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Parnoid Shift, or My Life on the Happy Planet

I came across this Michael Hasty piece at Online Journal, (I'll add that I was doing a Googlefest on James J. Angleton at the time ... CIA on my mind). Fortunately I my mental state at the time was not so far gone, I was able to find it again this morning.

What rings for me about this commentary is the sense of finding a twin sibling of an albeit different mother ... how is it some of us happen to cross the burbling Rubicon never to return. How we (some of us) go on to fully understand that what most people see of the geopolitical landscape on the Happy Planet is iceberg-esque. And since I'm feeling really weighed down by seeing these days Hasty's little essay hit home.

When did you traverse the fateful river Rubicon? Or, if you have not yet, do you think you will? The day ... picture it, when you firmly and resolutely doubt everything fed you by the in-bed media? When the headline "Fallujah Ceasefire Broken" brings a smirk to your face, along with the thought that the damn thing was broken before it got shrink-wrapped?

Hmmm?

For your reading pleasure: Paranoid Shift, by Michael Hasty.

URL: http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/011004Hasty/011004hasty.html

"The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth ... No man is an island, entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
John Donne, Meditation XVII