Why I Think I'm Living in "The Matrix"

Or, Reasons Not to Watch the Keanu Reeves Movie While George Bush Is in the White House:

1. Clearly, we're hooked up and floating in a perpetual dream state of hyperbolic images meant to distract us while our brain activity produces energy for ... for Dick Cheney or for The Machines. That's the only explanation for why we have "Corporate Media," Tim Russert and Judy Woodruff and all the rest of the Diverters of Attention. And that's the only explanation for why Corporate Media ignores CBS's censorship of a mild MoveOn.org TV commercial criticizing El Presidente, while simultaneously going pie-blind nuts over one pastie-covered Janet Jackson breast.

2. We float in a cranberry goo, with El Presidente whispering in our ear that only Republicans can make us safe and save our money ... make us safe and save our money, make us safe and save our money ... while running up a record deficit and plunging us into a bellicose doctrine of preemption that hangs us out to the hatred of the world, that kills us by the hundreds in Iraq and wounds us by the thousands in Iraq. But we have cranberry goo in our ears and in our eyes and up our nostrils, so we can't smell shit.

3. Floating, hooked to monitors, weightless in our Media dreams where up is down, the Magician makes Weapons of Mass Destruction appear and then disappear and tells us we still see them, and we do ... WE DO, WE DO ... and he juices up the current with Orange Alert, then cranks it down to Yellow, Orange-Yellow-Orange-Yellow, contracting and expanding our fears like a frog's leg hooked to a 12-volt. El Presidente will save us, protect us, enfold us in his flight-suited arms through this long dangerous night, so long as we don't ... listen ... to any ... static.

4. We suck on our pacifier of "democracy" -- they tell us so MANY things, piping the words in on a clear plastic tube, and we actually believe the words -- "democracy," but they have a plan for that too: "Vote right here on this touch-screen machine," brought to you by Corporate America for your own good, by Diebold Corp., an ominous name if there ever was one. In this Matrix, they give us images on a screen to keep us quiet, to put us to sleep. We go limp for images on a screen, except those accompanying the Super Bowl.

5. Where is Neo? WHO is Neo? Or can we wake ourselves up out of this sloshing bath of lies and delusions and pull the plugs that hook us up, that keep us sedated, and recognize the tough reality of what we've been made to serve, and how, and what they've been feeding us?