Alan Moore, who helped to transform the comic book into modern literature, has an interview on Salon.com. If there was ever a paranoid schizophrenic author that got it right, he'd be as close to the mark as any. I definitely suggest reading the whole interview. ] The funny thing is that Alan Moore hates to talk about ] film and television, because, as he explains later in our ] interview, both "have a lot to answer for." He's not ] talking about how they've distilled his densely ] researched, intricate tales of socio-historical ] interrogation, like "From Hell" and "The League of ] Extraordinary Gentlemen," into narrowcasted popcorn ] movies. Instead, he means the way they've had such an ] impact on human consciousness that many people were only ] able to articulate the horrific reality of 9/11 by ] comparing it to a disaster film. ] ] Moore clearly believes that the same mechanism has ] foisted a deadly, unwanted and unnecessary war upon the ] world. "Television and movies have short-circuited ] reality," he asserts. "I don't think a lot of people are ] entirely clear on what is real and what is on the ] screen." ] ] Moore, now 50, has a peculiar perspective on this problem ] of "misrecognition" between fiction and reality -- ] because so many of his works have seemingly anticipated ] or prefigured so much of what has come to pass. "V for ] Vendetta," Moore's dystopian early-1980s narrative about ] a future fascist Britain under siege by a notorious ] terrorist who was subjected to unbearable torture, echoes ] much of our current dilemma in the so-called war on ] terrorism, all the way down to the criminalization of ] homosexuality, the panoptic PATRIOT Act-like surveillance ] state and a homogeneous media that glosses over real news ] in favor of sensationalism. Alan Moore | The man who invented the future |