Our Plan: Imagine some sort of tip-off to reporters about a secret plan, a conspiracy (if you will) that is the brainchild of the president, but mostly orchestrated by the National Security Agency and the CIA. A break-in possibly, or merely loose lips at a bar on the Hill. Tapes may be found. Or memos and fax transmissions with names disguised, code words used instead. Pictures of memoranda--real names blacked out. Photos of world leaders, handshakes, corporate CEOs with eyes covered so as to hide their identities.
We propose to write the book Democracy for Dummies-- the expose of the secret plan. Part transcript, part visual elements, mostly narrative: the overall conspiracy and the country-by-country plan for the U-S-ification and domination of the entire globe. G-L-O-B-E! God Love Our Big Empire!!! Is it fiction? Is it non-fiction? This would be up to the readers to decide. Perhaps it would be stocked in both sections. Confusing? Maybe. Controversial? Yes! Noteworthy? Definitely!
This book combines political satire with critical analysis of American society. It is a blend of fact and fiction and we expect it to be read on two levels. First, as satire, when a team of left-over Cold Warriors, policy wonks, and national security state commandos, take a harmless speech by the President and turn it into a plan for reestablishing order in the global system. On a second level, it can be read as critical analysis because the key elements of the "secret plan" are exaggerations of the "normal" aspects of the U.S. political, economic, and social systems.
Chapter One: Epiphany in the Oval Office
The PLAN appears as Revelation in the form of American Eagles, the globe, and breaking CNN news. The President and one of his top aides, meeting to prepare a routine speech to the United Nations, stumble upon a plan to reestablish world order.
Chapter Two: Perpetual Elections
A team of NSA-CIA operatives is assigned to develop strategies to implement the PLAN. They are central characters in the book, and their work is a combination of Keystone Kops and serious intelligence activities. The first step in the plan is to extend democracy around the world in the form of mind-numbing elections that give the illusion of democracy, while raising the level of boredom such that civic participation is low.
Chapter Three: The Truth is Out There
When a group of pseudo-scientists threaten to blow the whistle on an Air Force cover-up of a possible alien abduction, CNN was there. Learn how the Assistant Press Secretary spins the bogus story of "the threat from above" to invoke unifying fear (a la the Green Menace) and disband the international threat from below.
Chapter Four: Bridging the Digital Divide Worldwide
Silicon swindlers cast their nets to the Third World to increase their share of the global pie. Half-baked partnerships between industry and indigenous peoples result.
Chapter Five: Location, Location. Location: The Case for Globalization
Who needs borders, or even citizens, when you have the not-so-hidden-hand of the market, multinational corporations, and the WTO. This chapter features the worlds most watched TV show "Who Wants to Have a Job?" This show brings workers and community leaders from around the world to compete in a game-show format to get a new multinational sweatshop in their town. A second feature is the "privatization workshop" run by Harvard economists and aimed at Third World political and economic leaders. The goal is to bring everyone into the neoliberal global economy.
Chapter Six: Cultural Development: Modernization theory in Living Color
The CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom is resurrected from the 1950s to produce state-ordered reports on how television tastes correspond with stages of cultural development in "Maslow Meets the Boob-Tube." The relationship between media and social control are exploited to produce mono-cultural mayhem, and a distinctively American world order.
Chapter Seven: Spiritual Technology: A Digitally Enhanced, Kinder, Gentler God
Religious difference is minimized, if not entirely ignored, in modern day Western democracy. An outrageous plan to export political correctness and tolerance along with New Age truths is revealed to the President and a team of spiritual advisers at a Camp David weekend retreat, The resulting Chicken Soup for the Global Soul becomes a best seller on Oprah Winfrey's Book of the Month club.
Chapter Eight: Counter Hegemony or Hegemony Counter
Three characters introduced earlier in the book--Charlie W. Trash, Emma Golden, and Ibafemi Offolawa--return to center stage in a comic effort to subvert The Plan. Readers are left to ponder the question of who has been marginalized and who has been absorbed into the emerging social order.
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