Tom Tomorrow (pseud.), "This Modern World: The Republican Matrix"

Tom Tomorrow (pseud.). "This Modern World: The Republican Matrix." This Modern World, 20 May 2003. On-line at [1] or under Working for Change's Tom Tomorrow Archives.

In the satiric tradition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (q.v. under Fiction) and the great political cartoonists, Tom Tomorrow presents a pre-postModern take on "the Republican Matrix" as of spring 2003, as "an illusion which engulfs us all...A steady barrage of images which obscure reality"—"a world born anew each day...in which there is nothing to be learned from the lessons of the past... […] Where logic holds no sway […]" and "Where reality itself is a malleable thing...subject to constant revision..." (unspaced three periods in text). See for an elegant attack on PoMo celebrations of a mediated, malleable reality and for making explicit some of the Orwellian (and, ironically, Adorno-Horkheimer) implications of the electronic cocooning and bodily/mental violation imaged in THE MATRIX films (q.v. under Drama).