Hold your nose and close your eyes; here’s another dose of stark reality from the King of Simple News.

How important are esthetics? You know, what role does window dressing play in our culture? Well, apparently the energy savings and the green appeal of hanging clothes outside to dry are overshadowed by esthetics. The outcry against clothes lines has reached the level of lawmaking against the practice. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091118/us_nm/us_usa_laundry

The main complaint is that hanging clothes outside to dry is synonymous with trailer trash. And here some of my best years were spent in a trailer. “No one wants to see underwear hanging in the breeze,” said one dissenter of the practice. Well, not so much as you can tell it, Victoria’s Secrets runs prime time TV ads showing underwear on live models about every night. Michael Jordon and Joe Montana have a made a small fortune hawking Hanes underwear on TV. I guess that’s just not the same.

A new truck repair shop today is required to plant trees and put a brick façade on the front of their buildings so that the sensitive public doesn’t have to suffer the visual pain that truck repair is a dirty job.    

Façade is defined as; “A superficial appearance or illusion of something.”

Superficial is defined as; “presenting only an appearance without substance or significance.”

That’s just the way we are, appearance is more important than substance and always has been. In the old west towns and mining camps, those constructing saloons, restaurants, hotels, etc. would build a wooden façade in front of a ragged tent! The façade fooled the patrons long enough to get them inside and that’s all it took to separate them from their money which was the principal idea to begin with.

Clothing companies put their samples on gorgeous women and hunks of men as a façade of sorts. Once you get the merchandise home, you realize that you look nothing like the commercial. But the ploy works over and over and over.

Much of our former mind game strategies are about to run their course. It takes money to build illusions. The cost of repair in the truck shop must be elevated to compensate for the cost and maintenance of the façade. That is why there are few facades in poverty stricken nations with the exception of government headquarters.

As Americans suffer declining real wages, governments at all levels continue to build marble laden monuments to themselves…they always have; Rome, Athens, Egypt, England, China, Washington D.C.. We are taught that these monuments extend to our individual pride of country and community. In reality, they are facades. Although, I suppose we should be proud of something that we paid for.

Inside these marble monuments, the inhabitants exist at the same elevated level as the architecture. We also pay for that privilege. Government never has and never will suffer the same ills of their constituents. We must keep up the façade that our leadership is special…kings and queens, democratically and duly elected to serve.

The extension of government royalty soon seeped over into our corporate elite. People with one brain and two legs reside in high-rise monoliths where the expectation of multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses is a given. This is also a façade without substance. No person with one brain and two legs can earn millions of dollars per year; however, they can steal it behind the façade.

Human psychology is truly stranger than fiction. Over the past years, we have suffered some of the worst government officials of all time, but rarely do we question their right to live well beyond the means of those who pay their salaries.

As millions of Americans lose their jobs, homes and autos, we don’t question the right for our leadership to drive new government provided vehicles, live in quality government quarters, and to continue the good life in perpetuity; unabated by the economic collapse that their very own policies created.

In fact, go to nearly any political rally and watch the people crowd forward just to shake hands or lick the boots of the next (or current) politician that is going to change their fate for the better.

I’m convinced that the path that we have taken could not have been altered so long as humans were in charge. We flourished and expanded in our wonderful unpopulated country due to our vast natural resources; right up to the point of overpopulation and using up those resources.

In the meanwhile, politicians and big business tycoons took false credit for our elevated way of life, that in stark reality, they may well have stifled rather than assisted, but…we believed them. It was nothing more than a façade with a ragged tent standing behind it, and constituted, “The Biggest Lie Ever Believed.”