NOVEMBER IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH . . .

. . . breeding lies of saving medicare out of a confiscatory health policy, mixing fear and schizoid politics, stirring false hope out of a dead theology.

Will we ever learn? Political promises of a campaign, like the renewal promise of spring in Eliot's Waste Land, are but cruel jokes in the waste land we have become. Every year in America the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is spoils to the victor and greed is always the victor. Worse, not content to lay waste to our nation, the fascist power elite forcefully export their destructive capitalism to other nations around the world.

Where will it end? Large corporations now have the political and economic power to confiscate resources throughout the world. Already in some places, even the rainwater is appropriated and desperate citizens charged for it. Will the world's population become become merely the property of corporate owned governments.

It sure looks that way.

THOUGHTS ON VIRTUAL REALITY

We like to think of virtual reality as an experience made possible by the advent of modern electronic contrivances that permit us to experience events outside our immediate environment. Actually, we've lived and dealt with versions of virtual reality just about as long as mankind has been on earth. Like most human experiences, virtual reality is new only in its manifestations. It is a mode of experience that we've practiced since the emergence of consciousness.

Even Cavemen recognized a world beyond the physical, a world of imagination, evidenced by cave drawings and the imagination to look toward an afterlife and to devise tools for anticipated, that is to say, virtual hunting and defenses activities. Seeing a world not out there, or one projected into the future, or to imagine a hunt or battle not now taking place and, therefore, not based on immediate sensory perception, is to experience reality in a virtual manner.

We might even go so far as to say that all art is a form of virtual reality. If an artist paints what he sees, however that appearance may vary from everyday perception, he is drawing a reality nontheless and in sharing that perception leads us into a virtual world, too.