Citing the chaos in its life – a chaos that culminated in a long string of increasingly bizarre incidents — the United States has checked itself into a rehab center where it will receive intensive treatment for a host of disorders, a spokesperson for the beleaguered nation announced today.
“My client came to that point many others have reached where it was forced to acknowledge that its life was out of control and that it needed to take steps to restore balance, sanity and sobriety into its existence or face catastrophic consequences,” said Stanley Blackwell, a publicist with J. Walter Thompson, a marketing and public relations agency that has represented a number of celebrities, sports stars and public figures undergoing personal difficulties, including Britney Spears, Mel Gibson, Lindsey Lohan, Michael Jackson, Larry Craig, and Michael Vick, the star NFL quarterback who recently pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty. “The United States at this time would also like to publicly apologize to all those people and nations in the global community hurt by its actions over the past several years and to ask forgiveness from all those, especially in the developing world, whose faith in the U.S. has been damaged as a result of its reckless and self-destructive behavior.”
Over the past several years, the U.S. has struggled with many problems, among them substance abuse, a multitude of eating disorders, wild mood swings that have seen the country gravitate between elation, panic, rage, mania and depression, often all in the same day, outbursts of violent anger and spending sprees that have left the nation near bankruptcy and alienated most of its friends and fans, and more and more frequently, serious problems with the law.
For the past eight years, it has also been involved in an openly unhappy marriage to George W. Bush, with whom it is currently locked in a messy divorce suit. “While taking full responsibility for its own lack of wisdom in deciding to wed Mr. Bush, the United States would like to point out that he is not the man the country thought it was marrying,” said Blackwell. “Instead of a compassionate, caring individual who’d faced down his own demons, he has openly encouraged the United States to engage in unhealthy behaviors and looted its bank account, all the while fueling the country’s anxieties about its own inadequacy and popularity. The United States eventually came to the point where it felt thoroughly terrorized by him in its own homeland.
“It’s a sad, sad story we see repeated every day around the world,” Blackwell stated. “Just because you’re rich, powerful and famous doesn’t mean you’re immune.”
While the difficulties that led to the U.S.’s decision to check into rehab have been building for a long time – some say decades — they reached a crescendo in the past few weeks with the country’s increasingly bellicose threats against Iran, a nation that was, itself, once among the U.S.’s closest friends. The U.S.’s crisis came to a head when it reviewed news coverage of the visit to New York by Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad
“Upon witnessing again the rude and abusive treatment Pres. Ahmadinejad received at the hands of [Columbia University President] Lee C. Bollinger, listening to idiotic calls by Rep. [Duncan] Hunter (GOP-Calif.) to cut off federal funds to Columbia – which happens to be a private university – and hearing Chris Mathews refer to the Iranian President as a ‘demagogue’ who is ‘clownish,’ the United States looked at the tattered state of its life, and at its own clownish demagogue of a President, and realized it was time, and past time, for a change,” Blackwell said.
For the moment, Blackwell said, the U.S. wishes not to disclose to name of the treatment center where it will be staying for at least the next 28 days.
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