“That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality.”
The famous quote from a Bush aide in the early days of the administration. A quote that despite the best efforts of the bloggers and reality, has unfortunately come true to an uncomfortable and dangerous degree. Yes, reality has a liberal bias, but when the real reality has come up against the Bushco reality, all to often the Bushco reality has won the battle of hearts and minds. Especially amongst the Corporate Media and The Village of opinion makers in the centers of power. The PTB have been comforted by the false but powerful reality that Bushco has at least partially succeeded in inflicting on the world.
George Bush’s Presidency has been successful. But only in that one area, creating a completely delusional version of reality that our nation and the world has been forced to react to due to the power of a bad president and his accomplices in creating that smokescreen. The Republicans….and many Democrats… in Congress and the media. When Bush and Cheney lied to take us into their war of choice not necessity, when they authorized torture, when they turned America into a form of police state that spies on its own citizens, the reality that they clubbed us into was so horrific that every person in the world was forced to choose between two realities and to support one or the other.
“You are either for us or against us.”
In other words, you either choose our reality…or we will destroy you. Whether militarily, or by smearing your reputation or by labeling you a traitor…or in the most extreme case, outting your identity as a CIA agent because you oppose us….we WILL destroy you. And in perhaps the most devastating and morally reprehensible act of reality creation….we will plunge you into a reality ruled by fear. “Terror alert” after terror alert, all timed for political purposes, all designed to keep us docile in fear of “the Enemy,” when in the real reality, designed to keep us in fear of ….them. Designed to quash opposition to them. This use of primal fear, both of “terrorists” and of being called unpatriotic, to manipulate reality, to manipulate our collective emotions….worked.
And continues to work.
He has fooled all of the people all of the time, whether it was fooling them through intimidation into believing his false reality, or fooling the rest of us into having to react in opposition to his reality, and thus reinforcing it through our reactions. Even the most fearless and clearheaded of us have been forced to descend to his level to fight his reality, his lies. His reality became so powerful that we were forced to oppose it, thus forcing us to acknowledge it. Thus forcing us to fight on his turf, to react to his reality, and thus to become part of it. And we have.
Nowhere can the evidence of George Bush’s “reality” be seen more starkly and clearly than in his farewell address last night. Listening to him describe what HE thinks happened over the last eight years is a descent into a fictional world that is shared only by the truly delusional. That bears very little resemblance to the world in which the rest of the world lives. It is, in a word, pathetic.
That is the world he thinks we live in, that is the world he tried and succeeded to force the rest of us to believe in, or to react to. And now we have to stop. Now we have to find our way back to a reality that has NOT been framed through the lens of reaction. Through the lens of imposed fear. That does not cede ground to his fear and lies, but instead thoroughly repudiates them, and repudiates his private reality.
The time for defining ourselves in reaction to George Bush is over. The time for fear is over. It is time for us to examine, both publicly by insisting on investigations to clear the record, and privately to root out the effects of his false reality within ourselves, is here.
George Bush “created reality” through the power of the presidency. That power is now over. A new reality IS here. In this time between Bush’s delusional farewell and Obama’s inauguration, we have a chance to reflect, to clear our minds of our fear and delusion….to pull our heads out of Gerorge Bush’s ass and in to the fresh air of a new reality.
I wish us all, but especially our media, politicians, and The Villagers, good luck and success in this effort.
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asshole.
from BooMan.
I’m using visuals help with the head-pulling-out-of-ass exercise.
because they would not hesitate to pull the “trigger.” And they pulled the “trigger” in so many ways — Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, etc. showing us all the utter lack of human regard they had for everyone, save themselves. And if they go free, unscathed from all the death, destruction and havoc they have reaped upon us, we can’t be too sure that we will, in fact, be rid of them. Wealth and power speaks the loudest in this country!
Thanks for your thoughts, buhdy!
constipated…..thanks, but the revelation does not make it any easier!
…is hard.
Part of it is, djeez, for eight years it has been one bamboozle after another. And the press and the village just sorta went along. And that’s over! So cool. So very cool.
And part of it is, well, there was Clinton before that, and HW Bush before that, and Reagan before that…and my faith-in-this-shit organ is pretty much fried. I mean…on one hand it’s a good thing, a growing up thing, to realize that politics are what they are, and our optimistic identification with the good, true and beautiful probably don’t hold very well. On the other hand…eh…this is an empire, that does things with your money and some measure of your complicity, every day, things that would make you weep for the rest of your life if you look too long.
And part of it…the part I’m having the hardest time with…is the fact that it really, truly seems to me…that when a big, opppressive regime changes faces….and suddenly there is someone you like, who says things you often agree with, who embodies many of your values, is in charge…everything in my life tells me it is a mistake to assume they are somehow on your side, until there is visible change, radical honesty, a profound willingness to put truth before power. That systems of expediency and control are very bad mirrors of ones hopes. This is not…not cynicism. It ties to everything I hold most hopeful and good in people.
So…eh…count me confused :}
Somebody posted a comment yesterday on the YouTube petition video that I made a couple of weeks ago… a comment that maybe shows how far we still have to go combating bush’s far side of the mirror pseudo-reality.
The comment was:
I replied with:
Looks like we still have some work to do, and who knows if reality has a liberal bias, but fortunately most liberals have a reality bias.
george was never worth listening to. From long before 2000.
and that became stark, unflinching, murderous reality.
really well said, Budhy.
it was one of those moments where you remember where you were, what you did next, who you told first. i was at the computer in my little office in ruralwingerville and jbk was in, well, he was in a room with the door closed. i started reading aloud and he said, what? i can’t hear you? i went and sat down in hallway by the closed door and told him about Valerie Plame. and i was astonished and bumf*zzled and convinced ‘they’ were going to get away with it, and jbk said no, this stuff always comes out, and i said, no, no, they’re going to get away with this too.
why remember that? i think it was the uncomprehension, just that one more thing that was so far past imagination, so blatant, so bold, so open… and no one was going to do or say anything and survive….
and then to think, this was before Katrina.
okay i’m commenting before reading the entire essay. so, these are my ramblings, some sort of purge i guess.
this is a true statement:
Top O Five Budhy Essay.
thanks for taking the time to put these thoughts into words.
i post this often, i listen to it often. i love the words, the guitar, the interaction, and the feeling. mostly the words. and the visuals are good. but mostly the words.
“You can hide under the covers and study your pain, make crosses of your lovers, throw roses in the rain…”
“I know it’s late we can make it if we run…”
“All the redemption I got is underneath this dirty hood…”
In a town for losers we’re pulling out of here to win…”
“We got one last change to make it real…”