They say that the winner writes history and that’s especially true with American History. This story starts a long time ago when two Ladonian soldiers got on a bright red inflatable dragon and rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. It was around the year 1400. They hadn’t invented paddles yet, so it was just one guy kicking off the back and other guy pushing with his bare hands. It took years to get across. You can’t even imagine how hard it was. Every day like this, all day, then at night just lying there under the stars, exhausted, wondering how much longer it was going to take. What did they have to eat? Who knows? What did they drink? Maybe they brought a bunch of coconuts. I don’t know. No one knows how they did it and they never sent anyone back to Ladonia to say they made it. That’s why no one else tried. Everyone thought the two died. They didn’t die. They got here. They got to America and mated with monkeys and toucans. About a million years went by until there were a lot of people. They were mad all the time because they were part toucan, part monkey, part Ladonian. One day they all decided to get really high on cocaine. Things got crazy. They started dressing like pilgrims with hats made of black construction paper and big useless buckles on their gigantic black shoes. They had guns that looked like trumpets. They had turkeys. They had Snoopy. Snoopy got them all to have dinner together and called it Thanksgiving and he taught them how to eat turkey with cranberry sauce. Snoopy showed them how to plant corn in the dirt with raw fish. It worked great. The corn crops were huge. They had corn dogs. After a while all the pilgrims moved to Pennsylvania and became Amish. The guys had long beards and the ladies wore bonnets. They abolished slavery and welcomed everyone into a big drum circle. Everyone rode around in horse and buggies and nobody used electricity. Then came Benjamin Franklin. He flew a kite with a key on it. The kite got struck by lightening and Benjamin Franklin got hurt. He was in the hospital for almost a week. When he got out he had so many hospital bills that he had to go right back to work. He started the first electric company and made up a catchy song about it. Soon everyone was singing his silly song, it stuck in people’s heads and pretty soon the electricity got stuck in their houses. Everyone was getting blenders. Electricity changed America and it’s how Thomas Edison, the peg-legged mayor of New York, got rich. He came up with more appliances than you could shake a stick at. In his case, he shook his wooden leg. Thomas Edison also invented the first movies. The first ones were really bad, but no one cared because they hadn’t seen anything before. The first movie was just Thomas Edison singing Mary Had A Little Lamb. The sequel was basically the same thing. The first really good movie in America was Star Wars, but that was later. First came the First World War. This was when America took its power back to Europe and bombed everyone, including Ladonia. It was America versus everyone else and America won because we had the Red Baron. He went around in a wooden plane painted red. He dropped bottles of lighter fluid on everyone. He had some wicked machine guns too. When the war ended everyone was happy because the Red Baron went back to America and started all the airline companies like United, TWA, Delta, Pan Am, all of them. At the height of the Red Baron’s financial success a kamikaze plane at the battle of Pearl Harbor took him out. That really upset everyone and so America went back to war. This time it involved nukes and everyone got hurt, but when this war ended there was no way anyone was going to mess with America again. There were some other wars, but they were just for show. Since that last big war America has called all the shots. America has been on top, but it has been lonely up there and also boring. That’s why America invented TV and TV game shows got big. People still were bored and they got so bored that they started breaking laws just for fun and no one cared. The cops stopped caring. No one was getting busted anymore because everyone was working for the FBI. That’s where things are today. People today don’t need anyone to rat them out, they do it to themselves, and they freely hand over all their private secrets and sins to the government. There’s no privacy, everyone’s a criminal and everyone’s in jail.