These are the things I learned:

• Share everything (including your status as the world’s only super power).
• Play fair (allow your enemies to catch their breath before launching an attack against you or civilians).
• Don’t hit people (even if they are using tanks, snipers and artillery against innocent civilians).
• Put things back where you found them (as they were the end of the Carter administration).
• Clean up your own mess (but blame it on your predecessor.  Constantly).
• Don’t take things that aren’t yours (Not valid for Nobel peace prize, credit for Iraq surge).
• Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody (but be sure to give yourself a solid B+ for effort).
• Wash your hands before you eat (and don’t allow your subjects to eat anything that tastes good).
• Flush (your country’s prestige down the toilet).
• Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you (but only if they are flaxseed and prune cookies and soy milk).
• Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some (except on the days that end in y–on those, play golf and talk to Oprah).
• Take a nap every afternoon (just like your air traffic controllers).
• When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together, (and be sure to build a consensus coalition and mobilize the international community before considering the possibility of potentially, in the future, at a later date, considering crossing the street.  Maybe.)
• Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that (Actually, some people know why and how, they’re called “rational, educated people.”  Silence them at all costs).
• Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.  (And it’s all Exxon’s fault.)
• And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK. (Actually, Dick & Jane start at the first grade, so you never actually read them. Facts are for the bourgeois.)