I’m seeing a lot of stuff out there in blogland, from people I generally respect, about the great conspiracy to control us. The government is reading our emails to Aunt Sally, to find out exactly when and where we will meet for dinner. Corporations are conspiring to dictate our very desires, our taste in everything from clothes to music. People, we are being led to the slaughter like so many bovine schlemiels. Resistance is futile.

Except a few of us, small in number, but grand in courage and determination, have been able to see through it all. We few are smarter than all the sheep in America, hell, the world. They are being diabolically controlled, and don’t even know it, but we geniuses have their backs!

The exact nature of this forcible brainwashing is variable.  A lot depends on what it is that we, as individuals, are having trouble being successful (okay, rich) at.  Personally, I am pretty sure that, since I haven’t made a dime on poetry, that the combined forces of the government and industry have made it their mission to make people believe it’s not good enough.  Literary magazines are in on it as well; you can tell from the poems they publish, which I personally can’t make head nor tail of.  They don’t publish mine, therefore depriving the ignorant but somehow noble masses from seeing them.  And paying me lots of money.  Justin Bieber and Billy Collins are both in on this as well.

Bob Dylan probably started the whole thing.