Dear George,
It is time to deify “the lie.” All of us were crippled as children when adults told us over and over, again, to “tell the truth.” A child brought up to be honest is a child conditioned to failure. Survey the ranks of the poverty stricken and you will find them strewn with unfortunates who believed the bullshit about George Washington and the cherry tree. You, sir, have pioneered the reversal of this trend.
It is a poet who is a Brit and a fag (three strikes) who has given us a solution without realizing it. W.H. Auden said, “A person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.”
There you have it, George. Pathologize sanity and reposition insanity as sanity. Make the imaginary more real than the real. Hell, you’ve been doing it with Iraq. All you have to do is expand its scope.
You have a terrific dynamic working for you. Truth bores; the lie stimulates. In our flight from boredom we willingly embrace falsehood and dub it real because the phony is more fun then the authentic. And then we dub the quest for the phony as the quest for authenticity. We love how the imaginary frightens us; it quickens our hearts. We are addicted to fear and are unable to live without the cutting edge of anxiety lacerating our souls. This gives rise to the cleansing redemption of anger and rage, and the cathartic act of slaughter—the more the better. The ultimate ground of aggression is boredom.
We must learn to praise the mendacity. Mendacity transcends reality. From the lie comes the power of the myth which is the hot chile pepper that spices up life’s blandness. In the totality of the lie is the warmth and comfort of the hearth. The lie erases doubt and uncertainty; it is the gated community of meaning in a meaningless world.
George, you are the living image that turns the lie into a vibrant being. I still get a rush when I remember your hemorrhoidal swagger across the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln. That’s the imagery that conflates the true and the false.
Never forget: There’s no such thing as a lie; there is only mendaciousness, the highest expression of reality.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
6:08:06 PM 
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