The Fall Of An Empire

The hottest new host on Fox News this year, Glenn Beck, has launched The 9-12 Project, a site dedicated to sharing core principles and values that Americans are said to live by.The website defines essential American qualities such as believing in god, being opposed to income tax, being pro marriage (as long as your straight) and many other gems.

Beck claims that The 9-12 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001. The day after America was attacked when we were not obsessed with Red States, Blue States or political parties. We were united as Americans, standing together to protect the values and principles of the "greatest nation ever created".
It’s really just more of the same that we’ve seen from the hard right recently, the whole "Socialism is bad, our money is being stolen for us, Barack is a Communist, etc." While some of those points might be true, what they continue to overlook is that Bush created the mess the country is in today, and Bush was the one that ran up the foreign debt and started the bailouts. But no, it’s only bad now a new, black guy takes over the mess.

In the show launching the The 9-12 Project, Beck interviewed Chuck Norris, who earlier this year said that thousands of militia were preparing for a military takeover of the United States. If that doesn’t say batshit crazy, I’m not sure what else can.
Here is a list of Beck's 9 principles that he is telling Americans from all walks of life that they should live by:

The 9 Principles

1. America Is Good.

2. I believe in God and He is the Center of my Life.

3. I must always try to be a more honest person than I was yesterday.

4. The family is sacred. My spouse and I are the ultimate authority, not the government.

5. If you break the law you pay the penalty. Justice is blind and no one is above it.

6. I have a right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, but there is no guarantee of equal results.

7. I work hard for what I have and I will share it with who I want to. Government cannot force me to be charitable.

8. It is not un-American for me to disagree with authority or to share my personal opinion.

9. The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.
If, like me, you find this to all be some kind of tripped out right wing nut jobs brain fart, there is another way. Davis Fleetwood, a political comedian and in my opinion, true genius, came up with his own project, The 9/10 Project. Fleetwood's project asserts that the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the coordinated terror tactics of the U.S. Federal government in the months and years following have had the intended effect of turning the populace of the United States into a herd of servile, submissive stooges.
The 9/10 Project is a movement for those individuals who acknowledge that the United States is still, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr, “The Greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and who are opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.The 9/10 Project acknowledges that the United States of America is now an EMPIRE and we all know that empires fall, that's just how it is. Rather than wage endless wars to remain king of the hill, The 9/10 Project favors the peaceful break-up of the United States of America.

The 9/10 Project is for citizens of the world who have borne witness to the growing imperial reach of the United States in the post 9/11 era and have reached the only logical conclusion one came come to "the long-term survival of the human species requires the United States of America to dismantle peacefully and immediately". We acknowledge that the founding fathers were certainly “on to something” but it is time to hit the reset button. Small is the new big.

The 9/10 Project asserts that if we American citizens continue to pursue the “rags to riches” myth of the American Dream we do so at our own peril. We do so willfully ignoring the dark underbelly of said dream that lurks like a storm cloud in the form of a sense of entitlement bloated to the point of bursting as if on steroids. A sense of entitlement that we can, literally and figuratively, no longer afford. A sense of entitlement that has us clawing and scratching our way through our pathetic little existence. In a culture of competition that has backed us into a corner the only escape from which seems to be more competition, more violence; or borrowing from another Peter to pay off another Paul and for what?

So we Americans can remain blithely ignorant between the direct connections that links the blood soaked desserts of the Middle East and our beloved S.U.V.’s and McMansions with newly remodeled kitchens ready for a photo spread in Martha Stewart Living? Really? Is that where we are on the evolutionary scale?

The 9-10 Project is designed to bring us all back to the place we were before 9/11: when the liberal intellectual elite in the U.S. was not afraid to declare loud and clear that is was ashamed of its government. A time when a culture war held the promise of cleaving a wedge between those of us truly on the left and the gun show loving Glen Beck apostles that make Fox News a profitable network.

Here are the 9/10 projects 9 basic principles:

1. (The United States of) America is BAD.

2. Face it, GOD is a lie. However… if, in fact, there is a CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE, she/he certainly did not write a book of laws for us to live by.

GOD George W. Bush claimed, many times, to be in dialogue with, and take guidance from, God. If he had said he took guidance from Tinker bell, it would have turned into a national emergency, or at the very least, a ratings monster of a reality television program. Rational individuals and mathematicians everywhere know that existence of Tinkerbell is just as likely as the existence of an all knowing creator who wrote the best selling book of all time… Furthermore, those daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. America’s war on terror is finally being revealed for what it really is: a Jihad.

3. Fair trade! Show me a human who can spend an hour in WAL-MART or TARGET and emerge without blood on their hands and I will show you an honest human.

Honesty I hope that I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider to be the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man. But the finely woven fabric (created by cheap child labor in some country with dark skinned children and faces covered in dust) of the Mossimo® Ripstop Cargo Short” just speaks to me in a way that says: Summer! Plus, my calves look great in them AND (omg!) I got 20% off because I opened a new Target charge account.

4. Gay marriage? Sure it should be legal. However, be careful what you wish for. The family is not “sacred”; it is one of their most powerful traps.

Marriage is one of the more powerful trap’s exalted by the religious right that keeps us is subservience to a make believe God, an economy that relies on you spinning your wheels in the rat race, and a government that aims to control you. By all means, marry if you must, but when the moon is full and the mood strikes you, feel free to go and rape your slave women. Or slave men. Depending on your orientation. Whatever. It is all good, and those high yellow kids are so cute and make great clothing models for Benetton.

5. Laws were meant to be broken.

I’ll let you in on a secret. Justice is blind is a great slogan invented by Madison Avenue geniuses employed to keep people with their heads down and doing what they are told. Why? The trust funds, Heidi Fleiss harems, dinner reservations at The French Laundry, and other “rights and privileges” enjoyed by the wealthiest 1% are predicated on a massive and sustained outbreak of fear. Are they scared enough yet, or do we need to see some more towers come down, bitches?!?!

6. “The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is a sham of historical proportions the consequences of which gave rise to death, incarceration, and the popularity of Glenn Beck.”

“The basic credo of the American way of life is encapsulated in that tidy and well sounding phrase ‘I have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ With that as a scoring rubric, the U.S.A. puts the F back in Fantastic Fucking Failure.

A: Life.

Fact:
22,000 Americans died last year from lack of health insurance. Not because they were sick, but 22,000 dead because they had no insurance. The number of Canadians, and citizens of Europe who died from lack of health care insurance, last year: ZERO.

B: Liberty.

Fact:
The USA incarcerates 2.3 million prisoners at a (2006) rate of 738 per 100,000. For China, the rate is 118 prisoners per 100,000 people less than one sixth the rate in “the land of the free.” No other country comes close to the American rate of incarceration. Are American Citizens that bad?

C: The pursuit of happiness

Fact:
The United States ranks 23^rd on the “happy planet index”. Above the so-called best country in the world include such smaller, socialist leaning countries as Denmark, Switzerland, and France.

7. I work just as hard as the average CEO. It is only the arbitrary criteria set by the ruling class that smiles benevolently on the fact that corporate CEO’s earn, on average, 543 times that of the average worker.

Equity “If we are to be truly free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained we must engage in Non-violent, meme warfare that would end the U.S.A.

8. It is not Un-American to assert that America must cease to exist.

Dissent “If there should come a time when the only hope for the survival of the American dream is the destruction of the nation that gave birth to her, then matricide is indeed a form of patriotism.” – Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father.

9. Fuck Wall Street, but make love to Mother Nature.

“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues” – Dr. Suess, The Lorax

While Fleetwood's 9-10 project may seem extreme to some it actually draws the logical conclusions that mankind will eventually come to: that the American project has failed and it is time to move on to something better. America has become an empire and, unfortunately, all empires are destined to fall. The fall of this evil machine will inevitably take one of two forms: either enough people will wake up from the junk food and television induced god-fearing coma that most Americans live their lives in, learn to think on their own, and rise up against the powers that be in revolution or in the not too distant future we will have exploited and abused one population to many and the world themselves will tear us to shreds like a pack of ravenous wolves.