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Frank Genovese Nathaniel D. Hutchings Introduction to Lemon-Lounging (LL101) 1 December 2012 Dead People Cider: A Historical and Instructional Essay During wintertime, there exist tasty liquid delicacies that people around the world eat or drink to stay warm. Some people drink hot chocolate, and some drink warm apple cider. However, there is a historical delicacy that has been long-forgotten by most of the people of the world known as dead people cider. It comes in many variants, depending on the ingredients used and the countries of their origin. Its appearance is generally a dark red, and it is generally heated to a temperature of seventy degrees Celsius. So how did the age-old tradition of preparing dead people cider start? Back ca. 100 BCE, the Maya civilization was performing its routine yearly human sacrifice to appease the gods. One man, Bernie Cordata, accidentally dropped remains of the sacrifice from cleanup into his heated cup of water. Upon finding out that this actually tasted amazingly, he decided to slaughter three dozen of his fellow Mayan folk, putting different parts of their corpses into his new concoction to experiment with which parts tasted the best. He discovered that the three best ingredients were hands, pinky toes, and ears; however, the rest of the body was viable for brewery. Cordata decided to take this recipe and show the rest of the Mayan civilization. Upon finding out that he murdered thirty-six people in cold blood, the civilization unanimously decided to execute him before he could finish explaining his motives. Afterward, his home was sacked, but his underground brewery was not uncovered for several days.

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Upon the brewerys discovery by an unknown benefactor, Mayan officials of the region decided to trade the bottles Cordata had brewed to surrounding civilizations; however, the bottles had curdled by the time the officials had found it. The officials looked in Cordatas journal and learned the recipe for this amazing concoction, which they decided to implement on a mass scale. The officials launched a full-scale war against adjacent Mayan kingdoms, under the guise that they were heretics and were also imposing an embargo on their own kingdom. Being much more prepared for battle than this kingdom, the adjacent kingdoms were able to siege this kingdom, kill its rulers, and take it as their own. After this, the knowledge of the existence of this amazing beverage, and Cordatas journal, were lost for ages. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a rag-tag group of seven North American colonists set out to South America in search of riches. Their names were Arnold Harrison, aged 63, Benjamin Foster, aged 42, Marcus Randall, age 27, Marilyn Harrison-Randall, age 16, Marcus Randall Jr., aged 7, Francis Paine, aged 44, and Francis Paine, also aged 44. Upon reaching land and trekking for days to ancient Mayan ruins, the group stumbled upon a small cavern. Once they entered the cavern, five of the seven traveled down the linear path leading to Bernie Cordatas gravesite, while Marcus Randall Jr. and Francis Paine (to this day, no one knows which Paine to attribute this event to) took the path branching off to the basement, where they started to dig until they uncovered several scattered bones and a bound book. Paine ran to the rest of the group to share his discovery, and they all knew that in this journal was the secret to both ultimate riches and more power than one man could possibly handle. Their only remaining task was to get back to North America to share their discovery. Sadly, the trek back to the colonies was a difficult one. Due to storms in the middle of their way back, five of the seven were washed up on a shore around the area that is currently

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known as Texas. The other two, Arnold Harrison and Marcus Randall, were lost in the storm after a failure to cooperate and a fight to the death. The rest were able to find a ship, but had heard through word of mouth that there was a war brewing in the colonies between the colonists and the British. Because of this, the five took the long path ahead, and entered the newly-formed United States around 1790. Upon finding out that George Washington was the leader of the United States of America, they went to him, telling him that hidden in this journal is the secret to ultimate wealth. Washington decided that these five were lunatics and had them all sentenced to death; however, Francis Paine (again, no one knows which Paine this is) was able to escape with this secret. However, Washingtons linguistic specialists that he sent in to actually decipher the journal were able to decipher the message, and Paine was called back and told of the discovery. From there, he was named the Secretary of Presidential Brewery and put in charge of using freshly-executed persons to form this concoction. This position was kept secret from the general public, and only the presidential Cabinet knew of its existence. John Adams, upon taking office, decided to keep Paine around, and had him hire faculty to succeed him so that there would be more brewers for such an amazing beverage. While it was not used for monetary gain by the President (instead for his own personal consumption), Paine was generously compensated for his discovery and work (Paine 163-586). Paines autobiography was found in his home almost a century after his death, giving scholars deeper insight to the origins of this mysterious beverage, one he originally dubbed Deceased Tea. Ever since the position of Secretary of Presidential Brewery was established, every president was informed of this secret position once having taken office, and told that they would be automatically impeached if they were to divulge this information to the public. However, upon Abraham Lincolns discovery that African-American slaves were being slaughtered by the

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masses in order to produce different flavors of deceased tea than that of white executed persons, he spoke out against this outrage to humanity. He was threatened to be impeached, but since states were starting to secede and a war was starting to brew, the Cabinet knew that they needed a leader. However, after winning the Civil War for the Union, Lincoln was deemed as hereby useless by the Cabinet. Since the general public still liked him and elected him to a second term, the Cabinet knew that impeachment would only arise more conflict among the nation. Therefore, they hired John Wilkes Booth as a hired gun to take down the President as to make sure the secret Cabinet position was never spoken of again. While Booth realized the risks of this endeavor, he knew that the prospect of a lifetime supply of deceased tea was too good to pass up. However, he was killed quickly by a Union Army soldier, as the act of killing a revered President did not look like a good deed to the general public. However, this entire sequence of events was planned by the Cabinet to make sure the secret of deceased tea was never known of again by the general public. The Cabinet was able to keep this secret until the First World War, where secret intel reports had clued Britain, France, and Russia that the United States was harboring secret cannibalistic tendencies for the last few centuries. This angered the nations so much that they decided that they were going to launch a full-scale attack against the savage Americans. However, Russian ambassadors were given a bottle of the beverage to drink, and declared it more potent than their finest vodka. It quickly took the Allies by storm, and they accepted the United States into their faction. As the war continued, Allied troops were given notepads with quick recipes to make deceased tea out of their fallen enemies. Meanwhile, on the homefront, local bars, pubs, taverns, etc. had hidden compartments where locally-murdered citizens would be put into grinders for mass production, and bartenders sold the drink as DT Cocktails.

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Shortly after the war, however, several humanitarian groups protested the production, sale, and consumption of these DT Cocktails, along with all other alcoholic beverages. These groups had learned from a former bartender, Charles P. Moon, that DT Cocktails were pretty much entirely made out of the remains of dead people, and they had assumed that other beverages commonly served in bars contained human remains in them as well. They were able to get the 19th Amendment ratified, as well as change the colloquial term DT Cocktail to Dead People Cider. Speakeasies all over America still produced dead people cider, but very few people actually opted to drink them, now knowing of its dark secret. However, the rest of the world that fought alongside America in World War I still widely consumed it and enjoyed it, and looked down upon the United States for not doing so. Even then, though, once Prohibition was repealed, the United States still opted to keep the manufacture, sale, and consumption of dead people cider illegal. Dead people cider resurged back into the American mainstream once America entered World War II and tensions between America and Japan were mounting. While the Japanese were put into internment camps, they often disappeared from these camps and were put into local grinders. They were ground up into a powder instead of a drink, and sold in supermarkets under a drink mix called DPC Japan. The general consensus was that since the Japanese were considered animalistic by American people, it was okay to use this variant, especially since it was still quite the favorable delicacy amongst the American population. Japanese officials caught word of this and then planned to buy off several surrounding nations to go into mass nuclear missile production. However, once the transactions were made and missile production had started in Russia, America had gotten word of this through a Japanese double agent that did not want to see Frank Sinatra get blown to smithereens. Sinatra was thus regarded as an American

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hero and given permission to pilot the Enola Gay to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki so that Japan would reconsider launching a full-scale nuclear attack on America. After all internment camps had closed, DPC Japan was discontinued. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were mounting, people started to associate the drinking of dead people cider with communism. Throughout America, massive amounts of people were accused of having secret hidden dead people cider breweries (and communism). Arthur Miller, a closet connoisseur of dead people cider, wrote his famous play, The Crucible, in order to present an extended metaphor on how much nonsense it was to automatically accuse someone of producing and drinking dead people cider, calling it akin to the infamous Salem witch trials. However, once his secret bottle collection of aged dead people cider was uncovered to the public, he was now Americas most hated person. A week after the discovery, he was trampled by a crowd of hippies. Dead people cider had completely disappeared from the American radar for almost twenty years, until Richard Nixon had taken the presidency. In his 1972 Proposition for a Secret Amendment, he stated: Ladies and gentlemen, our country has had a very dark past. It has done treacherous, gluttonous, and even communistic things ever since its humble beginnings. I am, of course, talking about our long history with the fabled drink, dead people cider. I know, I know; just hearing the name makes you cringe. We have fought many a battle, and many have died, to keep this menace to society out of our homes and our communities. I propose to you all, however, that if we are to truly move forward as a civilized nation, we can not have this treacherous past be known to the next generation. What you need to allow me to do, is to propose this amendment to the

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Constitution: Amendment X. It will never be spoken of after its ratification, nor will its existence be acknowledged in the actual constitution. Its purpose will be to disallow any further reference to the existence of dead people cider, and to eliminate all existing evidence of it ever having existed, or having been first commercialized, in the United States of America. With this amendment, our childrenand their childrenand their childrens childrenwill never know of the darkest, most disgusting aspects of American culture. This is what America needs to make the next generation great. --Richard Nixon, 15 June 1972 Nixons address caused Amendment X to be ratified with a unanimous yay vote, and he won re-election by a landslide. From here, the American government destroyed and discontinued all known copies of literature directly related to dead people cider, changed the reasons in all history books for certain happenings in the Civil War and both World Wars, and constructed a robotic Arthur Miller to keep writing literature under his name, all the while destroying any reference to Miller ever having been a connoisseur of the cider. Some had said Nixon passed Amendment X just to gain more re-election votes; however, these claims were instantly debunked by the notion that the very existence of Amendment X was never to be acknowledged again. Nixons popularity, however, was cut short in 1974, when people staying at the Watergate Hotel had noticed an unusual smell lingering about, and discovered it to be Nixons own personal dead people cider brewery, located in the basement. American news stations dubbed this event Cidergate, and dead people cider was once again referenced by the mainstream for as long as this event was being covered by the news. Nixon was instantly deemed both a communist and Americas biggest hypocrite, and he was then universally hated by the

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country. Riots broke out all throughout Washington, and several children were found picking up severed remains of dead bodies off the street, intending on home-brewing their own dead people cider. America, having destroyed any reference to the dead people cider just two years prior, was now drowning in it. Because of this, communities all over America rallied for Nixons impeachment. Before he was actually impeached, however, he resigned from office. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, decided to uphold Nixons secret amendment by informing the American populous to continue to destroy all evidence of dead people ciders existence. Furthermore, he changed all references in history books and periodicals from Cidergate to Watergate, and fabricated an in-depth story of how Nixon fell from grace. Then, he criminalized any mention of the term dead people cider, with any infraction of this law costing the perpetrator a twenty-thousand-dollar fine and a mandatory seven years in jail. After Cidergate, while most people complied with keeping dead people cider out of their homes, many decided to take an anarchistic attitude towards the matter. Immediately after Cidergate, people started to experiment with different types of music while rebelling against the system by drinking nothing but dead people cider. As a result, the entire musical genre of punk rock was born. People would mix several illegal narcotics with the cider and then hold in-house concerts, where people would be encouraged to engage in battles to the death, while the winner would be able to drink the cider of the loser. As punk rock rose in popularity, it started to become associated with gladiatorial combat, rather than communism. People would pay hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars for the opportunity to watch or compete in these barbaric exhibitions, only for the chance that they could once again experience the delicious nectar of the deceased.

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Once people outside the punk rock scene started to show their public appreciation for dead people cider, the movement started to boom as rapidly as it had declined. All of Americas upper class started to partake in dead people cider consumption again: musicians, actors, congressmaneven Mister Rogers got his fair share of the stuff. Still, though, it was deemed illegal throughout the entire country, and only those with money or political power could get away with drinking it. Because of this, much akin to the marijuana legalization movement, several communities rallied together to end the prohibition of dead people cider. They stressed that since the cider was such a popular commodity, it would be best for the economy if it were legalized and taxed to the people of America. While this idea did make sense in some regards, the American government would have none of it. They knew that Nixon was right, and that Amendment X was the only way to keep America from completely collapsing upon itself. They had all of the cider lobbyists jailed for first degree murder, along with tacking on the twentythousand-dollar fine detailed in Johnsons official policy for each of them. This mass imprisonment was enough of an effective scare tactic to make sure that dead people cider stayed off the streets for as long as possible. The existence of dead people cider was ignored, and eventually forgotten, by the general public until 1994, when historian James L. Sander found Bernie Cordatas original journal in an antique shop in Massachusetts. He took the mysterious book home and immediately got to work on translating its contents. After learning of deceased teas greatness, and not knowing at all of the history behind dead people cider, he decided to bring it back to American culture by murdering all of his neighbors and using them to bootleg sixty bottles of the fabled drink. To make sure to hide the natural musk of the deceased, he decided to throw in his own additives, such as the ever-popular high-fructose corn syrup, as well as several antioxidants and artificial

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cherry flavoring. He brought this concoction to the Food and Drug Administration, telling them he wanted to market a new drink. He gave them a false recipe to make sure they werent on to him, and sure enough, they gave him a license to manufacture his new soft drink. Knowing that it would be hard to rise to the top on his own, he went to Dr Pepper and showed them his mysterious concoction. It was an instant hit amongst the executives, and they decided to market it as Dr Pepper Cherry, meanwhile giving Sander a sixteen-million-dollar cash settlement for the rights to the recipe. After finding out that it was secretly dead people cider that they were about to market, they made sure to note to consumers that this variant of Dr Pepper contained a topsecret ingredient to avoid suspicion from any particular law enforcement agencies. In June of 1997, President Bill Clinton finally noticed that Cherry Dr Pepper bore a striking resemblance to the dead people cider he would frequently drink in his childhood. Although he was saddened to get rid of such a magnificent and revered drink once again, he knew that his job was to uphold the law and keep America strong. He notified the FDA and had Dr Pepper Cherry pulled from shelves and disallowed its very manufacture. Dr Pepper eliminated remains of the dead from its Cherry recipe, and they were allowed to start selling it again. However, after this change, it was clear that American morale had dropped, and that the prohibition of the cider, in any form, was detrimental to American society. After heavy consideration, Clinton finally decided to propose Amendment Y, which was to repeal Amendment X. However, before he could get it signed, the Lewinsky scandal broke out, and there became little support for anything Clinton proposed to the general public, and Amendment Y was not ratified. So, some may ask, what is the current status of dead people cider? As President George W. Bush was very against the idea of allowing the production of dead people cider in America,

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very few resurgences of the drinks popularity occurred during his terms in office. However, one of Barack Obamas first presidential campaign promises was to make sure that the forgotten amendment would be ratified, and that dead people cider would be back in the homes of America shortly after his election. This made all of America hopeful that they would live much happier lives, so he was able to win by a landslide. Surely enough, within a month of him being elected, Amendment Y was proposed and ratified, allowing the home-production of dead people cider, using store-bought bodies left over from the Iraq War. Since 2009, dead people cider has been an integral part of many family gatherings, especially during wintertime. Many people have tried making and selling other variants of the original dead people cider recipe, but no recipe was as well-regarded as Sanders Dr Pepper Cherry recipe. The most expensive known bottle of dead people cider contains the remains of Osama bin Laden, and is priced at a hefty sum of three billion dollars. To this day, many people question the ethics of using remains of the deceased to produce a soft drink recipe. Just as well, many people are on the fence. Still, to this day, over fifty percent of people have stated that they like to drink dead people cider on a semi-regular basis, while an additional twelve percent state that they only drink it on special occasions, such as Christmas, the Fourth of July, or Leif Ericson Day (Rasmussen). Dead people cider is an important component of nearly all aspects of American and world history, and it should be appreciated as such. America started the branching-out of this well-revered tradition throughout the rest of the world, and thus, if one chooses to drink a glass of dead people cider, they are choosing to indulge in an act of ultimate patriotism.

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Works Cited Nixon, Richard. "A Proposition for a Secret Amendment." White House, Washington D.C. 15 June 1972. Paine, Francis: Francis PaineNo, the Other Francis Paine!: The Unauthorized Autobiography of the Discoverer of Deceased Tea Pages 163-586. Rasmussen Reports. "Dead People Cider." Survey. 1 December 2012.