Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

So: live in your bunker with a decade’s worth of twenty-serving cans of teriyaki rice and beef. Pretend you live in a little house on the prairie and shop once a week on the make-believe Via Condotti nearby. When you’re not managing your imaginary NFL all-star team, imagine you’re serving as an officer in the Second Connecticut Heavy Artillery Regiment at the Battle of Cold Harbor. Get ready for Jesus’s return. Impersonate mad Dr. Mundo’s summoner in League of Legends, an aristocratic aesthete on Instagram, a truth-telling troll on Twitter. Fantasize that you were born with those perfect artificial breasts. Speak in tongues. Read and believe the books by people who say they died and went to Heaven. Dress like a wizard or a feudal baron. Believe that believing you’ll get rich will make you rich, that burning sage cleared your house of evil spirits, that humans were supernaturally created in a flash the day before yesterday, that alien beings taught us to build computer chips. Go crazy. You have every right. And snug and smug in my own Urban American Redoubt, I have every right to disapprove of my fellow Americans who’ve decided that reason and empiricism are just some of many ways of understanding the world, no better than any other, that everyone is entitled to her truth and his truth. I am free to practice what the liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof scolds writers for doing, to take a “sneering tone about conservative Christianity itself” even though “mocke...