America Fantastica Quotes

“We all need our fantasies, Angie. Even you. Harps and halos. Life everlasting. UFOs and laced Kool-Aid and Prince Charming zooming us off to paradise. Everybody on earth—we trade in reality for whatever keeps us going.” “You’re defending deceit?” “No, I’m describing it.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“Mythomania—or plain old lying—infiltrated churches, schools, hair salons, corporate boardrooms, courtrooms, and nightclubs. Smith & Wesson received seven hundred write-in votes in Topeka’s mayoral race. The Library of Congress was under pressure to ban its copy of the Gutenberg Bible for flaunting the word fornicate and the first two syllables of the word sodomy. Speechwriters jumped aboard. Nannies and city councilmen in Prescott, Arizona, denounced the devil’s codex implanted in the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution; NASA was burning down forests in Idaho; the Census Bureau was refusing to count people with blue eyes; Grover Cleveland’s skull was buried under the Watergate complex; vigilantes roamed the nighttime streets of Fargo in search of Democrats and Kenyans; Columbine was a CIA operation; Pearl Harbor never happened; corporations were people; Amazon was a distinguished citizen. In Fulda, where the Truth Tellers were led by Dink O’Neill, his brother Chub, and Chamber of Commerce President Earl Fenstermacher, the burdens of seeding fake unfake news kept them hopping through the hot days of September 2019. Boyd Halverson’s contributions were sorely missed. “Boyd had a knack for it,” Chub told Earl after their bimonthly Kiwanis brunch. “I don’t know how we’ll replace him.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“Could this, he wondered, be I? Instantly, he congratulated himself on the impeccable grammar. Still the journalist. Still civilized, too, because what was grammar if not civilization, or the delegate of civilization, or its last decaying bulwark?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“Could this, he wondered, be I? Instantly, he congratulated himself on the impeccable grammar.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“The fabulous and the fantastic—the wildly outlandish lies—were typically questioned by the intellect yet wholly absorbed by the heart. Almost always, mythomaniacs lied to reinforce fragile egos, decorating their lives with unearned grandeur.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“There are two Santa Monicas. One is a fairy tale of spangled gowns and improbable breasts and faces from the tabloids, of big money and fixed noses and strung-out voice teachers and heiresses on skateboards and even bigger big money; of movie stars you thought were dead and look dead; of terraced apartment buildings cascading down perilous yellow bluffs toward the sea; of Olympic swimmers and hip-hop hit men and impresarios of salvation and twenty-six-year-old agents backing out of deals in the lounge bar at Shutters; of yoga masters and street magicians; of porn kings and fast cars and microdosing prophets and shuck-and-jive evangelists and tattooed tycoons and considerably bigger big money; of Sudanese busboys with capped teeth and eight-by-ten glossies in their back pockets; of Ivy League panhandlers, teenage has-beens, home-run kinds in diamonds and fur coats, daughters of sultans, sons of felons, widows of the silver screen, and the kind of meaningless big money that has forgotten what money is.

There is that.

But start at the pier and head southeast until you reach a neighborhood of tidy, more or less identical stucco houses separated by fourteen feet of scorched grass. In a number of these homes, you will find families, or the descendants of families, who have lived here since the mid-to-late forties. For them, upscale was a Chevy in the driveway. Mom mixed up Kool-Aid at ten cents a gallon, Pop pushed used cars at a dealership off Wilshire Boulevard, Junior had a paper route, Sis did some weekend babysitting. Nowadays, the house Pop bought for $37,000 will fetch just under two million in a sluggish market, but as Pop loved to say, secretly proud "What kind of house do you buy with the profit? A pup tent? A toolshed in Laguna?”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“They kissed. “Okay,” Dooney said. “Now pay attention. Evil number one, competition. Evil number two, government. So let’s say you’re a respectable, all-American robber baron; you’re sick and tired of all the save-the-water, save-the-whatever EPA types, IRS types, SEC types, DNC types, name your traitor. How can you be a robber baron if you can’t rob anybody?” “Got me,” said Cal. “Retire?” “Uh-uh,” said Dooney. “Think vertical. If you’re fed up with government, you hike up your trousers and throw your hat in the ring. You become the government. You go vertical. You install yourself right up there at the tippy-top of the pyramid. Corporations, Cal—they’re people. Law of the land. Therefore you nominate your corporation for president of the United Capitalist States of America, that’s what you do, you do an acquisition, you buy a subsidiary called the presidency, you install yourself as commander in chief—you install Amazon, you install PS&S and yours truly—because PS&S is a living, breathing, bona fide human being just like you and me and Jeff Bezos—human rights, legal rights—and, bingo, the IRS is your errand boy, the SEC is your own personal masseuse, the EPA is the groundskeeper on that golf course of yours down in Florida, and, hey, if you catch any flack, tough shit, you fire the whistleblower and hire somebody with the sense to do exactly what you want, what PS&S wants, what Amazon and the USA want. You make this country great again. Because you are this country. Because you are great. And if anybody thinks you’re not, fair enough, you buy yourself another subsidiary, you buy a Congress, so then it’s your Congress, the PS&S Congress, and you scare the shit out of anybody who thinks differently. That’s vertical. That’s king of the Monopoly board. That’s queen of Sheba. That’s why the Pilgrims showed up.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica

“He didn’t plan much—just the basics. Boyd would rob the bank on a Saturday, leave a false trail into Mexico, then head home to attend to things he should have attended to long ago.”
― Tim O'Brien, America Fantastica