If Truth Hurts - Bend It

By: Anita Creamer

The lies are shaping our lives, our world, and our future. Yet no one much seems to mind. Strange, this disconnection between what seems to be reality and what we choose instead to believe.

Maybe the Matrix really is in control, and while we busily go through the pretense of our lives, those in charge are feeding on our souls.

We're living in a dishonest age, an era of fraudulence.

The President took us into war on the basis of what seems to have been sketchy intelligence manipulated to provide the Bush administration the rationale it needed to do what it already intended to do: overthrow Saddam Hussein and make Americans feel better about the post-Sept. 11 world by kicking a little Middle Eastern derrière.

No weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq - no evidence of nuclear capability, no biological or chemical agents. Nor has any evidence ever been found to link Iraq with the al-Qaida terrorists, despite what the administration has repeatedly implied.

Was it all a lie?

Quite possibly, but anyone who suggests so runs the risk of being labeled unpatriotic and un-American.

Polls indicate that Americans aren't particularly concerned. We won, as if there were ever any doubt that we would. The President, who campaigned on a promise to restore integrity to the White House, enjoys high approval ratings regardless of what seem to be his fabrications.

After all, it's not like he lied about something really important, like sex. A philandering President really gets Americans upset.

Meanwhile, the government is angry that tasteful-living dominatrix Martha Stewart allegedly lied to federal investigators. She's been indicted on nine counts related to the sale of a fairly paltry 4,000 shares of ImClone stock, and the federal prosecutor has said the case is all about her lies.

Maybe it is. Or maybe it's about making a scapegoat out of Stewart, the uppity, easily loathed queen of a media empire she modestly named after herself.

In any case, she's been indicted, and we can look forward to the continuing spectacle of her public humiliation.

Unlike Stewart, the true titans of arrogant, runaway corporate greed defrauded their shareholders and ran their companies into the ground. Few of them have faced legal consequences.

Most simply have to live with their misrepresentations and their shame, which no doubt disturbs them not one bit.

In other recent lie-related news, baseball player Sammy Sosa has apologized after he was caught using a corked bat in a Chicago Cubs game earlier this week, thus throwing the credibility of his spectacular home run statistics into question.

Meanwhile, New York Times reporters Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg have admitted to passing other people's work off as their own.

The matrix of lies and corruption surrounds our lives, and we just don't seem to care.

Are we simply not paying close attention?

Have we been too distracted by keeping up with more important matters, like the intimate details of the American Idol finale and the Laci Peterson investigation?

Or do we somehow, through some complicated internal system of preferences, manage to pick and choose which lies we fall for and which lies we reject?

Maybe we're fundamentally too unsophisticated and too honest - never mind the harmless little white lies that smooth our way through life - to recognize the big bang of the shameless, blatant lie.

The lie that takes us to war, for example.

We like to think otherwise. We like to think the truth matters in this country.

But the truth is, maybe we can't handle the truth.