A new book has recently been published by Kurt Andersen that probably piles on too many uniquely American fables and tall tales, legends that led us to believe in make-believe convenient fictions put out in Hollywood, Spaghetti Westerns, heroes and heroines galore, good guys and bad guys painted in quick strokes, everything for everybody that created The American Fantasyland.
From Disneyland to Wally-World, and Sheriff Joe to Tele-evangelists and 2 Presidents from television land, How lucky can we get?
 |
| Image credit: Keith Negley |
It’s as American as George Washington’s Cherry Tree
"Reading a great revisionist history of America is the bookish way to feel what it’s like to be born again. Suddenly past, present and future are connected by a visible thread. Stray details and aberrations start to make sense. You feel ashamed, but also enlightened, because at least you have named the sin: You belong to a nation of bloodthirsty colonizers (Howard Zinn), or anti-intellectuals (Richard Hofstadter) or, in Kurt Andersen’s latest opus, a people who have committed themselves over the last half century to florid, collective delusion.
If, for example, you remain confused about what happened in the last election, Andersen’s retelling of history will clarify things for you. As a host of public radio’s Studio 360, a best-selling novelist and a cultural omnivore, Andersen has been tracking and storing the data on the nation’s unraveling for decades. And he knew that what happened that November night, and in the subsequent months, was not just inevitable but in many ways our nation’s natural destiny. As he explains in what must have been an alarmingly self-confirming last chapter: Donald Trump is “stupendous Exhibit A” in the landscape of “Fantasyland,” a fitting leader for a nation that has, over the centuries, nurtured a “promiscuous devotion to the untrue.
Fake news. Post-truth. Alternative facts. For Andersen, these are not momentary perversions but habits baked into our DNA, the ultimate expressions of attitudes “that have made America exceptional for its entire history.”
Andersen’s history begins at the beginning, with the first comforting lie we tell ourselves. Each year we teach our children about Pilgrims, those gentle robed creatures who landed at Plymouth Rock. . . .
What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm. . . . The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism, which concerns “electricity of the system thrown out of balance” (run that one by your yoga teachers). “Dr.” William A. Rockefeller, father of John D., gets his start mass-marketing a pink elixir called Microbe Killer. . . While the most persistent thread in “Fantasyland” is Christianity — the astounding number of Americans who believe in heaven and angels, which most of Europe gave up decades ago — Andersen reserves a starring role for the secular spiritualists. . . New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful . . . simply put: “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.” Or put more simply: You do you.
. . . At the end of his book he tries to redraw a boundary that moves us a little closer to sanity. “You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts — especially if your fantastical facts hurt people,” he says, echoing a comment by Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But the attempt is brief and feels halfhearted. By that point the pile up of detail — gun nuts, survivalists, web holes, scenes of cosplay, sci-fi shows and manufactured bubbles of hope — leaves a reader worried that a short manifesto on facts won’t save us.
What we Americans need, it would seem, is something more powerful. A story to end all stories, . . A collective delusion so seductive that it will have us all, in Locke-step, bowing down to reason and reality. Anyone have any ideas?
- Hanna Rosin is a host of NPR’s Invisibilia and the author of “The End of Men.”
FANTASYLAND How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
By Kurt Andersen
462 pp. Random House. $30.
Link > NY Times Book Reviews 09.05.2017By Kurt Andersen
462 pp. Random House. $30.
_____________________________________________________________________________
Published on Jun 30, 2017
Views: 5,628
Duration: About an hour
Has the great American experiment in liberty gone off the rails? Best-selling novelist, public radio host, and acclaimed cultural critic Kurt Andersen tackles that question in his latest book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, due out in September.
Get a sneak preview of this provocative chronicle of magical thinking and make-believe that provides a new paradigm for understanding the post-factual present, in which reality and illusion are dangerously blurred.
Get a sneak preview of this provocative chronicle of magical thinking and make-believe that provides a new paradigm for understanding the post-factual present, in which reality and illusion are dangerously blurred.
No comments:
Post a Comment