Detente and DMZ

Dealing with conflict is never easy. I sat there today, watching the Washington Spin Machine as they tried to solidify some image of the President’s resent trip into insanity (also known as Great Britain). Amazing resources — both psychological and physical — are being expended to create a unified picture of what happened. It’s very similar to how everything goes in the real world.

People observe one thing, report another, and then form an opinion based on what other people have said about what they reported about the thing completely different. Our society is so hell-bent on creating images of what we are that we forget to look at *what we are*. We interface on the image-level of our beings.

Sadly enough, we’re imitating movies, books, music–trying to be more real by imitating the “real” we see in the movies–which are representations of how people react as seen by the auteur eye–rather than real reality. So we’re copying the copy. Ironically, it goes further than that–the new movies are copying the ‘real’ real we’re copying from the older movies. Thus we’re starting to copy copies of copies of a copy.

Go figure.

Perhaps what we need is a period of detente followed by the creation of a DMZ — A DE-Manipulation-Zone in which honesty is valued above national loyalty, ‘personal’ interest (though the truth should always be in one’s best interest), and inuendo. In this DMZ of humanity, families could sort out their differences, husbands and wives could save their marriages, and politicians could salvage what’s left of civilization before we end up wiping ourselves off the face of our own planet.

Good luck with that one, though. It sounds too much like something that’s intelligent to actually work.