ILLUMINATI COME OUT OF HIDING TO DECLARE BANKRUPTCY
Friday, July 2, 2010 at 6:18PM | by Otter 
ILLUMINATI COME OUT OF HIDING TO DECLARE BANKRUPTCY
DATELINE: New York, Rome, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Oslo.
The Illuminati emerged from their underground crystal kingdom at a hastily convened press conference on Thursday to explain why their organization had gone bankrupt and why, as a result of bad investing strategies, it would regretfully be postponing the End of the World for another two millennia until it could restructure, go back into hiding, and once again pull the strings of both government and finances in secret.
"The Illuminati are very embarrassed," said a stunned Damien de Beest, Netherlands-born Grand High Goatfoot and Chief Executive Officer of the super-secret organization tasked with bringing about a one-world government and Armageddon. "We know how many people look for stability in these troubled times, and the belief that we are there and pulling history's strings is something the world could count on."
Observers are still combing over the financial catastrophe as the Illuminati scampered at a late morning breakfast to do damage control. An internal memo to "All 30th Degree Illuminati Under the Moon and Above The Eternal Flames" painted the picture of the financial meltdown: "We got into some bad Kyrgyzstan government bonds, but were hammered when Argentina unexpectedly did not get the memo on global market strategies and pegged their dollar to the U.S. dollar. We tried to make up for it by dealing in overextended mortgages, ill-advisedly rigged the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan expecting a better return on Afghanistan's lithium deposits, and it sort of went south from there."
De Beest insisted, "We will get to the bottom of it. The organization has already eaten the still-beating hearts of several junior analysts, advisors, and diabolical schemers. But our investigation is just beginning. We suspect that our super secret organization might have been penetrated by a super-secret organization bent on controlling it from within."
The Illuminati at the height of its power, on June 23, 1986, was the guiding force behind all world governments except for small pockets of Afghanistan, Viet Nam, and most of Newark, New Jersey. "We meant to take over the world financial system as well as penetrate to the highest levels of government, but we kind of got bogged down in some really bad mortgage investments," said Julius Beelzebub, chief strategist for the Illuminati. "Looking back, we just got greedy really. We thought we could leverage control of the Federal Reserve into pretty much controlling the whole world monetary system, but it's kind of seeming like a bad idea now."
Experts note that this is not the first time the organization's aggressive strategies have backfired. "Back in the 1970's and 1980's, its use of the number 666 on credit cards and in UPC bar-codes was just wrong-headed," says World Watch analyst Barbie Ken. "Did they think nobody had read the Book of Revelation? And there was that bald power-grab when they slapped the logo with the pagan moon and thirteen stars on their Proctor and Gamble arm. They probably did the right thing in just hoping that would blow over, but it ruined their attempt to clean the teeth of the Christian Right, which just moved over from Crest to Colgate in shockingly high numbers."
Hundreds of thousands of protestors in major world capitols showed some confusion about who precisely the Illuminati are and what they do. Right Wing evangelical shortwave radio talk-show host Rev. Tobias Uppletummy denounced the press conference as a fraud. "We don't believe your lying lies!" he bellowed through a megaphone at a small demonstration in Atlanta, Georgia, outside the Coca Cola Company's offices. "You can't snooker us! You're still solvent!" For some reason he pointed as he spoke at his fellow protestors, apparently convinced they were secretly Illuminati. Asserting a relationship between the G7 and the Illuminati, Esther Quitherbutton staged a sit-in outside a Starbucks in Washington, D.C., holding a sign that said, "Globalization Stops The World's Beating Heart." Ambrose Permissiveness of Tampa carried a sign demanding "Illuminatio Mea," but it was not immediately clear to whom the sign was addressed, as he was sitting in a deck-chair atop a weather-buoy. One sign at a New York rally read, inexplicably, "Consanguinity, Not Apothegms." The sign was decorated in Masonic symbols.
The sudden announcement raises questions in many circles about whether the Illuminati can be trusted to bring about a one-world government and Armageddon. "A mild predilection for toxic loans can be absorbed by most infernal organizations," says critic Andrew Slabchest. "But this whole thing looks more like an addiction."
Ken adds, "Since the Illuminati's mission is world domination, we can understand these aggressive strategies somewhat, but somewhere along the line a more conservative, balanced approach to global demonization is really going to be required."
"We can understand why people would be disappointed," admitted de Beest. "Mistakes have been made. But we will not rest. We will fix this thing. We will make this right."
Illuminati in Personal Reflection 
Reader Comments (5)
OMG! I laughed out loud. If I'd been drinking, well... it wouldn't have been pretty!
I remember being TERRIFIED in, like, seventh or eight grade when the whole Pringles Chips Are Evil campaign started and I heard the whole conspiracy theory. Wow, it was the first time the church seemed to be telling the truth about the End Times; there is was right on my favorite new snack. Not.
This was really too funny. Sadly, I know people who would truly be ecstatic that the Evil had been stopped in their plans if they read this. But I'm too busy still chuckling to care too much.
Sandra, yeah, conspiracy theories are fun because they explain everything and can never be disproven. Any evidence against them becomes evidence for them. ("The government says the alleged U.F.O. was a weather satellite"; "Well, that's what they WOULD say...")
I love eschatology, and reading it is fascinating stuff, but it's all dreams and visions intended to explain everything.
And one of the funny things is, it's like so much fortune-telling and future-telling: it's self-fulfilling.
If you can set an image at the center of a group of people's collective imagination, they will see to it that it comes true.
If you foretell the rebuilding of Jerusalem (or Ground Zero, or New Orleans...) it _will_ happen. Without a vision the people perish, because the inevitable disasters of life push us around without a center of collective gravity. Poetry and the imagination provide that center of gravity.
So the End Times, a (self?) fulfilling prophecy, is cast in images that made sense two thousand years ago, but now make the best sense we can make of them, and are strong enough poetry that they fit together in seemingly infinite ways.
They give us ways of talking about experience.
And either God or the Illuminati must be pulling the strings, right? Or both.
How comforting to think that there was nothing we could have done.
But the thing that always gets me about the Illuminati is, the human capacity for fucking up is so enormous, how could anybody manage a plot that big? We can't even get 100,000 feet of boom from Venice, LA, to Grand Isle.
Maybe in a future installment I'll do an investigative report of red tape in the Illuminati's internal bureaucracy.
You need to write for The Onion.
"If you can set an image at the center of a group of people's collective imagination, they will see to it that it comes true."
Yes, absolutely. I just wish the collective imagination gravitated toward an image that was empowering and hopeful rather than doom and an abnegation of responsibility.
They exist but they seem to attract such a minority consciousness. I get that most people feel helpless so they resonate with Controlled By Others scenarios but why don't people seem to want NOT to feel helpless and resonate to the I Can Do It, You Can Too stories?
THat was the funniest thing I've read in a long time. Thanks for the laugh! I needed that.