Forget for a moment who was inaugurated today. (And try your best to forget all the hoopla, pomp, circumstance,
and extravagance that's turned presidential inaugurations, little by little over a couple of centuries, into coronations
of elected monarchs. Now you know why I haven't watched one inauguration in my lifetime. The inauguree, if that
sounds right, is purely coincidental. Though when I saw photos of Barack Obama in front of those faux Greco-Roman
columns I thought, oh, sh@t, now they're actually admitting what they're up to!)
There's a lot of people out there (and around here, for that matter) who think we absitively, posolutely will not
survive whatever it is the Donaldus Minimus presidency has in store for us. Well, guess what, folks. It wasn't easy,
but America has one helluva survival record. It only began with getting an actual, honest to God Constitution out of
the scrum known as the constitutional convention. How many countries can you think of that could, never mind
would, survive some of what we've survived:
* Alien and sedition acts.
* The War of 1812.
* Civil wars.
* World wars.
* Reconstruction.
* Tammany Hall.
* That blowhard Theodore Roosevelt.
* That buttinski Woodrow Wilson.
* The Black Sox.
* Prohibition.
* Flagpole sitting.
* The Great Depression.
* The New Deal.
* Goldfish swallowing.
* Bauhaus architecture.
* Kilroy.
* "Mairzy Doats."
* The television set.
* Truth or Consequences. (Though, admittedly, some of it was pretty hilarious.)
* The Bomb. (With and without Dr. Strangelove.)
* The Korean War.
* J. Fred Muggs. (And, his once-removed obnoxious black-sheep cousin, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp.)
* John Cameron (Let's go hopscotching the world for headlines!) Swayze.
* Bermuda shorts.
* The quiz show scandals.
* The hula hoop.
* The Twist.
* Chatty Cathy.
* Candlestick Park.
* Metrecal.
* The Beverly Hillbillies and its obnoxious spinoff Petticoat Junction. (Though when the latter's Kate
Bradley did "Mairzy Doats" as a beatnik poem reading it over bongos in a coffee house it was a) funnier than
hell, and b) exactly what that song deserved!)
* The Daley machine.
* Camelot.
* Vietnam.
* My Mother, the Car.
* Eight-track tapes.
* Watergate. (And all the other -gates.)
* The Brady Bunch.
* The Partridge Family.
* AstroTurf.
* The designated hitter.
* Charlie Finley.
* The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. (Even if Paul Lynde was a crackup as her nemesis the Hooded Claw.)
* The AMC Pacer and Gremlin.
* The ForChevAmChrysWagen.
* The Exorcist.
* The pet rock.
* Jaws.
* Disco.
* Leisure suits.
* Josie and the Pussycats.
* Designer jeans.
* Kiss.
* The Cabbage Patch Kids.
* The Scarsdale Diet.
* The Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises.
* The film version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
* That ridiculous innuendo that finally compelled Procter & Gamble to say we surrender instead of
up yours and change its venerable logo.
* Pink Lady & Jeff.
* Toga parties. (Though one of the earliest ones was said to have been thrown by Eleanor Roosevelt, decades before
anyone ever heard of Animal House---and it was said to be a zap at her husband's Caesarian image.)
* The uniforms of the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates (they looked like a cheap beer league team even while winning the World
Series) and the late 70s/early 80s Houston Astros.
* The Chicago White Sox's turn-of-the-century-with-Bermuda-shorts uniform experiment. (Who could blame Chris Sale for
taking a razor to the replica jerseys last season?)
* Jimmy Carter.
* Billy Carter.
* Dallas.
* Dynasty.
* The NFL.
* Especially the Super Bowl.
* ABSCAM.
* George Steinbrenner.
* The Ron Popeil pocket fisherman.
* The salad shooter.
* Big Mouth Billy Bass.
* Elvis impersonators.
* "The heavy mental music that goes over big at the Hitler Youth rallies." (So said David Johansen, former lead singer of
the New York Dolls, about why he abandoned his first solo career---in which he established himself as one helluva blue-
eyed soul singer melding hard rock and R&B---in favour of becoming Buster Poindexter for a long enough spell.)
* Heaven's Gate. (The film and the doomsday cult.)
* The Yippies.
* The Yuppies.
* The Pound Puppies.
* Hush Puppies.
* The Earth Shoe.
* Tree hugging.
* The spotted owl.
* The snail darter.
* The fairy shrimp.
* PETA.
* Iran-Contra.
* The Bushes and the Clintons.
* Pete Rose.
* Bud Selig.
* Tonya Harding.
* Wrestling, actual and alleged.
* O.J. Simpson.
* The Kardashians. (OK, admittedly, compared to them it's easier to make the cockroach extinct.)
* Pogs.
* The smartphone.
* The Smart Car.
* The Hummer.
* The Pontiac Aztek. (We survived, but Pontiac didn't.)
* The fall of the house of Oldsmobile.
* Y2K.
* 9/11.
* 90210.
* The 2002 All-Star Game.
* Honey Boo Boo (and every other example of "reality" television).
* Brangelina.
* Barack Obama.
Come on. Any nation that can survive even a third of all that can survive anything. (Even if we're more likely to go to
the medicine cabinet rather than to war over a lot of it.) Because according to that evidence it's got the strongest national
stomach on the planet.
