But what if I’d like the wool over my eyes?

I have reality fatigue.

I’m tired of trying to figure out who is lying on any given issue (hint: the Democrats do it just as much as the Republicans do it; they just aren’t as good at it). I’m tired of the pretense that journalism is “objective.” We’ve known for a long time that merely observing an event changes the character of the event. No where is this more true than in the reality television age, in the age of MTV’s Jackass and car commercials that require a “do not attempt. professional driver – closed course” disclaimer for 30 seconds of quick cut beauty shots of an automobile that’s too expensive for anyone to reasonably buy anyway.

I’m tired of being aware, of knowing that my government is not here to help me, that side effects may occur, that every choice I make (were these tennis shoes made by a company with fair labor practices? does this company really use post-consumer recycled materials, or is that just PR? what are the environmental effects of the chemicals in this cleaner and is there a better option? should I not buy Minute Maid lemonade because Coca Cola has been accused of horrific human rights violations? are Target’s labor practices really any better than Wal-Mart’s?) has, I am told, an impact on the lives of others (well, perhaps not my single choice, but the accreted choices of hundreds of thousands of people).

Until recently the media were making a big deal of the fact that Bush is now saying he would fire someone in his administration who was found to have committed a crime in connection with the Valerie Plame leak (google news 1,550 related articles).

I could swear that last week they showed me footage of a press conference from 2003 or 2004 when Bush said exactly the same thing. I’ll be damned, though, in the vastness of the internet, if I can find one news story or one link to said footage. And I know I didn’t imagine it; my hallucinations are usually better than that (think nubile young things in not very much clothing bearing fruity drinks and tasty snacks). But now I have to spend the energy to reconcile what I know and the information that is actually available to me.

The other day at lunch my aunt was talking about this pair of shoes she loves that she’s had for 25 or so years. They need knew heels and soles, she says, do I know if the cobbler (yes, we still have a cobbler in our neighborhood) is any good? He did the same thing for me last summer and did a nice job, I told her. She mentioned casually how it was a shame that skills like that were dying out. Well, why wouldn’t skills like cobbler and tailor (and, increasingly, plumber, electrician, and carpenter) die out when we can just go to fill-in-discount-store-name and get another pair for the everyday, low, roll-back price of $13.97? The truth is that Americans live in a disposable culture and we have shitty taste and low expectations: we’ll take what we can get even if it’s badly made as long as it’s cheap and we can be made to think we’re getting a deal.

Reality fatigue doesn’t set in over a period of weeks or even months: it takes years. My psyche is stretched thin, showing strain marks like a piece of steel bearing too much weight from all the cognitive dissonance of awareness. And as I look around lately I wonder to myself, what’s wrong with being blissfully unaware? What’s wrong with living life based on the things that are easiest for you, most pleasurable? Would I go back into the Matrix if I could?

I’ve been pondering this for a while, both in discussions with friends and via some reading I’ve been doing lately about the philosophy behind The Matrix films. After all, popular culture is a better entrée into philosophy than no entrée at all.

One essayist in this book argues that reality is preferable to the programmed world of the matrix because those who exist in reality are living life versus those whose bodies are residing in goo-filled pods and are simply experiencing the reality programmed for them by the AIs. It’s a specious argument in that, within the construct of the matrix, people have as much freedom as those of us living outside the movie: they live; grow up; pick careers; pay their taxes; pick lovers; do drugs; don’t do drugs; choose Chinese noodles instead of Mexican for dinner. There’s no indication that the AI picks all of this for them. If the AI controlled every aspect of every single “coppertop” life then it’s reasonable to assume no one would have ever escaped the matrix in the first place.

On the other hand, when Cypher makes his deal with Agent Smith his conditions for having his body reinserted into the matrix’s physical interface are that when he wakes up he wants remember nothing and to be someone important, like an actor, implying that the AI can decide all these things.

We know, as well, that the matrix, like any system, operates on a series of rules. Indeed, one of the constants when dealing with computer based systems is that certain rules can be bent and others can be violated with few or no consequences.

Our “real world” (and the quotes are for a reason) also functions based on a series of rules, some of them we made up (it’s wrong to kill…but here are the exceptions; you must pay your taxes…but here are the exceptions; you should stop at traffic lights…but only if there’s no one around to catch you not stopping (or so it would seem)) and some of them are out of our control (no matter how much we legislate changing the clocks is not going to increase the number of daylight hours in the northern hemisphere in March folks). But is our “real world” truly real?

If, as one theory I’ve been pondering lately says, thought determines experience then why is it that the world is such a difficult and unfair place? Granted, there are a lot of things for which to be grateful — flowers, bird song, warm breezes, cold beer, random acts of kindness from strangers to name a few — but for every one of those things there is at least one, if not more, kick in the pants to balance it out (given my experiments lately with positive thinking and personal attitude adjustment, I’m gonna skip listing them out; we all know what they are).

So does this mean we’re thinking ourselves miserable? If so, does this mean that the people who are unaware they are doing this, the people who hate and curse and criticize for no good reason could change the world if they stopped doing that? It’s not stopping bullets in mid-air but the world would be a better place if we could all walk around with smiles on our faces.

Except….

Except the systems that exist in our world that perpetuate raw, grinding poverty would still exist.

Except the tendency of the powerful to keep the less powerful under control would still exist because it is, I believe, human nature to want the most reward for the least amount of effort.

Except there would still be the random assholes and the bullies who truly derived their personal satisfaction from the misery of others.

But I digress.

I’m tired of knowing all this stuff. Just for a day I’d like to be able to walk around blissfully ignorant of injustice, unaware of the nature of politics and the demands for corporate accountability, fair labor practices, and human rights. Ideally, the goal is to have the need for all these demands to go away but for a little bit I’d just like things to be as they seem to be, or to at least not know that they aren’t (someone who studies these things tells me that the reality I’m perceiving isn’t really there at all; sort of our own personal little matrix, if you will).

The problem is that even if you want to believe the pretty lies, even if you want to not be able to see the truth of it when you look at the news or watch TV, once you’ve seen the man behind the curtain you can’t ever go back.

Some reading, in case you’re interested:

Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix, Glenn Yeffeth (editor): get prices | look inside

Do You Suffer News Fatigue? Sick of dour headlines? Too much Bush and war and death and homophobia and Bush? You are not alone, Mark Morford, Friday, 21 January 2005, SFGate.com: read the article

The Aloha Spirit

The Book of Emergency Magick for the Non-Magician

E-mail addles the mind: Endless messaging rots brain worse than pot, study finds, Benjamin Pimentel, Wednesday, 04 May 2005, SFGate.com: read the article