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  • 2003-04-20 (xsd:date)
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  • John Cleese's Letter to the USA (en)
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  • Just as most any anonymous piece of cynically humorous satire about American politics and culture ends up eventually being attributed to comedian George Carlin, so the same kind of material gets credited to English comic John Cleese when it evinces a British viewpoint on American affairs. Unlike his fellow Monty Python trouper Terry Jones, however, Mr. Cleese doesn't generally pen this sort of political levity. The genesis of this article is a long and convoluted one. It hit the online world shortly after the contentious U.S. presidential election of 2000, in which the results of Florida's crucial vote were disputed for weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court eventually stepped in to halt recounts, and George W. Bush was declared the winner despite receiving fewer popular votes overall than his opponent, Al Gore. The piece evidently originated on with one Alan Baxter of Rochester, U.K., who wrote and posted a much shorter, four-item version to an internal newsgroup hosted by his employer in November 2000, as a wry commentary on the recently concluded (but then still far from decided) U.S. presidential election: This item was soon reworked and expanded into a ten-point version: The Revocation piece escaped into the wider world of the Internet a week later when Peter Rieden of Farnborough, U.K., added three more entries to a slightly revised the list (bringing the total to thirteen) and posted it to the USENET newsgroup sci.military.naval on 15 November 2000: The Revocation of Independence quickly spread far and wide on the Internet through e-mail forwards, newsgroup posts, and mailing lists, and within days newspapers in the U.K. were running even longer, fifteen-point versions, such as the following: Curiously, U.S. newspapers tended to run a fifteen-point version as well, but one that was much terser and made significantly different demands to which the U.S. was required to comply: Predictably, the satire spawned a variety of U.S. rebuttal versions: Another popular response to the Revocation piece was this one: All of this brought us to the end of 2004, when the U.S. went through another controversial presidential election (although one not nearly as close or contested as the 2000 version), which once again resulted in a victory for the Republican candidate, George W. Bush. One of the multiplicity of variants of the four-year-old Revocation of Independence satire was dusted off, British funnyman John Cleese's name was appended to the end, and the cycle of forwarding started all over again, only this time with a recognizable name attached to the piece. Many, many people have had a hand in shaping the multiple variations of this bit of humor that now exist, but John Cleese himself is one of the few who hasn't. (en)
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