The Republic… the Allegory of the Cave… seeing the shadow
world and believing it’s real. If you managed to stay awake in the dimly lit
philosophy lecture hall, you’ll remember Plato’s account of the human
predicament: it is though we are bound up in a cave, and from birth see only
shadows of reality cast on its wall, and hear only its echoes. In time, he
asserts, “such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows
of artificial things."
Twenty-five centuries later, we sit in a darkened theater
watching The Matrix. Machines run the world as most people know it. The
spectators are socketed into a collective virtual reality that keeps them
content to sit still and give up their energy to their masters. If you now
wonder whether I’m writing about the people in the film, or the people watching
the film, then you are a candidate for the red pill of political liberation.
Read on.
In darkness we watch The Terminator. The machines that run
the world are fighting for absolute domination. Remote control. But the
instruments of that control are not killer robots or shape-shifting sentinels. They are politicians, their
spin-meisters, and their corporate overlords. Tails that wag the dogs.
What launched me on this rant was a news story from a few
weeks back, evaluating the leadership potential and electability of Cruz
Bustamante. The paper reported that the Lieutenant Governor would be put to a
test in facing up to a man known as “The Terminator.” Even though I’m not a fan
of Cruz any more than a sworn opponent of Arnold, this observation drove me
nuts. The Terminator is fiction, image, illusion. A shadow on the wall. Cruz
isn’t running against Arnold’s character, he’s running against Arnold. Or is
he?
Ever since the 1968 presidential election, politicians have
been sold like soda and SUVs. In his seminal work “The Selling of the
President”, Joe McGinniss documents how television producers repackaged Nixon
from shawdowy skulker to “Mr. President.” One of the President’s men, CBS
executive Frank Shakespeare, adopted the revolutionary assumption that voters
find the issues boring —image is what counts. Another one of his marketeers was
Roger Ailes, also media guru to President Bush Senior and now Chairman of the
Fox News Channel. The same Fox News whose war-mongering mocks their motto, ”We
report. You decide.” (How about, “We decide.You agree.”)
Echos off the cave wall: Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly,
making truth through the repetition of lies, like the connection between Saddam
and the September 11 attacks, or the serious scientific doubt about global
warming. Shadows on the cave wall: Nixon trickster Donald Segretti’s apprentice
Karl Rove, staging the President’s flight- jacket war-hero photo-op. If we are
charmed to vote our support, or turned off and tuned out, we stay in the
matrix, giving up our energy (tax money, labor) increasingly to the interests
of fewer and fewer people at the top.
I turn to our poets for clarity, and hear Jackson Brown:
“They sell us the President the same way they sell us our clothes and our cars.
/ They sell us every thing from youth
to religion the same time they sell us our wars / I want to know who the men in
the shadows are, I want to hear somebody asking them why / They can be counted
on to tell us who our enemies are, but they're never the ones to fight or to
die.”
And U2’s Bono: “And it's true we are immune / When fact is fiction and TV
reality / And today the millions cry / We eat and drink while tomorrow they
die.”
Films are fun, but let’s not mistake the actors for the
characters they play. Here’s my remedy: boycott “info-tainment.” Question
Reality TV. Unplug from the corporate media matrix, and get your news from
internet independents like Buzzflash, Salon, CounterPunch, and Greg Palast. To
borrow a phrase from Al Franken’s new book, don’t put up with “Lies, and the
Lying Liars who Tell Them.” Where there is shadow, shine a light.