As I was reading this morning a question occurred to me. Is it a coincidence that the colors associated with the major political parties in the United States correspond to the colors of the pills Morpheus offered Neo in "The Matrix"?
"You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes."
Vote blue and continue to be fed the lie that is the machine's version of reality, or vote red and have your eyes opened to just how much you're been manipulated.
Interesting observation. Aside: I used to have a problem with the red-blue political paradigm for several reasons. "I'd rather be dead than red" referring to commies = reds. Blue once associated with faithfulness (true blue), but contra the faithfulness meme, "blue bloods" once were largely UNfaithful "nobility" after having previously been examples of fidelity.
All kinds of mixed signals from past memes, making a mishmash of my attempts to come to grips with the current red-blue political meme.
Finally, I just resigned myself to all the mixed metaphors and just grumpily accepted the current meme. No more or less useful than any other, I suppose, but I do like your expansion of the meaning.