People have started asking me and my friends when we’re going to sell out, move on and get real jobs, like they did after the Sixties. We are told that pretty soon, we’ll need to face reality.
Whenever anyone tells you that, it’s important to remember that the so-called ‘reality’ that we’re being ordered to face, in the way that one might be told to face the wall, was and is built on debt and sand: it is a specific agenda whose survival depends on everyone else continuing to believe that there is no alternative. As an anonymous aide told writer Ron Suskind in the early Bush years: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’
