The Slacker's Guide to U.S. History: The Bare Minimum on Discovering America, the Boston Tea Party, the California Gold Rush, and Lots of Other Stuff Dead White Guys Did (22 page)

With absolutely no shame, white America happily forces the Macarena, the electric slide, and the chicken dance on naive and impressionable dancing enthusiasts at weddings and professional sporting events. Children with white parents and white parents with white parents have turned their backs on common decency and actively participated in these childishly scripted dances on the pretense that it strengthens the fabric of America.
DANCES LIKE THESE ARE HEAVILY PROMOTED BY WHITE AMERICA, AS THEY GIVE MANY OF THE RHYTHMICALLY CHALLENGED THE OPPORTUNITY TO FEEL SAFE AND SECURE ON THE DANCE FLOOR.
Now if they could only produce a step-by-step method to solve many a white man's problem with lack of endowment.

Capitalizing on the theory of strength in numbers, those dancers with a fair complexion now make their darker, more rhythmically inclined dancing counterparts nervous. Whites have long been considered the lowest on the getting-down totem pole, and for scores of white Americans to confidently dance in public, it is clear that non-whites must lose their monopoly on the business of cuttin' the rug.

The precedent for using dancing as a tool to create fear in those of a different complexion was laid out in the 1880s when Native Americans singing “this land is our land” offered up the Ghost Dance to their dance-hungry brothers and sisters. Similar to popular white dances, it was believed by those who believed that the dance had the support of God. In fact, it was believed, that if you believed, and God believed that you believed, then he would protect the believer from the bullets of the white man's gun. After years of constant battle with the White-non-Hispanic U.S. military the enthusiasm for being shot was at an all-time low in the Native American community.

Choreographers of the Ghost Dance used this lack of desire to be inflicted with gunshot wounds to raise the popularity of their hot new dance. The Ghost Dance received heavy rotation in the club scene between the regular rotation of 50 Cent and T-Pain tracks.

To give credibility to their dance, the choreographers signed a promotional deal with one of the most respected Native American military leaders, Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull was required to promote the Ghost Dance within his community and to lend his image for print and television advertisements. The well-liked Sitting Bull proved to be the right front man, as the popularity of the Ghost Dance spread like herpes at a condom-free swingers party.

By the end of 1890, the fear of the Ghost Dance within the white community reached historic proportions, reaching Number 2 on Whitey's Fear Chart, just behind being left alone in an alley with a large number of muscular men of African descent who had been abused by their slave owner. The fear resulted in the government agent responsible for keeping an eye on the wildly popular Sitting Bull to order his arrest.

On December 15, 1890, special agent James McLaughlin, fearful that there might be something to this “I believe and God believes I believe” rhetoric, cowardly ordered the Native American reservation police to arrest Sitting Bull. During the arrest, a Rodney King — like riot broke out, resulting in Sitting Bull being shot dead. With Sitting Bull dead from a gunshot wound, the Ghost Dance proved to not live up to all its hype. Native Americans everywhere were disappointed at this and began to turn their attention to a new dance craze, called “retreat to the reservation.”
THIS TRAGEDY ASIDE, WE CAN ONLY BE THANKFUL THERE ARE NOT MORE CASUALTIES WHEN LARGE GROUPS OF WHITE PEOPLE TAKE TO THE DANCE FLOOR.

William McKinley is the president that nobody remembers, family and friends included. Born in Ohio in 1843, this white shadow's hometown of Canton, Ohio, is far more famous for being the home of Pro Football's Hall of Fame than it is for being the birthplace of our twenty-fifth and most forgettable president. A Civil War veteran, McKinley steadily rose in rank, although nobody remembers why. As president, he may have been a proponent of the gold standard and possibly in favor of keeping tariff s high on imports, although he could have been for low tariffs and “Made in China” stickers on every toy — historians aren't sure.

MCKINLEY HAD A “BEEN THERE, DONE THAT, GOT THE T-SHIRT” ATTITUDE TOWARD BEING GOVERNOR OF OHIO IN 1896.
Following his forgettable stint as governor, McKinley kept his low profile by winning the Republican nomination for president. His opponent, William Jennings Bryan, ran on one issue and one issue only: the issue of disqualifying the Hollywood foreign press from voting for the Oscars, condoms in the classroom, the fair tax, greenhouse emission controls, military reform, and same-sex unions. Despite Bryan's one-issue platform, he found it impossible to compete with McKinley's anonymity, as he followed the time-tested formula of military man + state governor = next president of the United States.

McKinley's assassin is as anonymous as the president he murdered. Alongside fellow presidential assassins with names like John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, the name of Leon Frank Czolgosz just doesn't have any sizzle. Like all presidential assassins, Czolgosz was an anarchist and a loner. Not using his nonrhythmic name as a crutch, Leon aborted his original plan of killing the president with a candlestick in the library in favor of the more traditional gun in front of scores of witnesses.

Czolgosz shot McKinley at the Pan Am Exposition being held in Buffalo, New York. Leon simply walked up to the president and calmly pulled out his pistol, shooting the president twice. After the shooting, the crowd beat Czol-gosz, nearly killing him. Despite the crowd's lack of follow through, the courts finished what they started, as Czolgosz was executed in the electric chair in October 1901.

As for the legacy of the dead McKinley, it is the legacy of the forgotten president. He quietly and uneventfully passed away from the gunshot wounds eight days after the shooting. As a symbolic gesture of remembrance, the government named a mountain after McKinley in the far off and nearly uninhabitable state of Alaska. In keeping with McKinley's forgettableness, many Alaskans simply refer to the mountain by its Native American name, Denali.

After his death, Americans felt they had awakened from a case of amnesia, as McKinley was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt, a much more memorable president in Americans' minds.
BUT IN HONORING MCKINLEY BY PUTTING HIM ON THE $500 BILL, WE HAVE ASSURED THAT MOST AMERICANS WILL NEVER KNOW THE FACE OF OUR TWENTY-FIFTH PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY.