WouldntULike2Know-Zizek

“It is not that reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reailty (i.e. the symbolic coordinates which determine what we experience as reality). (234)

Concerning the attacks on the World Trade Center, this quote speaks towards the process by which we, as Americans, were awakened to "the desert of the real." Comparatively speaking, however, this "desert" was still highly censored to the viewing public. "While the number of victims--3000--is repeated all the itme, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see--no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people...in clear contrast to reporting on Third World catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of gruesome detail... the real horror happens there, not here." (232)

The uninformed public deals daily with this powederpuff reality. The media deliberately produce news segments to distract people from reality. They, similar to Jim Carrey in the Truman Show, seek to create reality for the public which can be described in Toxicology reports and custody hearings. Just as in the Matrix, people plug into this and focus all of their attention to it, without realizing the travesties that are occurring in their own backyard. Perhaps it is because Americans do not want to admit fault or recognize defeat that we seem to ignore reality. We can recognize and seek to help others in their dire situations but we hate to admit that such atrocities happen on our soil.

The media also erases from our memory and removes from our sight the atrocities that others experience as a result of our actions. All footage of wars fought overseas was censored in order to maintain support for the governments cause. Because we do not question what we see, the process of blind acceptance makes media corporations with government involvement able to do virtually anything while gaining our obedient and undoubting support.