"My esteemed colleagues," he began, "Yesterday a flotilla of Chinese gunboats appeared off the Eastern coast of these United States, demanding payment of a gigantic ransom from our bankrupt treasury. President Averill P. Harris IV has not opposed this act of blackmail. Yet I do not speak to condemn our President. I speak to ask our elected representatives a single question.

"What did we expect? Did we think we could postpone the reckoning forever? Did we think we could avoid personal and fiscal responsibility, fiddle for all eternity like a grasshopper among the ruins of a once-great nation?"

These are the actual first lines of the speech that every American schoolchild now learns, once he has mastered enough ancient English to attempt it. It is a speech that has inspired dozens of films and plays over the centuries. It is the one truly famous speech from the age of the American Imperium.

The fame of the Kennedy speech should not overshadow the events that produced it. Recently, scholars have reexamined the causes of the Great Flotilla. Their research has focused on the events of another date, five months earlier: April 15, 2043.

On April 15, 2043, historians tell us, over one hundred thirty-four million United States taxpayers filed requests for extensions of time to file their annual tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service. It is worth noting that these requests were entirely legal at the time. The enormous number of requests for extension, comprising nearly eighty-five percent of all returns filed in that year, caused a catastrophic decline in immediate tax receipts.

The immediate catalyst for the collapse appears to have been Congress's refusal, in the fall of 2042, to pass a bill regulating interest rates on so-called "tax advance loans" made by global banking interests. The prevailing interest rates on these loans had by this time reached over ten thousand percent.

Lobbyists for the banking interests had received a concession from Congress: tax advance loans were not dischargable in bankruptcy. The vast majority of taxpayers for tax year 2042 therefore voted with their keyboards, and requested more time to pay from the government itself. The results on the already-strained federal budget were disastrous, and set the stage for the international crisis that occurred less than six months later.

The second significant factor leading to American collapse was religious. An evangelical preacher named Harold Schlump appears to have convinced a large number of Americans that they would be left behind in the Rapture if they had ANY unconfessed sin, however small, on their consciences.

Schlump's obsessions were eccentric, but they resonated with increasingly anxious segments of the population. Enough Americans were terrified by the preacher's warnings about driving even slightly above the speed limit that a large number of them began driving SLOWER than the posted speed limit, often much slower. Frequently, such slow drivers could be found in both lanes of the highway. The resulting effect on interstate commerce and transportation were disastrous.

Schlump's devotees also believed they were required scrupulously to report all income to the taxing authorities. His efforts led to the filing of millions of arcane forms that had been gathering dust for years in bureaucrats' offices. NSM devotees filed thousands of Use Tax forms for taxable internet catalog sales, for example. Taxing authorities were simply unequipped to handle such a barrage of scrupulous taxpaying, often involving extremely small amounts, especially when coupled with enormous numbers of requests for extension of file from taxpayers with much larger tax liabilities.

Other, lesser factors also contributed to the crisis. In 2042, a conservative Congress passed the "No Plea Bargaining Act," leading to the collapse of the judicial system. In the May 2041 credit panic, millions of citizens completed, signed and returned every single unsolicited credit card offer they received, then froze the cards that were sent to them in their refrigerator freezers, devastating the credit card industry. Throughout the summer of 2043, millions of Americans, frustrated by spam, e-mail pfishing, and popup ads, turned their computers off and visited national parks instead, leading to massive overcrowding and traffic jams on already slow roadways and the collapse of numerous internet businesses.

As mentioned, the final crisis occurred in September 2043, after the national treasury defaulted on a quarterly interest payment to its Chinese and Japanese trading partners. No longer content to protest quietly, our Chinese forefathers (who by now had the largest military in the world) sailed their gunboats to the shores of New York and demanded payment. After a large ransom was collected from ordinary Americans, they withdrew, promising to return if satisfactory arrangements could not continue to be made. It was in the shadow of those events that Marcus Kennedy made his speech.

It was a beautiful speech, exhorting Americans everywhere to patriotism, discipline, self- sacrifice, reason, togetherness, common sense, pride and thrift. And, as we know, it had no effect whatsoever, either in improving American behavior or in forestalling our eventual invasion and the collapse of the American Empire. Which is why the Speech languished in obscurity and was almost forgotten until five hundred years later, when it gained fame as part of a famous tragedy, Tyotto Takai Desu Ne'e. The Japanese title of this play should not obscure the fact that Kennedy's lines were originally delivered in English. Just as we should never forget that America's capital city, Hua Shen Dun, was once known as "Washington."