I ended the article, “Hearts and Minds” with a comment about “waking up with a cable protruding from the base of my skull”. For the savvy reader, that was a direct reference to “The Matrix”, one of my favorite films. Or trilogies, as it is now known.
Why would a supposedly educated person rely on fiction to make a point? Good question, and one which begs ever more good questions. Which is what truly good fiction is designed for, in my opinion, for truly good fiction has a base root in reality. It must be believable to warrant any merit.
What is the connection to “The Matrix” and the reality to which I refer? It is the relationship shared by today’s media and its audience, who are all too eager to accept reported events as fact. We all grew up watching out parents read the “papers” and have been programmed by these witnesses to abide in form. In other words, we have been plugged in and required to believe whatever that black and white print spat out. “It must be true”. How sad.
But the Matrix is not what you may think. Surprised? So was I, but arguments such as mine are easily dismissed as fantasy, and for good reason. “Gasp”, you may say, for the author dismisses his own platform! And lest ye think me insane, I must qualify…I do NOT take a lot of stock in the movie version of The Matrix, at least in literal terms. But the premise thereof…ah, there lies the rub!
What have we witnessed in the last five years in regards to the mainstream media? Anyone who has explored outside these boundaries has discovered a world much different than that being fed to us through Mom and Dad’s old sources. And what have we yielded as a result of this knowledge? Nothing but scorn from, you guessed it, the mainstream press and academia.
Alternative sources of information are being routinely dismissed as blasphemous, and modern liberals are more than willing accomplices to these acts. Here is where “The Matrix” comes into play. While we have the ability to view and compare our input, there are those who want to stifle our access to anything but what they have to offer as truth. They are trying to convince us that the cardboard they feed us is in reality a delicious steak dinner. Some of us accept this. Most of us should most definitely not.
