NEW HUMOR AND SITES FROM GREG BULMASH

America has a lot of problems. I'll be the first to admit it. But just as with a person, sometimes you can find clues to internal problems by looking at past relationships. Let's look at America's past relationships, dating back to World War II...

We'd had a fling with Germany a few years back, but we thought we'd put an end to it. Yet Germany was coming on to us again. And when Germany's friend, Japan, went out of its way to get us involved. Well, we knew Germany wanted us bad.

Germany was very coquettish, making us really work for the score, but in 1945, we rolled through Europe beating our chests. But, little did we know, we hadn't just involved ourselves in another one-war stand. After this romp, it was time for a relationship.

"Hey," Germany said, "you can't go running off to the Pacific with your buddies. You wouldn't want to leave me alone with Joe Stalin, knowing that he has feelings for me, would you? No golf tomorrow, either. There's an economy that needs fixing."

Suddenly all the American generals felt "suffocated." They wanted to go out and look for another war, but Germany was saying "what about my needs? I finally gave up, let you roll your battallion in, and now you're just going to leave? You don't care about me."

Next thing you know time goes by. We'd traded keys, left a toothbrush at Germany's apartment... We kept talking about breaking up with Germany, but we just couldn't do it. There was always an excuse. Yet all during this, we were having covert affairs with a few Central and South American nations.

In the 90's, though, we've pretty much broken up with Germany and we're just good friends. We're still paying alimony to Japan big time.

Now we've got a thing going with Bosnia. And we've learned from our mistakes. Especially after that bad break-up with Vietnam, we're very cautious. We'll accuse the Serbian leadership of war crimes, but we're not interested in staging an invasion to get them. See, that would require an actual engagement, but we want to keep our forces uncommitted so we can go wherever our fancy takes us if something interesting should pop up; most likely with one of those cute little Middle-Eastern numbers we've had our eye on for a while.

You know, sometimes I think America never should have broken up with England. Then I remember how bitchy and bossy England was, and how supportive France was. But France changed...

I get the feeling that America feels very alone. Nobody understands it. It just wants to be loved. Is that so wrong?