Reading so much Philip K. Dick lately has started to get to me. In the best possible way, I think. Although maybe I’m just fooling myself. That’s such a big part of his novels, of people fooling themselves and fooling each other. But it’s never in the end quite the way the people had understood it to be in the beginning. In terms of who was being fooled and who was being doubly fooled. He goes into this whole idea of spurious realities:

… today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener.

That quote was from 1978, from one of my all time favorite essays in the world: “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later“. I find myself referencing that essay again and again, and today is no exception.

That also got me thinking about Michael Moore’s outburst at the Oscars

… We live in fictitious times. We live in the time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious president. We live in a time where we have a man sending us to war for fictitious reasons.

I got into thinking about all this after reading the following headline on MSN, mere minutes ago:

Al Qaeda’s Pre-Election Plot

And they have this very staged, very ridiculous photograph of a man in a dark striped suit, underlit, holding his hands out in front of him, perhaps to indicate the largeness of the terrorist threat to an Average Joe NYC Cop. The article itself of course contains no details or information of any kind or substance relating to any supposed plots by Al Qaeda. Just a continuing smokescreen of factoids and useless quotations to drown your sorrows in.

Honestly, I have a hard time even reading this sort of dribbling shit anymore. The best part of the whole article though, is the interactive roll-over graphic with the header: “FACT FILE: Potential American Targets”. It features a delightful little map of the United States. At first, you look at it, and think, “Hooray! The map is empty!” Meaning, no targets. But then you notice the four little symbols in the map key off to the side: (1) Nuclear, (2) Defense, (3) Landmark, (4) Infrastructure. Clicking on each symbol then highlights a myriad of color-coded dots scattered across the US like grains of sand from a smashed hourglass. From an information-designer’s perspective, I’m disappointed they didn’t include the option to light up all four categories of targets at once, allowing you to revel in a mental orgy of possible destruction.

The other fun little game you can play when you read an “article” like this is to look at the sorts of language and imagery they use. Here’s a perfect example, located conveniently enough right underneath the Super-Funhouse Information Graphic of Doom:

It was the break the Feds had been praying for…

Doesn’t that conjure up fun little film noir type images of hot-shot investigators in trenchoats and fedoras, tracking down the bad guys? But let’s also take a moment to examine the chain of assumptions which lead to to that statement above. So the Feds had been praying. To whom, I wonder? Certainly not to Allah, or to Vishnu, or to Thor, since those are all phony-baloney religions. They must have been praying to GOD, the Grand Old Deity. And what kind of people pray to God? Only good people pray to God. Bad people don’t pray to God. Bad people are much too busy running around blowing things up, or marrying people of the same sex, or burning flags or draft cards.

Anyway, that one line, that’s just a taste. You could sit yourself down and open up any sentence in this twisted trash-heap of an article to uncover all kinds of other hidden and not-so-hidden suppositions. Nevermind that this story comes shortly after there was that uproar about certain people seeking the formal authority to delay national elections, in the event of a “terrorist threat”. That story of course plays into this story, to prove to people, “Hey look, we’re not JUST power-hungry intergalactic monsters feeding off the brains of human sex-slaves - we ALSO happen to have SUBSTANTIAL CREDIBLE evidence of possible terrorist attacks, except we just don’t have any REAL details… No, none at all. BRAAAIINNSSS!!!…”

These two events, my friend, are what literary types refer to as foreshadowing.

Foreshadowing = Clues, hints, prophecies, signs or suggestions of historical or the story’s future events with some information being withheld which helps to build suspense. Aids in keeping the reader’s attention level high by creating expectations. The story’s characters and/or the reader may or may not be aware of the outcome. Sometimes foreshadowing can influence the reader to make false leads as seen in Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayer mysteries. Questions like how, when, where will it happen? arise. Frequently, readers will not pick up on foreshadowing until after the event (e.g., the disciples did not truly understand what Christ was saying until after He taught them after the resurrection.) Foreshadowing may also be described by the reader as having a “gut feeling” something is about to happen and may not be able to put it into words.

Sounds familiar? That’s because that’s exactly what’s going on right now. This whole thing, it’s just one giant novel, writ large on the media landscape and on the panicky tired faces of your average freedom-loving, flag-waving, queer-hating American. But it’s a very crudely written tale, with plot holes so wide you could fly four hijacked jumbo-jets (and a coup d’etat) through with no trouble at all.

All told, the whole thing comes off like the work of some amateur struggling writer, drowning in a sea of rejection letters, who’s pulling out every hackneyed cliche and unfair plot device in the book, who has completely reached beyond his own means and ability as a story-teller. I’ve seen more believable and entertaining stories splattered in doo-doo butter on the toilets at Barnes & Noble. Seriously, couldn’t they have at least hired some better story-tellers to help them stage this whole thing? (Wait? They already did that?)

If this were a Philip K. Dick novel, we would eventually learn that George W. Bush & Osama Bin Laden are actually the same person, whose brain was split by a powerful designer drug. And each of his identities has no idea that the other is his mortal enemy. And then there’d be some kind of crazy shit in it about seeing God and like androids who don’t know they’re androids, and people getting hit by pink beams of sentient information. And if were PKD, there would come a time in the story when all the disparate identities and illusions would come crashing down in one glorious thunderous motion. Let me turn back to that essay by him, that I love so much:

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

I certainly hope to shit that this is the sort of outcome that this poorly crafted novel which we’re having foisted on us as reality is going to have. I’m also very curious what the whole thing would look like if we switched writers, genres and agendas. What if we suddenly saw the headline on MSN:

Osama Bin Laden donates millions to cancer research

Wouldn’t that be the ultimate act of “asymmetrical warfare”? Extravagant gift-giving, with no strings attached? Wouldn’t that pack a greater punch into our mental armor? I mean, assuming that he really is a terrorist and not just a creation of the CIA. Or, what if he, like France in ages past, sent us a brand new Statue of Liberty, with an inscription at the bottom of our own Bill of Rights? Through a high-profile symbolic “assault” which went against everything that we thought we knew as a culture, about ourselves and about our enemies, he would instantaneously be able to explode a bigger mental/emotional bomb in America than he ever could by killing us. That is, of course, assuming he’s not just a character in this gigantic distorted novel we now call prime-time reality.