How to Get Rich and Betray the United States

Michael Murray currently lives and works in Toronto. He has an extensive wardrobe and is a dominant and intimidating presence on the Bocce Ball field...

Make money and serve the people!

Do you like to surf the Internet? If so, you might be exactly what the Chinese government is looking for!! Earn up to $500 a week from the comfort of your own home, just by surfing Internet or hacking mainframe security in the United States of America! Do not pass up this once in a lifetime lucky day!

Even though I was a little bit skeptical, I really didn’t think I could afford to pass up this opportunity when I saw it appear in my Hotmail account. After all, I’m poor and as I care about the environment, all of my hygiene rituals are waterless, so working from home sounded perfect. Plus, I’d always wanted to be a spy and knowing that China was the future, I thought it would be an aces idea to get onboard and help them decode the confusing swamp that is America.

What follows is my first report:

Gracious Supervisor #248:
I want to thank you very sincerely for this great career opportunity. I am very happy to serve the People and will work crazy hard to ensure that my reports are of the highest caliber and that we develop a long-lasting and meaningful business relationship. I would also like to add that I believe that it is good to have just one child!

Here are some of the things that I think are very important and useful for China to know about America:

Technology
Apart from the iPhone 5 there are no new developments in American technology.

Celebrities
Celebrities are simultaneously worshipped and destroyed in the United States. Everybody wants to be one and to hurt one, which is why cosmetic surgery and handguns are so prevalent in the culture.

For instance, Jennifer Lawrence is the dewy eyed 22-year-old who just won the Academy Award for best actress and if you want to understand the United States, you must understand her. She is America’s sweetheart, the girl who grew up with brothers and appreciates fast food, but is still funny and drop-dead gorgeous! It is a fact that I would take an arrow for her and I do believe that America would go to war over her.

The celebrity opposite of Jennifer Lawrence is Anne Hathaway. America hates her because she’s over-organized and wants it too much. She would have been the pretty but not sexy girl on student council, the one who was always smiling while bossing people around. America would not go to war over her.

The Military
The American military is extremely large and well equipped. The U.S. spends everything it earns on the military and celebrities, I think. In fact, the military is a kind of celebrity—a massive, drunk celebrity with weapons.

To get a feel for the ethos of the American warrior culture, I played Call of Duty for six straight days, discovering that it feels really, really good to kill things. It made me feel like a man, you know? As I have low testosterone, it’s nice to feel like a man every once in awhile. I told my wife that it was medically imperative for me to stop doing the dishes—which is known to increase estrogen levels—but she didn’t buy it. Just because she’s quite a bit taller than me she thinks she can tell me what to do, but as America shall soon discover, might does not make right!

Pornography
It turns out that many (North) American males have spouses who are not supportive of their interest in pornography-- even if it is strictly work related. That being said, some sites are better than others.

Financial Institutions, particularly Visa
I used my computer hacking skills to discover that my wife’s password for our Visa account is a superlative about an ex-boyfriend: DEACONBESTSEXEVER!! This is not the sort of news a man with low testosterone needs to hear. It is truly demoralizing to find a bunch of charges from gas stations out near where Deacon lives on his organic farm, plus purchases for farm equipment (a pitchfork) and an acoustic guitar that you have never seen. I got a fitness membership for my birthday and a book about good nutrition. I think that the Chinese expression is, "我的绿帽子."

Depression
Many (North) Americans suffer from depression, especially after they find out that the person they thought was a loving and loyal spouse was not, but was in fact the sort of woman who would buy a pitchfork for some dolt farmer she never got over because he was “real.” Depression. I guess there’s still a bit of a stigma about it, but when you have it you really don’t care. You really don’t care about anything. A depressed country would be very easy to seize. You should put depression in America’s drinking water and then take it over.

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"Unit 61398" of the People's Liberation Army outside of Shanghai, supposed location of a massive hacking operation against American targets.

Michael Murray currently lives and works in Toronto. He has an extensive wardrobe and is a dominant and intimidating presence on the Bocce Ball field. He won the New Yorker Cartoon Caption contest and dislikes Cuba. He works as a creative writer, copywriter, blogger and “journalist” and as he is modest, he feels awkward talking about his genius, which he recently found out does not translate into IQ tests. His work has appeared in the Toronto Standard, Slant Magazine, the Ottawa Citizen and Pajiba.com.