Scientists 1,200 years into the future try to figure out if a country called the USA ever really existed, and if it did, why it vanished so suddenly without a trace.

People’s Republic of Upper Slobovia Democratic Free Press
February 22, 3261

Scientists at the People’s Republic of Upper Slobovia’s (PRUS) Institute for the Study of Inferior Foreign Cultures announced their findings today from a ten-year research investigation of a land once known as The United States of America.

“We’re still sorting through the data,” PRUSISIFC Executive Director Dr. Boris Bukosky announced to a packed audience of state-sanctioned academics and party-approved interested observers.  “Our findings are somewhat tentative, but we think we’ve gotten our hands around the major issues that caused this previously unknown civilization to vanish after a little over two hundred years of existence.”

Bukosky related the incredible, or as some critics have maintained, incredulous story of a country created upon the notion of inalienable rights bestowed by a Creator.  This idea of individual freedom and justice was later embodied in a Constitution that allegedly protected those rights from governmental abuse. 

“Now I must stress,” Bukosky cautioned, “that we’re still trying to separate myth from fact as we sift through the fragmentary records of that time.  Obviously, the notion that some mythical ‘Creator’ actually existed, let alone bestowed rights not sanctioned by the wise leaders of the state, is meant to be an allegory of some kind.  Everyone knows there is no God.  I mean, after all, if there was a God, every abortion would be an affront to the Creator of Mankind.  And we all know that isn’t the case because the Supreme Court of the PRUS said it is a woman’s Right to do this.  And how can a Right be wrong?”

“So,” Bukosky continued, “we’ve tentatively concluded that their so-called Declaration of Independence is some type of children’s story, and not meant to be taken seriously.”

Reacting to questions about a “Constitution” that allegedly limited the powers of the local, state and national governments, Bukosky stressed that while such a document did indeed exist, it was not a code of law.  “In fact,” he explained, “it wasn’t even a guidepost or framework within which to make laws, as some of the documents we recovered seemed to suggest.  No, by the time that civilization ended — shortly after a group called ‘Liberal Democrats’ took complete power — the Constitution was seen as a ‘suggestion,’ nothing more.”

Pressed to explain, Bukosky offered the following story.  “Once these Liberal Democrats gained control, they put people in the court system who only cared about advancing their party’s political agenda, not upholding some sort of abstract notion of the law.  They seem to have been aided in this by a national press that hated something called a ‘Conservative Republican,’ which as best we can tell was a lower life form that wanted old people to starve and little children to breathe dirty air.  These Conservative Republicans must have been really despicable people.  We came across one incident in 2006 where this Conservative Republican congressman sent suggestive messages to a 19-year-old adult person of the same sex. He was universally condemned by the press and driven from office for being a homosexual predator.  Then we found another incident a few years earlier where a Liberal Democrat congressman actually had sex with a 16-year-old boy called an ‘intern’.  However this was seen as a great step forward for homosexual rights, and an expression of true love between consenting adults.”

“So you see,” Dr. Bukosky summarized, “we can only conclude that Conservative Republicans must be a recognizably lower life form to be given such different treatment.  That, or the national press was biased, and the Liberal Democrats were hypocrites.”

This brought a second scientist, Dr. Anna Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong, to address certain alternative theories about the decline of the United States of America.  “We still haven’t entirely dismissed the idea that these USA people were actually serious about what they professed to believe, incredible as some of these Constitutional ideas are,” Dr. Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong said.  “The alternative hypothesis is that the Liberal Democrats and their press allies were so power hungry, and so devoid of principles, that they would say or do anything to get power.  And once in power, they would say or do anything to keep that power, even if it meant destroying the very basis of their civilization.”

As evidence of her theory, Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong spoke about something called the Iraq War.  “We think it might be related to the Great Patriotic War Against Islamo-Fascism,” she explained.  “That was when our ancestors were confronted with Middle East terrorism, and finally decided to end it all by nuking those countries back into the stone age, where most of them already were intellectually.  We simply weren’t going to stand for some 14th-century rejects killing our people and threatening our way of life because we didn’t pray to Allah.  So when they wouldn’t listen to reason and tried to kill us, we killed them back, assimilated the survivors into our way of life, and ended the problem.  But I digress.”

Returning to her main point, Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong traced the beginning of the end of the USA back to November 1994.  “That was when Conservative Republicans regained control of something called ‘The House.’  The Liberal Democrats had been living in this House for 40 years, and didn’t want to leave their chairs.  So instead of accepting defeat, they pretended that they didn’t lose.  With their allies in the press they lied about their opponents and did everything they could to not just defeat them, but demonize and destroy them.  Finally, they got their House chairs, or ‘seats,’ back in 2006, and some kind of swamp-like thing too with Hairy Reeds in control of it.  Then they used this power to stop their country from fighting people who wanted to kill Americans, called Al Kadas.  This just made the Al Kadas stronger, who stepped up their attacks against the USA.”

“This USA was rumored to have all kinds of powerful weapons, even greater than our ancestors had.  But they also had an educational system that taught them that all people were essentially alike.  So when truly evil people threatened their country, they couldn’t recognize them for what they really were, but instead saw it as ‘a situation to be managed,’ not a fight to be won.  And so they kept compromising with the bad people to buy them off, like another country called ‘The French’, which it did for a little while.  But the bad people always kept coming back.  These Liberal Democrats kept trying to find something called ‘common ground’ with the Al Kadas right up to the moment when their own heads were cut off.  By then it was too late for the USA people to do anything other than just give up entirely, since by then there was nothing really left to preserve.”

One reporter, not believing that any so-called advanced civilization could be run by a complete bunch of morons of the type described, challenged this assertion.  But Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong was quick to reply.

“We’ve recovered evidence of a growing belief among these Liberal Democrats that the US government attacked itself on September 11, 2001 and killed 3,000 of its own citizens.  These same people also believed that man, not the sun or other natural forces, was primarily responsible for raising the earth’s temperature from 1 to 9 degrees (they couldn’t seem to agree on a number).  They also believed that space aliens visited the earth and were being held captive in some place called Area 51, that a person named John F. Kennedy was living in the basement of a white house, and that a singer called Elvis was still alive.  During the critical time period of 2007 when the future of their country’s war against Al Kada was being debated, most of their news media was focused on whether a 39-year-old woman who took off her clothes for a living was murdered or died of a drug overdose.  So yes, it is not only possible, but the evidence more than bears this out.  In fact, I’ve come to believe that the Conservative Republicans were the normal people, while the real genetic mutations were Liberal Democrats who possessed some kind of stupidity gene.”

The press conference ended with a promise by Drs. Bukoksy and Smythe-Rostropovich-Bin Laden-Garcia-Fong to report back with more information once additional artifacts were analyzed, among them a same-sex marriage petition, several pyramid-shaped energy crystals from a place called San Francisco, a state-mandated elementary school condom distribution kit, and a Hillary Clinton for President button.