We aRe THe iLLuSioN ]

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be ! We know things are bad - worse than bad, They're crazy ! It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone !' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone ! I want you to get MAD !

Less than three percent of you people read books ! Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers ! Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube ! This tube is the Gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers.. This tube is the most awesome [bad word] force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls in to the hands of the wrong people, and that's why when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome [bad word] propoganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what [bad word] will be peddled for truth on this network ?

So, you listen to me. Listen to me: Television is not the truth ! Television is a [bad word] amusement park ! Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, side-show freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business ! So if you want the truth.. Go to God ! Go to your gurus ! Go to yourselves ! Because that's the only place you're ever going to find any real truth.

You're never going to get any truth from us. We'll tell you anything you want to hear; we lie like hell. We'll tell you that, uh, Kojak always gets the killer, or that nobody ever gets cancer at Archie Bunker's house, and no matter how much trouble the hero is in, don't worry, just look at your watch; at the end of the hour he's going to win. We'll tell you any [bad word] you want to hear. We deal in *illusions*, man ! None of it is true ! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds.. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality, and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you ! You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even *think* like the tube ! This is mass madness, you maniacs ! In God's name, you people are the real thing ! *WE* are the illusion ! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off ! Turn them off right in the middle of the sentence I'm speaking to you now ! TURN THEM OFF !..