THE LAST FOUR chapters were about how Americans suddenly ramped up their beliefs that all sorts of iffy and unreal things were actually, factually real and true. This chapter is about what happened in the realms that are supposed to be fictional—movies, novels, Disney World, Dungeons and Dragons, war reenactments, pop culture. And how in the 1960s and ’70s we also began massively expanding the zone that combined fantasy with everyday reality—by making downtowns and suburbs more like Disneyland, theming restaurants, normalizing cosmetic surgery and gambling and pornography and so much more,
...more
