This is Necropolitique.

My name is not important. I am a more-or-less failed freelance web developer with no personal political biases other than the usual boredom with partisanship squabbling. This weblog is here for one reason only: to provide a platform for the dissemination of the document I have come to call Necropolitique, Testimony of the Mad Liberal. I feel compelled to do this in large measure because of the circumstances through which it has come into my hands, and also because of the content that seems to be revealing itself to me. Perhaps I should explain.

Late in the evening of December 31, 2000, while typing up a business plan prospectus for a potential client, I experienced a sudden and not obviously explainable computer failure. There was a bright red flash from the monitor, then a ferocious flicker, then black death. I was mad as hell--thinking I had just lost an hour's worth of work--and had a few words with Bill Gates. But it was considerably worse than I originally thought. When I rebooted the machine, it came up "Error reading from Drive:c. Drive does not exist." I very nearly had a stroke. The vision of my computer in a head-to-head grudge match with a steamroller came first to my mind. It was a disaster, of course, as anyone who's ever experienced a hard drive failure can surely attest.

Well, I was fucked. I knew it, and the technical geek down at the repair shop knew it, too. But he did think that he might be able to recover at least some of my files, so I left the box. One week later, I got a call. He sounded really confused. "I never seen anything like this," he said. "The disk isn't damaged, but it is clean--like, reformatted clean, except that there's still one file on it. It's big, but it looks like gibberish to me. Want me to delete it?"

I told him no, on the off chance that it contained something I could salvage. I took the computer home, and hooked it up, and reloaded a bunch of software, and finally, fixed a drink and sat down to look at the file. It was huge. A 3.26 gigabyte text file. Text file. No formatting or code of any sort. And although it was clearly in English, it seemed to be some whole other English than I've ever seen.

Here's a sample taken from the first block of text, cut and pasted directly from the document:

Dan th twilk, semb land whith. Yer bin 3.35.333, only ones "2000." Demcrzy ones. Lang next ever not. Necropolitique whens ov th dan thug. Yer las ever not.

It almost made some sort of sense, but I was damned if I could tell just what. So I spent the last two years trying to translate it. And this blog is a record of that. I will be releasing translations of the Necropolitique in sections, just as soon as I am confident in the translation. Some sections may be longer than others, and I may return to particular passages to edit them if I learn something that might change vocabulary, or syntax, or meaning. In those cases, I will add the word "EDITED."

I make no claims as to the authenticity of this document, or its provenance, or any implications apparent through the text. I only know that the document seems to claim that it originates in the year 3652, and that it appears to be history.

A history of the painful last decade of a great merchant empire, The United States of America. Let the Necropolitique speak for itself.