Operation Possum Is Dead

The nation’s public interest groups were rocked to their foundations today by reports that in the trove of classified information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden was found the revelation that in early 2003 a government metadata analyst successfully connected the millions and millions of dots on the American public’s decades-long scheme to lure the ruling class into so thorough a false sense of security that they would someday carelessly lay the groundwork for their own long overdue undoing.

Said Chuck Webster, media relations volunteer for a collective of grassroots organizations tasked with keeping up the subterfuge that the American people were not strategically rolling over for the oligarchs, “Oh my god. I can’t believe Operation Possum is really dead. Thirty years of just lifelessly lying there biting the dust down the drain.

“The sad part is we really thought we were getting somewhere. I mean look at how half-heartedly they’ve been going through the motions of maintaining the paper-thin democratic façade they’re building their sprawling plutocracy behind.

“Look at all the blatant crimes they’ve been piling up and the rhetorical safe houses of cards the serial felons have taken up residence in.

“Look at all the nonstop barrages of haymakers they’ve been throwing at us round after round after round while we’ve been patiently waiting for the rope-a-dope to pay off.

“And now it’s not ever going to pay off. Taking all those head and body shots and all the blows below the belt and the rabbit and kidney punches and the eye gouges and head butts has been for nothing.”

Said Operation Possum’s chief architect Debbie Martin, “In hindsight, we may have committed a tactical error by giving the ruling class a blank check when it comes to surveilling us. But who could have known that we’ve been so successful at convincing the plutocrats of our chickenhearted impotence that they would abuse the blank check we gave them so recklessly as to find out that we gave them the blank check by way of teasing a catastrophic hubris out of them?

“In many ways, though, I have to say, we have nothing to hang our heads about. Look how successful we were at truly convincing the enemy that we’re spineless, that they had so beaten the courage out of us that they did not need to keep their guards up.

“We can also be proud of how disciplined we the American people have been in sticking to the plan of allowing the ruling class to keep walking all over us until they took the right wrong step.”

Said Peter “Pete” Peterson, billionaire former US Secretary of Commerce and driving force behind the American austerity movement, “You just have to feel sorry for the masses sometimes. I almost wish I could take each and every one of them aside and give them a few bucks to make up for them losing to us again.

“Of course you also really have to laugh at these people. No populace could possibly be as dumb and gutless as they’ve been making themselves out to be. I mean did they really think we didn’t know something was up when they kept letting us sell them such bills of goods as the ridiculous idea that they have to give up their freedoms to protect their freedoms and that war and corporate criminals are not above the law and that money trickles down and that corporate America can regulate itself and that perpetual war is not about profits and that Obama is not a corporate con man?

“If I didn’t already know how dumb the American people are I’d suspect that the underlining of their unthreatening dumbness by dumbly allowing the ruling class the unchecked surveillance capabilities to find out about their dumb plan to give us enough rope to overconfidently hang ourselves was just more rope for us to hang ourselves with.

“On the other hand, it would be just like these rope-a-dopes to keep feeding us rope when we’ve already got so much of it we’d have to hang ourselves from the moon if not Mars for our feet not to reach the ground.”