Recently I was on my home from my girlfriends late at night and listening to AM talk radio. Nothing political, just some strange show on psychic transformations. A teenager called in from somewhere out in the American continent with a question hovering anxiously in his young mind. He asked the shows host what would happen to ghosts, to disembodied spirits, after the Apocalypse? Obviously the kid had been reading too much Clive Barker during the night and listening to too much AM Christian radio in the day (well...at least he was reading), but the question itself nimbly summed up the present confused state of American cultural consciousness under the Bush regime.

Lies and the Apocalypse have always been a part of American culture, from the snake-oil salesmen of the mid-19th century and the wonderfully brash P.T. Barnum to the apocalyptic fears aroused in the Salem witch trails and parroted by present day evangelical hucksters. But in our present media-sophisticated hyper-linked culture, the damning and dumbing-down nature of the present administrations mendacity has reached a new Orwellian level. Like the kid who believes in ghosts and tries to position them in the larger fear-based myth of apocalypse, the Bush administration believes it can lie to the American public based on the existence of former lies. At least the kid on the radio is still technically a child. With the Bushites though, there is no excuse for the excessive imaginations of youth. Via the White House, the lies enfold one another and the seeking and actualization of anything resembling a truth is lost in the shuffle of debunking the lies that the current lies rest upon. You can explain to the teenager that ghosts are not real, but you should really begin by explaining Apocalypse as just another Christian story meant to scare the parishioners into servitude. Most kids interested in such things will listen to the adult for this supposedly 'hidden knowledge' and not interrupt. The present quack administration, however, is quick to condemn any reasonable approach to seeking out truth by insisting on (or denying the existence of) earlier lies, and the spin placed on events becomes deeper, more confusing, and murkier. This seems to me to be part of a carefully constructed strategy that bets on the gullibility of the American people. It's like that old CRASS song refrain: Fuck her mind so they can fuck her silly. Only now the American people are the ones being fucked.

As last weeks lies about success in occupied war zones where battle casualties grow on a daily basis become the foundation for next weeks lies about honor and treachery regarding the newer casualties, the original lies about wars being fought to secure resources for an over-bloated populace become more difficult to remember, just as our precocious teenager confuses the childhood fancy of ghosts with the mind-numbing evangelist apocalyptic creeds while forgetting that life itself is the most precious reality.

So here we are just past Halloween, where the mantra of Trick or Treat played out against the backdrop of economic despair and battlefield gloom. A Chinook helicopter filled with young Americans, a potent symbol of the Army of One, is brought down by an outraged natives in a desert-like oasis. And beneath the lies under the spin the truth is people make the helicopters come down, not disembodied terrorists demanding apocalypse. We build the weapons. We ship them overseas filled with youth who have been fed the lies of the state and then they are shot down by people who don't accept the capitalist elites vision of their place in the modern world.

What lies now lie ahead, as we enter into the most sentimental season of the American cultural year? Will it be more snake-oil sold to us via the forgetful oracle Rumsfeld ~the oil cartels chief stooge~ or perhaps it is time for some more witch trials? Or, is it as Chomsky says, that the Administration will create another national tragedy to confuse the people about the last lies? Or, is it merely to reinforce remaining in that weird fear-based clime of a teenage boy who confuses the swirl of stories in his own head, the ghosts and apocalypse, with a genuine need to protect the vulnerable from conflagration?