Mark W. Bradley: The Declaration of Dependence

The Declaration of Dependence

(Adopted in Camera Obscura by an Incontinent Congress, 2001-2006)

A Pusillanimous Proclamation of the Fifty United States of America
By Mark W. Bradley

When, in the course of Divinely Ordered Events, it becomes expedient for a distracted and terrified people to renounce the political independence which has long plagued and bedeviled them, and to assume among the powerless, the complacent, and the meek of the world the rightfully subservient place to which God and his Earthly Minions have justifiably consigned them, an indecent contempt for the opinions of mankind absolves them from any responsibility of having to declare the causes which impel them to this shameful, yet exhilarating, abdication.

We hold these generally accepted talking points to be self-evident, that all Christian white men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain discretionary privileges, that among these are life (not applicable to terrorist sympathizers), liberty (within narrowly defined but broadly shifting parameters), and the pursuit of happiness (through whatever means necessary, including group-hypnosis, pharmaceuticals, and/or forced psychiatric realignment). That to secure these privileges, governments are superimposed upon men by a Jealous and Vengeful God, deriving their unlimited and irrevocable powers from the tacit and often disengaged consent of the governed; that whenever any vestige of democracy becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of Jehovah and his Ever-Vigilant Servants to alter, abolish or eradicate it, and to institute new-and-improved government, laying its foundation on an all-but-complete absence of principle and obscuring its concealed powers in such form, as to them shall seem least likely of detection by the general public.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that long-nurtured pretenses and artfully-cloaked illusions should not be abandoned for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to scrupulously avoid observation of governmental abuse (as long as such observation is remotely avoidable) than to right themselves by challenging the authorities before whom they have so carefully learned to genuflect and grovel. But when a long train of temporarily necessary constitutional accommodations evinces a design to do nothing so much as enhance their safety and felicity, it is their privilege, it is their patriotic duty, to embrace such government, and eagerly inquire as to how they may further facilitate the abandonment of cumbersome legal constraints on the same, so as not to provide any impediment to their future security. Such has been the abject prostration of this shiftless mob of bovine impersonators; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to jettison the superfluous liberties which have hitherto obstructed the effective operation of (for instance) the National Security Agency. The history of the current President of the United States is a history of unprecedented Solomonic wisdom and far-sightedness, having in direct object the establishment of an all-encompassing and virtually impermeable safety umbrella over our otherwise defenseless country. To prove this, let facts be submitted to an increasingly incredulous world.

(...)

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress dissembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge and Arch-Flamethrower of Heaven for the punctilious pusillanimity of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of this nation, solemnly publish and declare, that these United States are, and of right ought to be pathetically abject and wholly dependent colonial possessions, held in outright bondage for their own protection by the wise and benevolent CEO’s of the multinational conglomerates, to whom we willingly pledge our puny lives, our ever-dwindling fortunes and our sullied honor.