THE APPEARANCE OF ILLUSION

forest of the night

I hear on the news these days Egypt, Cairo, demands, internet revolution, Mubarak, demands. They've had more than enough of the American puppet, 30+ years. Obama says some meaningless sentences with the word democracy sprinkled in to sound like it has something to do with something. Couldn't be much. Democracy put their autocratic top dog in place to be sure to keep the Suez Canal open for oil tankers on their way through the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. It saves the expense of the trip around the Cape at the southern tip of Africa. Again, oil is more the interest than democracy. Won't it be awful when Mubarak steps down and "the people" have their way, somebody who represents them. That won't last long. He'll have to be assassinated by a fringe terrorist group nobody has heard of and replaced by an American implant. I don't mean this is from foreknowledge, it's just one of many possible fantasies.

In movies made the last ten or so years I see a theme that comes forward in widely disparate genres of film, that nothing is as it appears to be. Heard in today's movie, Shooter, with Mark Walberg, "When you've got it figured out, you're wrong." This was advice he went to a man he called wise to hear him say. Good film, made by the same director who made Replacement Killers, Antoine Fuqua, American. Throughout the film, we learn that more and more is not as it seems, until nothing is as it seems. Surprises come from every direction. It gives the impression that everything is falling apart, because nothing is as it appears. I'm inclined to see it one more step in collective consciousness toward understanding the nature of illusion we call real. Movies I see as the dreams of collective society. It tells me we're embracing the notion that nothing is as it seems, or maybe another way of looking at it, all is illusion. We're seeing illusion now in our collective dream.

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