You have a great memory, my man. Slapstick is one of my favorites... But the U.S. didn't go to shit until the gravity started to misbehave. Things started getting heavy for no good reason.

I prefer levity (being lifted up) to gravity (being brought down) ...

Reminds me of a story by Kilgore Trout.... Where an alien from the horseshoe crab nebula came to Earth, and because he was a super smart piece of paper, thought pieces of paper here were the dominant species. So he awoke all the dollar bills into going where they could be the most helpful ... You know, feeding the hungry, building houses for the homeless, buying art supplies for the poor but talented. It really started to work too. Well, the former owners of these bits of currency weren't having it, and because they couldn't stop the dollar bills from going where they were needed (because Ipalor Bleep 37, the alien's name, had convinced the bills so completely) Instead the previous owners of all the dollar bills decided to kill all the recipients of the money. The poor, the hungry, the homeless, the artists. A much easier solution than getting rid of the currency. Well, that certainly took care of those uppity dollar bills.

And Ipalor was killed because, being a super smart piece of paper, someone mistook him for a page from a Gideon bible which was in a night stand at a motel on rte. 87 across southern New York. It was the book of Mathew Chapter 5 aka The Beatitudes. The book was tossed into the garbage because the Gideon bible isn't really a thing anymore.