The aide (to President Bush) said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about Enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

—Ron Suskind, New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004

I found this in the most recent issue of The Stranger, at the top of a Jen Graves story in the arts section. It just had an ominous, skin-chilling, deadpan tone to it that made me imagine a young Anthony Perkins saying that Bush aide’s lines, much in the way he described stuffing birds in the back parlor in “Psycho.”

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