Happy Birthday, America!

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To paraphrase Steve Martin's Czech brother character from an old SNL sketch, "America is a wild and crazy place." Too bad the humorless want to do us harm. A country like ours deserves its rightful place at the top of the pecking order if only because we can laugh at just about everything including ourselves.

The 4th of July makes me think about how far we've come in the last 20-years alone at lightening up. Back in 1980 I was placing advertising for Superman II in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. The studio wanted to run a special 4th of July ad that showed Christopher Reeve carrying a flag pole with Old Glory waving in the breeze. The Sun-Sentinel didn't have a problem with it. The Miami Herald did. After submitting the ad we were told that the flag had to go, that the paper had a policy about using the American flag in any advertising. Past deadline, there was nothing we could do about it so the paper excised the offending flag and ran the ad like this:

I'm sure it made thousands more want to buy tickets because as you and I know, there's nothing more exciting than a man with a big stick.

Now, after all these years, good or bad, the flag is used to sell just about everything in the Miami Herald.

You gotta laugh.

God bless America!