As if in a Trance

 Before artificial intelligence, there was counter intelligence. And before we worried the day could come when computer chips would be planted in our heads, there was the day we worried about foreign propaganda powers planting chips on our shoulders so we would distrust each other and our own leaders.

They try to divide us, try to turn us one against each other, try to stir us up to rebellion and war.

There is nothing more like a robot than a person who marches off to war because he or she has been deluded, indoctrinated, deceived, and mentally captured. It's as if a chip has been planted in their minds.

Okay, no computer chips have been planted in the heads of Americans. But if you do not believe foreign powers have endeavored to plant in our heads division, and discord, and rebellion among us, well, you just don't know the ways of those foreign powers.

We once believed in such a thing as propaganda. There was a day we weren't so blind that we couldn't see that it exists. We once could plainly see that foreign powers were persuading their people to follow them like puppets on a string, like dancers in a trance. But, it never occurred to us that if the foreign power could brainwash its own people, it could brainwash us, as well. 

We were enlightened. We were Americans. No such black magic would work on us.

As if.

Well, there came a day when social media swept the world. Nothing was more suited for the art of propaganda. Do we not suppose the masters of propaganda would swoop in for the kill, firing meme after meme to deceive and delude? Propaganda is their game. They are the masters of it. They aren't going to abandon it just because social media gave them their most deadly tool yet.

Far from it.

Well, I don't know that there's a deep state, but it sure seems there's a deep fog. Trump is found guilty of sexual assault, and we were quick to forget it. And, now comes the indictment saying he knowingly endangered the nation with his careless and illegal collecting of national documents. We see the pictures of the documents stacked up in boxes in his Mar-a-largo bathroom and elsewhere in hid Mar-a-largo mansion.

And, in our trance, we look away. We refuse to accept, refuse to believe what is placed right in front of our eyes.

It's as if a chip has been planted in our heads.