At present, forty-six percent of Americans are under the delusion that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11.This statistic comes to light as ABC/Disney airs a drama based on 9/11 which contains a degree of accuracy about equal to what an episode of The Flintstones does in depicting life during the Stone Age.

What are the cultural circumstances that allow such mass cultural delusions to be perpetrated with seeming impunity? Sadly, there is not a granule of novelty in this: All nations, tribes, and families tell tales composed of sacred lies. On a personal basis, these tales serve to repackage self-deception as self-confidence. On a mass scale, a nation's acts of aggression can be retold as epic tales of selfless valor and heroic sacrifice. As Jean Renoir put it, "In this world there's one thing that's terrible, that everyone has their reasons."

When the events and circumstances of our lives become terrifying, we are prone to create waking dreams of risen and returning saviors, eternal feasts and attentive virgins, communion with space brothers, and decisive wars that will forever banish all sin and suffering. During times of trauma and uncertainty, we seek narratives of reassurance —even clinging to ones that are spurious.

For nearly two decades, post-Reagan conservatives have had an obsessive need to believe it is possible to return to a fictional past, to a golden era populated by well-turned out obedient children, dutiful wives, and docile minorities, all of whom were lorded over by morally upright white men who wielded their righteous power guided by the grace of God.

The Gipper's fine head of 1940s' hair should, they believe, be carved in stone on Mount Rushmore where it would defy rain, snow, and lashing wind, and would be, axiomatically, also impervious to the reality of change.

But all monuments to delusion need not be as epic as that. Even objects as seemingly innocuous as city names can deceive us. A sample: The Manhattan neighborhood where I reside, the East Village, is a misnomer. It’s name was created by real estate hustlers who acted on the presumption that the property values of the area, known previously as the northern section of The Lower Eastside—or simply DON'T GO THERE!—would be enhanced by said name change. The connotations of the name “The Lower Eastside” had a tendency to scare off the sort of tenants who had the means to afford the newly jacked-up rents.

The marketing move was contrived to attract faux hipster careerists and those radical-until-daddy-takes-away-his-trust-fund types whose pretensions and vanities led them to believe the designation "Village" invoked an artistic cachet to their corporate-controlled lives, but who would not abide the risks and squalor inherent to the sorts of neighborhoods that have been forsaken by all but poor working families, squatters, drug addicts, the mentally ill, and non-conformists, as well as by those renegade creative types too engaged in actually creating the future of art, music, and poetry to be overly concerned by the risks of such environs nor troubled by the attendant low status their address held among uptown trendies. For the next sample, I'll travel southward and back in time, a number of decades.

I was born in the Deep South industrial city of Birmingham, Alabama, another example of a place in possession of a fraudulent name.

Birmingham was founded by steel and coal barons from Pittsburgh, who, in an attempt to ameliorate the worldwide perception of American southerners as being dumb as dirt and backwoods yokels, christened their colonial creation with the name Birmingham in order to brand it with a proper "city of industry" cachet.

Subsequently, the bloodsucking Yankee bastards (sorry, visionary captains of capitalism) who were known in Birmingham as the "Big Mules," went about the business of exploiting (sorry, giving gainful employment to) every dumb as dirt and backwoods yokel who had the requisite physical stamina and motor skills required to sacrifice their bodies and souls for substandard wages.

As the riches plundered from the Appalachian Hills flowed northward to Pittsburgh, what the laboring classes received in return was a life of ceaseless toil and perpetual debt. These harsh realities made the people of Birmingham hard and mean. In the early nineteen-sixties, the city was unofficially re-christened "Bombingham." Bombingham was one hateful, little colonial outpost. If a white man complained about low wages and poor working conditions, the bosses told him, "If you don't like your job, there are ten niggers who will take it for a fraction of your pay." It's self-evident why Birmingham was not known as a beacon of racial harmony.

When my family left Birmingham, we moved to Atlanta, Georgia, a city (or more precisely, a contrived collection of corrupt zoning practices and real estate developer larcenies) that also bears a contrived name inhabited by a citizenry whose personal styles and cultural sentiments reflect Atlanta's phony name to a fault. Whereas Birmingham's fraudulent name was meant to evoke an aura of industry, Atlanta's was meant to conjure an image of the ancient grandeur of a great city of antiquity.

Illustrative of the cultural confabulation and communal delusions that Atlanta residents term as their way of life are the lives, fates, and legacies of two famous residents of the city, Blind Willie McTell and Margaret Mitchell, both of whom resided there in overlapping intervals during the first half of the twentieth century.

I first heard the music of Blind Willie McTell in the mid-sixties, when in tow of my father, I visited friends of his who comprised the half-dozen or so members of Atlanta's "beatnik" community.

They were flopped in a run-down mafia-owned building at the intersection of Peachtree and Tenth Street, bizarrely enough, in the building that contained the apartment that Margaret Mitchell had christened "The Dump,” the location where she had conceived and written Gone With The Wind.

On a battered record player belonging to the building's resident manager, the late Bud Foote—a professor at Georgia Tech, author, poet, musician, and all around Beat polymath—spun rare and exquisite LPs. It was at The Dump where I first heard the works of Mctell and other blues, folk, and jazz greats. The building was located a short distance from where, according to local bohemian lore had it (all seven of them), an aging McTell used to busk for change from redneck Babbits and country-come-to-town parvenus, shortly before he gave up playing the blues and took up lay preaching and gospel music.

The Margaret Mitchell House, as it has been subsequently dubbed by the Atlanta Tourism Board, is now a city landmark. Both obtuse locals and gullible tourists seem oblivious to the fact that the building, thrice burned to the ground and rebuilt by the city, doesn't, in any way, shape, or form resemble the original structure where the epic racist bodice-ripper Gone With The Wind was originally hallucinated and put to page.

Not far down the road exists a bar named Blind Willy's, a place that, on any given night, is populated by the sort of folks, who, had they lived in McTell's era, would have ignored or spat upon him when he was busking on Ponce De Leon Avenue.

The ironies of Atlanta are impenetrable when there are dollars to be made from the creation of a safe, business-friendly and false mythology out of the stuff of the city's racist and tawdry history.

The progeny of Margaret Mitchell, now news-writers and producers at Atlanta’s CNN headquarters, will continue to contrive the spurious narratives of our times with storylines that are about as accurate as the one their forbearer confabulated within the pages of Gone With The Wind regarding the Civil War-era American South. Both tales are vain, shallow, narcissistic, self-serving spectacles filled with inane, melodramatic mélanges shot through with cultural clichés, reality-denying rationalizations, and pulp novel devices that serve to mask the realities of brutal classism, blood-drenched racism, and wars waged on behalf of a corrupt ruling class.

philangie2000@yahoo.com.