American consumer, that if he DID consume it, he’d be getting only a small percentage of his Daily Requirement of dietary fiber. This is just one of the many benefits we enjoy as residents of this Consumer Paradise. My head aches with pride.

DON’T KNOW
MUCH ABOUT
HISTORY

    W ell, you young people have gone and done it again. I’m talking about the recent study showing that high school students, to quote the Associated Press, “do not know basic facts about American history.”
    I hate to be a nag, but this is something like the 46,000th consecutive study showing that you young people are not cutting the academic mustard. Do you know how that makes us older people feel? It makes us feel
great
. We go around saying to ourselves: “We may be fat and slow and achy and unhip and have hair sprouting from our noses like June asparagus, but at least we know the basic facts about American history.”
    According to the Associated Press, “more than half of America’s high school seniors do not know the intent of the Monroe Doctrine or the chief goal of United States foreign policy after World War II.”
    Is that shocking, or what? Of course, to be fair, we have to admit that, for most of the past fifty years, almost
nobody
knew what our foreign policy was. It was a secret. For a while there, in the early 1970s, the only person who knew anything about our foreign policy was Henry Kissinger, who kept it hidden in a secret compartment in his underwear, refusing even to show it to President Nixon, although he did occasionally bring it out to impress actresses he was dating.
    In fact, we now know, thanks to recent news reports, that
none
of our postwar presidents really knew what our foreign policy was, because the Central Intelligence Agency (motto: “Proudly Overthrowing Fidel Castro Since 1962”) was passing along false information about the Russians. (There is an excellent reason why the CIA did this, but if I told you what it is, I would have to kill you.)
    Basically, the CIA led the presidents to believe that the Russians were this well-disciplined, super-advanced military power with all kinds of high-tech atomic laser death rays; whereas in fact the Russians, if they had actually fought us, would have had to rely primarily on the tactic of throwing turnips. So we spent billions of dollars on items such as the Stealth bomber, which by the way we are still building, in case we ever need to sneak an airplane over there to drop bombs on, say, a Burger King.
    But my point is that most of us had no idea what the U.S. foreign policy was until the election of Bill Clinton, who, to his credit, has established a clear and consistent foreign policy, which is as follows: Whenever the president of the United States gets anywhere near any foreign head of state, living or dead, he gives that leader a big old hug. This has proven to be an effective way to get foreign leaders to do what we want: Many heads of state are willing to sign any random document that President Clinton thrusts in front ofthem, without reading it, just so he will stop embracing them. This is how the prime minister of Sweden, in a recent visit to the White House, wound up purchasing nearly $4,000 worth of Amway products.
    But getting back to the issue at hand, which is the intent of the Monroe Doctrine: I am shocked that more than half of today’s high-school seniors do not know what it is. This kind of ignorance was NOT tolerated when I was a student at Pleasantville (New York) High School, where I studied history under a teacher named—I am not making this up—Oscar Fossum. No sir, we
learned
our history back then, and we learned it the hard way: By being subjected to surprise quizzes in which we had to write 200-word essay-style answers to questions on topics we knew virtually nothing