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

by Kurt Andersen

Brobdingnagian

Brobdingnagian /ˌbräbdiNGˈnaɡēən/ I. adjective gigantic. II. noun a giant. – origin early 18th cent.: from Brobdingnag, the name given by Swift (in Gulliver's Travels) to a land where everything is of huge size, +-ian.

Everywhere [the Southerner] turns away from reality to a gaudy world of his own making.

White Southern religious culture became kind of a rump Confederacy.

For a great many white Southerners, defeat made them not contrite and peaceable (like, say, Germans and Japanese after World War II) but permanently pissed off.

stentorian

stentorian /stenˈtôrēən/ adjective (of a person's voice) loud and powerful

asceticism,

asceticism /əˈsedəˌsizəm/ noun severe self-discipline and avoidance of all forms of indulgence, typically for religious reasons

bowdlerize

bowdlerize /ˈbōdləˌrīz ˈboudləˌrīz/ I. verb—[with obj.] 1. remove material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), especially with the result that it becomes weaker or less effective (as adj. bowdlerized) • a bowdlerized version of the story.

For as long as they’d been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogatory or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary, or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb. It was a curious linguistic cleansing and a convenient prelude to the full unfettering of balderdash, bunkum, hooey, humbug, and malarkey later in the century.

The following year Congress and the president stuck “under God” into the eighty-seven-year-old Pledge of Allegiance, then gave America its first official motto, “In God We Trust,” to be printed on currency.

Eisenhower’s first year in the presidency

the Pentecostal minister Oral Roberts bought time on hundreds of TV stations for a weekly show and faith-healed people on the air, the Times TV critic was appalled by this “gospel preacher making his own extemporaneous medical diagnoses and claiming magic results unsupported by the slightest shred of rational evidence….To allow the enormously influential medium of television to be used week after week to allow undocumented ‘miracles’…seems contrary to the spirit…of the industry’s code governing mature and responsible broadcasting.”

“We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.” —DANIEL BOORSTIN, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

“If there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” —THOMAS PYNCHON, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful. If not, it can’t be helped.*2

the famous Gestalt prayer: I do my thing and you do

polemical

polemical /pəˈlemək(ə)l/ I. adjective of, relating to, or involving strongly critical, controversial, or disputatious writing or speech • a polemical essay.

Tart popularized the term consensus reality orientation for what you or I would simply call reality, and around 1970 consensus reality became a permanent interdisciplinary term of art in academia.

In 1973 a dozen young fantasy revolutionaries formed the Symbionese Liberation Army in California, announcing they were “under black and minority leadership,” even though all but one were white. They murdered the black Oakland school superintendent, then kidnapped the media heiress Patty Hearst—who

Gun nut became a phrase in the 1960s because gun nuts really didn’t exist until then—and

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly,

jeremiad

I. noun a long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes. – origin late 18th cent.: from French jérémiade, from Jérémie ‘Jeremiah,’ from ecclesiastical Latin Jeremias, with reference to the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.

In the 1980s, after the Halloween parades invented by freshly out gay people in San Francisco and New York, dressing up on Halloween became a thing straight adults routinely did in every corner of America.

By 1988, there were half a million U.S. fantasy sports players. In any earlier era, to spend hundreds of hours a year on an elaborate game of make-believe—I’m a team owner, buying and selling players—would’ve been unthinkable for anyone but children.

in the early 1960s, the final legal end of white supremacy came into sight. And as a result, certain white Southerners started displaying Confederate symbols, and Southern states retrofitted state flags to include them.

Wallowing in nostalgia for a lost Golden Age ruined by meddling liberal outsiders from Washington and New York, previously a white Southern habit, became more and more of a white American habit.

It was a memorable moment in the evolution of presidential campaigns into auditions for entertainer-in-chief, and on MTV two years later, he laid down the next milestone. Answering questions from an audience of young people, the president of the United States told a seventeen-year-old girl that he wore “usually briefs” rather than boxer shorts.

Just before the Clintons arrived in Washington, the right had managed to do away with the federal Fairness Doctrine, which had been enacted to keep radio and TV shows from being ideologically one-sided.

splenetic

splenetic /spləˈnedik/ I. adjective 1. bad-tempered; spiteful • a splenetic outburst.

I feel like he did a good job explaining the various elements of the fantasy industrial complex up until the 80s and 90s. I think it seems rather thrown together and not as research based.

country by country, prosperity and a sense of security correlate with less religious belief almost everywhere—except America.

For a generation, in other words, American television has trained Americans to treat fiction as nonfiction.

the textbook Biology, published by Bob Jones University Press, which teaches that unlimited CO2 emissions are fine and that AIDS may have been God’s means of punishing “sexual impurity.”

Half the states require no standardized tests or other measures for homeschooled children, and fewer than a dozen require home teachers to be high school graduates.

For instance, a company called Responsive Ed is the largest charter-education operator in Texas, with dozens of schools around the state. “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth,” Responsive Ed’s science texts teach. Evolutionary biology, they say, consists of “dogma” and “unproved theory.”

Texas is problematic both

because it is (with California) the largest buyer of textbooks, and creationists have controlled its elected state board of education and many of its local ones. The chair of the state board in 2009 was a dentist who said that “evolution is hooey” and that he can “evaluate history textbooks [by] see[ing] how they cover Christianity.”

Survivalists are an interesting case study because they combine so many Fantasyland strands into a single package. They’ve taken a couple of the role-playing hobbies that people acknowledge are fantasies—pretend war, simulated olden-times life—and make them real, a full-time fantasy game, a never-ending LARP.

The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel.

As disbelief in science grows, our whole society may become less prosperous and more vulnerable.

As religious belief drives government to make legal contraception and abortions more difficult to get, the rest of us

will have our pockets picked in all kinds of ways f...

Nearly all people who can be hypnotized most easily are those who have what psychology calls a “fantasy-prone personality”—for instance, people who think they possess paranormal powers, or who as (lonely) children tended to believe completely in their imaginary friends.

History does not repeat, but it rhymes.

Do you believe that “a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda is conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government”? Yes, say 34 percent of the people who voted Republican in 2012.*1

bumptious

Searching the records of the 278 Republicans serving in the Senate and House in 2014, the news organization PolitiFact found only eight who publicly acknowledged that global warming is real and caused by humans.

For almost a generation now, according to a new study by professors at the Harvard Business School and Tufts, the average white American has subscribed to the fantasy that antiwhite bias is a more

serious problem in the United States than antiblack bias.

when candidate Trump first announced his proposed ban on Muslim immigrants—because sharia “authorizes such atrocities as murder…beheadings”—his backup data consisted entirely of bogus polling by Frank Gaffney.

Two-thirds of Republicans today admit they’d be less likely to vote for a presidential candidate who disbelieves in God.*6

of the 535 members of the last Congress, exactly one listed her religion as “none.” Among all 7,383 state legislators, there is apparently only one atheist.*7

Eight of the fifty state constitutions officially prohibit atheists from holding public office; of those, Pennsylvania and Tennessee specifically require officeholders to believe in Heaven