You’re not paranoid, they really are coming to get you. Well, not really, they’re more out to usurp all political and financial power and rule the world. They don’t care so much about you.

So says Joel Achenbach in a meditation in the Washington Post on just what shit screenwriters have to come up with these days to sell paranoia and America’s paranoid past. (It’ll be interesting to see whether The Manchurian Candidate remake is more than a blip on the screen. Especially, as the piece says, when Fahrenheit 9/11 is already dominating the game this summer.)

The new paranoia ignores ideology; it’s enough to call the whole shebang a hoax and maybe it is, right?

The knowledge that there’s an enemy, that there are bad guys out there, is the anchor in our lives. To be an American today is to live in the middle of a mind control experiment. If you hear a candidate say, “I’d like to plant a thought in your mind,” you’d better run for your life.

You could build a bunker, man, but who do you think controls the construction materials?