Not long before the rising tides swamped Manhattan, there will have been a nation called the United States of America that no longer knew itself. Americans will have stopped catechising themselves with the Declaration of Independence, which will have been tamped once too often into a fireworks tube for wadding and sent aloft to shower its last smoldering remains onto the grounds of what used to be a state park but which will have become a tent city operated by a for-profit prison company called "Freedom Isn't Free" on behalf of bankrupted people with pre-existing conditions, where the sulphurous smell of the smoking Declaration will have delighted the nostrils of a 2-year-old chasing lightning bugs and listening to her pre-existing brain-tumored, insolvent grandfather rave about the Martian colony's revolt against the USA Space Usurpation: hadn't he seen it coming, he will have raved, because who didn't fucking know that going into a fiscal hole for imperial military adventurism is the root cause of all revolutions? But, he will have already known that, believed that, said that, long before his death throes, which will not have been long off at that point when he was sobbing: what could you expect from people who didn't even know that it used to be, once upon a time, right there in the D. of I. that government had a purpose! A higher calling, as it were! As it might have been! And what was it? What might it have been? "Can nobody tell me?" the grandfather will have sobbed at the sky as the smoldering bits will have showered down. "Chapter and verse! Tell me, slaves of the American Empire! What is the trinity of government?" And what answer will he have heard as his grand-daughter will have gone skittering around after the smoking paper hoping for lightning bugs? Rapid-fire silence behind the smoke. Nothing of securing rights, nothing of safety, nothing of happiness.
No more bang. Whimper. By then it will have been almost time for Independence Day.
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