Stranger than fiction...

It has been said that truth is stranger than fiction. But, what happens when truth is completely replaced by fiction?

Such a question was once limited to science fiction, but no more. In an age when cyber technology afflicts society with a barrage of "fake news," when unsupported opinion and even outright fabrication are presented as fact in a cybernetically generated alternate reality -- in which so many immerse themselves -- what then is accepted as reality? Reality, it seems, is whatever the majority chooses to embrace. Truth or fiction. Bright, idealized vision, or horrific nightmare.

Joseph Goebels, one of the great masters of untruth once said that the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it. That seems even more true today in the age of cyber reality, or un-reality.

Our current president-elect seems to create his own reality quite handily, conjuring phantom enemies and allies at will. And, concealing any reality he chooses not to see.

His own intelligence officers insist the evidence is overwhelming that the current Russian dictatorship is attacking this country at will in cyber space, attempting to affect the course of our national destiny as far as current cyber technology will allow. Yet, our chosen leader simply refuses to accept that reality. Why he refuses to accept it, only he knows. But, as George Orwell pointed out in his dystopian future novel "1984", truth becomes malleable in the hands of a dictatorial regime which controls the flow of information. Nothing...not even the statement that 2 + 2 = 4 can be considered absolute. The human mind is our only instrument for discerning truth, after all, and that faulty instrument can be twisted.

President-elect Trump refers to fellow Americans who oppose him as his enemies, and treats a foreign dictatorship like Russia as a friend, even as they demonstrably attack us. All manner of horrific scenarios of back-room dealing and international intrigue spring readily to mind and haunt our nightmares as we speculate as to the true nature of our new leader's relationship with the great bear across the sea. But, the true reality, like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, remains hidden.

Like the Russian doll, shells within shells of false realities may regress infinitely inward. What we find at the center may be the most horrific reality of all.