Wednesday, September 9, 2009

When Satire Becomes Reality


Welcome to Bizarro World

By Justin Raimondo

"Google News has lately taken to labeling Antiwar.com’s new articles, including this column, as "satire." To take one particularly unfortunate example, an article by Fred Reed on the furor over the photo of Lance Corporal Joshua Bernard’s tragic death in Afghanistan was so classified on the Google search engine. This, I believe, is proof positive of what I call the Bizarro Effect, a direct result of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. What happened was this: the sheer force of the explosion as those planes hit the World Trade Center and slammed into the Pentagon forced us into an alternate dimension where up is down, news is entertainment, and a rational critique of U.S. foreign policy is considered sheer amusement. Here in Bizarro World, everything is upended: not only our morals, but our grasp of reality, and, indeed, the concept of reality itself. As one top White House aide in the Bush administration put it to a skeptical journalist:

"The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."’........."

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