Storm the Reality Studios!

We are at War.

Not in Iraq. Though we are. Not in Afghanistan. Though we are. Hopefully not in Iran or Syria or Pakistan in the final few days before this fateful election. Though we might be.

We are at War for Reality.

On one side (or one of the sides?) we have the last eight years of misrule as represented by the Bush Administration.

On another side we have a continuation of and possibly even an expansion of this misrule as represented by John McCain.

On the third side we have a new (or is it an old?) revisioning of American politics as represented by Barack Obama.

Why do I say this is a Reality War? Why isn't it just another Presidential election cycle? Because we're talking about our Commonly Perceived Reality or CPR. (Pretty nifty how suitable that acronym is given the deflated state of the economy and our political spirit, eh?) Because the three sides of this imaginary coin each represent a different version of reality that we can either accept or reject, that we can submit to or battle against.

When you vote next Tuesday, if you haven't already, you are casting a vote as a shaman may cast a spell. Your intent is to change reality.

Our current CPR is a bleak, fearful, distrustful and discouraging one. Do not believe that this is an accident of time and space, that it is the sole result of accident at all. The engineers of our current CPR spent years planning and maneuvering to achieve the type of control over our perceptions that they now have. The public records and history of Cheney and Rove and friends make this very clear, though pundits and historians will only talk of this as politics and policy. It is neither.

It is piracy. Their stated goal was a "permanent Republican majority." Translate this as "permanent reality control" and you now understand. Like others before them who imagined permanent control, who dreamed of Thousand Year Reich’s, the Republicans hoped to have perpetual control of our reality via the Presidency, the Congress, the Courts and certain parts of the media. Bush had planned war and using the side effects of war to cement power and change our CPR before he entered office. The events of September 11, 2001 were, without meaning to trivialize them, only a fortunate catalyst for his plans. The terrorists gave Bush a powerful wedge on that day with which he could shift reality. And Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Rove took full advantage of it.

The result is the America we live in today. It is not the America of ten years ago, not that the CPR of the Clinton years was a perfect one, regardless of the nostalgia so many Democrats feel for it. There probably is no perfect CPR. We are too diverse a nation to create perfection.

But we can strive for perfection. This has always been part of the American CPR, the idea that we can be better than we are. Our nation would not exist without this central tenet. In retrospect, we may endowed our past efforts with this idea, but we could never have risen up against and overthrown a king without this belief. We are the children of the Enlightenment. Progress and perfection are inherent in our founding, in our idea of reality.

This has been lost to us in the current CPR. We have been blinded to the idea that we can work for the betterment of all. Fear and ignorance - willful and imposed - have worked to rob us of this basic American ideal. The enrichment of a few at the expense of the many, using manufactured fears and political weapons of control, has been a dominant theme of this CPR.

It's time for that to end. It's time for the people to go to war with reality. With a flip of the coin, we can reveal a new face for the future. Our votes are power and with them we will perform a tremendous feat of magic on November 4, 2008. We will change reality.

What we do with it after that is up to us.

Vote Obama!

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