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History.
Politics.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.Lawrence ODonnell
How did we get here?
In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that whats happening in our country todaythis post-factual, fake news moment were all living throughis not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
Over the course of five centuriesfrom the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrialsour love of the fantastichas made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasiesevery citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.Tom Brokaw
[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of Americas cultural history.Newsday
Compelling and totally unnerving.The Village Voice
A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.The Guardian
This is an important bookthe indispensable bookfor understanding America in the age of Trump.Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci.… (altro)
This is an extraordinary book with lots of history about the US as a nation built on fantasy and delusion, finally culminating in Trump and the crazy beliefs of many 'Mericans. I highly recommend it. Those who love the story of the Pilgrims will be disturbed. ( )
If ever there was a book I should have DNF'd early on, this was it. Anderson's hypothesis, if you will, is that the United States was birthed in fantasy (the gold rush) and over time, our populace has become so enamored with fantasy that we ended up with Donald Trump as our president.
And his "proof" is anecdote after anecdote (described in a historical context) about the uniquely (ok, sure) American love of fantasy. Well, yeah, if you conflate every form of entertainment and pleasure seeking with fantasy, I guess he might have a point. Anderson starts by going after religion, but before you know it, everything from Disneyworld to fantasy sports to the suburbs has lead to the downfall of our society. No other countries have any of these things, right (eye roll)?
This review isn't very good. That's because this book alternately made me sleepy and angry. For three weeks. I don't even want to give it any more mindshare than I already have. It's a thesis argued with 90% opinion and a problem with absolutely no solution. Can we please leave this type of conjecture to true historians going forward? ( )
The premise is on point, the book is well researched, but the lens is totally myopic. It's been fantasy since Sumeria, not just when the world changed around the author's perception. I don't regret finishing it but a part of me wished I walked. ( )
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"The easiest thing of all to deceive in oneself; for we believe whatever we want to believe." -Demosthenes
"Increasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -Philip K. Dick
"You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your ow facts." -Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Dedica
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For the people who taught me to think--Jean and Bob Andersen, and the teachers of Omaha's District 66.
Incipit
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Now Entering Fantasyland. This book has been germinating for a long time.
Citazioni
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Western civilization’s first great advertising campaign was created in order to inspire enough dreamers and suckers to create America.
Hutchinson is so American because she was so confident in herself, in her intuitions and idiosyncratic, subjective understanding of reality. She’s so American because, unlike the worried, pointy-headed people around her, she didn’t recognize ambiguity or admit to self-doubt. Her perceptions and beliefs were true because they were hers and because she felt them so thoroughly to be true.... American Christianity in the twenty-first century resembles Hutchinson’s version more than it does the official Christianity of her time.
THE BIG PIECE of secular conventional wisdom about Protestantism has been that it gave a self-righteous oomph to moneymaking and capitalism—hard work accrues to God’s glory, success looks like a sign of His grace. But it seems clear to me the deeper, broader, and more enduring influence of American Protestantism was the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty.
This country began as an empty vessel for pursuing fantasies of easy wealth or utopia or eternal life—a vessel of such spaciousness that an assortment of new fantasies could be spun off perpetually. That had never happened before. Ordinary individuals took the initiative and improvised a country out of a wilderness, reshaped the world. That had never happened before, either.
...the eventual result was an anything-goes relativism that extends beyond religion to almost every kind of passionate belief: If I think it’s true, no matter why or how I think it’s true, then it’s true, and nobody can tell me otherwise. That’s the real-life reductio ad absurdum of American individualism. And it would become a credo of Fantasyland.
Americans together had, astoundingly, created a new nation from scratch—a nation that guaranteed personal liberty above all, where citizens were officially freer than ever before to invent and promote and believe anything. So Americans promptly began believing almost everything.
...it turned out that a lot of Americans, being Americans, still wanted a promise of the adventure tale to end all adventure tales. They wanted to see Jesus for real, here on Earth, sooner rather than later, actually leading them in a sensational battle against monsters from Hell, a war they were guaranteed to win.
American Christians from the start tended toward the literal and hysterical and collectively self-centered.
If one considers the Bible, in the main, to be historical fiction, then what Joseph Smith produced was a monumental and pioneering work of fan fiction....
...from Ben Franklin to Mark Zuckerberg, the stories of the supremely successful entrepreneurs obscure the forgotten millions of losers and nincompoops. The fabulous successes seem like proof of the power of passionate belief in oneself, our American faith in faith.
...the Panic of 1893. That financial panic, which triggered a huge economic depression, was caused in part by the unsustainable overbuilding of the western railroads and the popping of that railroad bubble. Which had been inflated by the western real estate bubble. Which happened even though just twenty years before, the Panic of 1873 had been caused by the popping of a previous railroad bubble. Americans, predisposed to believe in bonanzas and their own special luckiness, were not really learning the hard lessons of economic booms and busts.
The American pastoral ideal also grew out of the new Christianity that considered itself more perfect because it was more pure and primitive. Americans’ loathing of Catholicism and later of monarchy devolved into a loathing of Europe and of cities as well. All of which made it easier for Americans to turn the lemon of the New World—the horrifying wilderness—into lemonade, to make the new nation one in which (tamed) nature was ever present. Americans wanted it both ways, the prosperity and comfort that required towns and cities and factories and railroads, but also the picturesque fantasy that one was still Boone-like, living near where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play.
Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence... In fact, his cabin, which his friends helped him build, was barely a half-hour walk from the prosperous old town where his mom and dad and a couple of thousand other people lived, and only a seventeen-mile trip on the new railroad from the third-largest city in America... Thoreau epitomized this particular have-your-cake-and-eat-it American fantasy, a life in harmony with nature as long as it’s not too uncomfortable or inconvenient.
...during the nineteenth century, a new form of nostalgia emerged as an important tic in Americans’ psychology, an imaginary homesickness for places and times the nostalgists had never experienced and that had in some cases never existed.
The meteoric rise and fall of the Klan aside, white Southerners’ myth of their own special goodness—honorable, honest, humane, and civilized guardians of tradition, unlike the soulless Yankees—did not wither.... the war hadn’t really been about that; slavery was a detail. In fact, white Southerners had fought the war to defend their right as Americans to believe anything they wanted to believe, even an unsustainable fantasy, even if it meant treating a class of humanity as nonhuman.
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.... For Northerners, victory had confirmed they were on God’s side, fortifying their besetting smugness, and their religion resolved more and more into a pretty, reassuring background hum.
Christianity is rooted and grounded in supernaturalism, and when robbed of supernaturalism it ceases to be a religion and becomes an exalted system of ethics.
The cultural impact of the Scopes trial, however, was enormous. Each side was confirmed in its beliefs. It allowed the mainstream to write off Christian true believers as hillbilly dead-enders and to imagine that reason was inexorably triumphing in America. Thought leaders and cosmopolites and middle-class Time-reading conservatives, such as my grandparents and parents in Nebraska, could almost forget that many millions of gung-ho Christian fantasists still existed. And the fantasists—especially in the South, for whom the Yankees’ twentieth-century national cultural victory was a rerun of their Civil War victory—could go on believing and telling their children that science was untrue when it contradicted the Bible.
...suburbs could also satisfy white people’s nostalgia for a time when they lived almost exclusively among other white (and Christian, preferably Protestant) people.
“In Los Angeles,” the New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael once wrote, “you can live any way you want (except the urban way); it’s the fantasy-brothel, where you can live the fantasy of your choice.”
...the beginning of the century, two-thirds of Americans still lived in old small towns and on farms. By 1960, only a third did—and another third now lived in suburbia’s new simulations of old-time countrified America.
Disneyland had been inspired by disapproval of “questionable characters” and “honky-tonk” atmosphere. In the badlands three hundred miles across the Mojave Desert, Vegas was created by questionable characters to be honky-tonk, the Pottersville to Disneyland’s Bedford Falls.
All the ideas we call countercultural barged onto the cultural main stage in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s true, but what we don’t really register is that so did extreme Christianity, full-blown conspiracism, libertarianism, unembarrassed greed, and more. Anything goes meant anything went.
“Do your own thing” has a lot in common with “Every man for himself.” If it feels good, do it: for some that will mean smoking weed and watching porn—and for others, opposing modest gun regulation and paying yourself four hundred times what you pay your employees.
Szasz opposed any involuntary psychiatric intervention and, along with the Cuckoo’s Nest portrayal, paved the way for the disastrous dismantling of U.S. mental health facilities. But more generally they helped make popular and respectable the idea that much of science is a sinister scheme concocted by a despotic conspiracy to oppress the people. Mental illness, both Szasz and Laing said, is “a theory not a fact”—now the universal bottom-line argument for anyone, from creationists to climate change deniers to antivaccine hysterics, who prefer to disregard science in favor of their own beliefs.
The rulers of any tribe or society do not merely dictate customs and laws; they are the masters of everyone’s perceptions, defining reality itself.
Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert said, in character in 2006, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has been aware of it, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been wearing different uniforms on the same team—the Fantasyland team.
The differences among Christian true believers in the late 1960s and ’70s mirrored the differences among the new bohemian masses. The charismatics were like the hippies and New Agers, experiencing ecstasy and seeing signs and wonders, demanding cool music and clothes in church. The fundamentalists were like the New Left, insular zealots focused on arguing doctrine, hating the unrighteous, and awaiting the final battle. Charismatics were the Christian equivalent of the millions of circa-1970 hippies who didn’t so much disagree with the radicals’ critiques of the rotten world but were ultimately more interested in peace and love and awesomeness.
Leaders of the conservative movement, still new and still actually conservative, worried that these noisy crackpots might ruin their chance at the nomination and presidency in 1964.... The leaders of the reality-based conservative movement and Republican Party led, declaring the John Birch Society beyond the pale and rendering it moot as an official player in the national political discourse. Within three years, the fraction of Americans with an unfavorable view of Birchers, according to Gallup, went from a minority to a majority, and when Ronald Reagan ran for the California governorship in 1965, even he called them “kind of a lunatic fringe.”
Retreating to self-sufficient rural isolation, living off the grid, became a hippie thing in the 1960s before it took off as a right-wing conceit in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement, with the Whole Earth Catalog as its official almanac and souvenir program, floated along on dreams of agrarian utopia. (For a year or two around 1970, I was a teenage Walter Mitty with my own Whole Earth dream.) Survivalism was the same but different. Both shared a vision of themselves as clued-in self-reliant ordinary heroes escaping the urban corporate-government hive because it was decadent, corrupt, and corrupting. One was more New England-town-meeting Transcendentalist, the other more sharp-shooting Idaho-wilderness mountain man. One had more in common with hopeful Christian postmillennials, building a new Eden, the other more like premillennials ensuring their own salvation in the violent end-time. But both were (and are) overcome by the long-running nostalgia for a dream of a purer, pastoral America they’d picked up from the fantasy-industrial complex.
Videogames, originally sold to boys to pretend they were grown-up action heroes, were soon bought mainly by grown men who wanted to play like boys.
The Republican Party saw an opportunity to play to that self-pitying, self-glorifying, ass-kicking nostalgia and adopted its so-called Southern Strategy to turn white Southerners, who had always been Democrats, into Republicans.... 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.
Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the Internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree. Particularly for a people with our history and propensities, the downside—this proliferation and reinforcement of nutty ideas and false beliefs, this assembling of communities of the utterly deluded, this construction of parallel universes that look and feel perfectly real, the viral appeal of the untrue—seems at least as profound as the upside.
Every new war and rumor of war in Israel and the Middle East excited Christian zealots. Each outbreak of combat looked to a lot of American Christians like a foreshock or temblor leading up to the big one, the final showdown, Armageddon—an actual place, by the way, an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.
The bit of the Bible that preoccupies these spiritual warriors, Ephesians 6:12, was obscure until recently: “Put on the whole armor of God….For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” To believers, the exhortation to wage war on the devil is not metaphorical. They ignore the “not against flesh and blood” passage and focus on the “wickedness in high places”—which to them means that particular VIPs (popes, presidents, supporters of marriage equality) are Satan’s agents on Earth.*12 Which grants their political opinions and cultural tastes God’s own antisatanic imprimatur.
country by country, prosperity and a sense of security correlate with less religious belief almost everywhere—except America.
That list of the means by which leaders in any society try to maintain coherence and order sounds a bit evil and un-American: withholding access, withholding institutional sponsorship, subjecting ideas and those who hold them to scorn, stigmatized knowledge. That’s why elite always has been a pejorative in this country, and why mainstream recently turned into one.
Homeschools are part of the new infrastructure for enabling alternate realities. 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. Doing otherwise would be elitist.
The fanciful and religious and cryptoreligious parts have gotten overripe, bursting and spilling their juices over the Enlightenment-reason parts, spoiling our whole barrel. Holders of any belief about anything, especially and incontrovertibly if those beliefs are ascribed to faith, are now expected to be immune from challenge.
Alex Jones, routinely described as “conservative” because he rants against gun regulation, government-subsidized healthcare, and taxes. Populist? Alt-right? Crypto-nihilist? Our language simply hasn’t kept up with the new permutations. He is the very epitome of cutting-edge political discourse, where outright fiction is presented and consumed as nonfiction. What’s more, he’s no longer a fringe freak; he’s a freak who has both a huge following and the ear of the president of the United States.
the incomes of middle- and working-class people flatlined, Republicans pooh-poohed rising economic inequality and insecurity; economic insecurity does correlate with greater religiosity; and for white Americans, greater religiosity does correlate with voting Republican. For Republican politicians and their rich-getting-richer donors, that’s a virtuous circle, not a vicious one.
the stone-cold cynicism of Karl Rove, like the Wizard of Oz’s evil twin coming out from behind the curtain for a candid chat just before he won a second term for George Bush, explaining that the “judicious study of discernible reality” had been rendered obsolete. They were rational people who understood that a large fraction of Americans don’t bother with rationality when they vote, that many voters resent the judicious study of discernible reality. Keeping those people angry and scared won them elections.
In retrospect, the sudden change in the gun lobby in the late 1970s, from more or less flexible to absolutely hysterical, was a harbinger of the transformation of the entire right a generation later. Reasonable Republicanism was replaced by absolutism: no new taxes, virtually no regulation, abolish the EPA and the IRS and the Federal Reserve.
No less a figure than Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative appointed by Nixon, complained after he retired that the Second Amendment “has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word fraud—on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
One undeniable virtue of markets is that eventually they reflect hard facts. The financial world isn’t prone to permanent fantasy.
Trump’s version of unreality is a patchwork of knowing falsehoods and sincerely believed fantasies, which is more troubling than if he were just a liar.
when the U.S. government was created, the Founders invented a cautious Senate to overrule the House fiends when necessary—Washington told Jefferson it was like a saucer to cool impossibly hot coffee. Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton hoped the Electoral College would do something similar every four years, that a sober, deliberative group could have the final say in case the People ever elected some unacceptable charlatan or demagogue with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true….Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
Ultime parole
Dati dalle informazioni generali inglesi.Modifica per tradurlo nella tua lingua.
The good news, in other words, is that America may now be at peak Fantasyland. We can hope.
History.
Politics.
Sociology.
Nonfiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.Lawrence ODonnell
How did we get here?
In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that whats happening in our country todaythis post-factual, fake news moment were all living throughis not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
Over the course of five centuriesfrom the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrialsour love of the fantastichas made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasiesevery citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.Tom Brokaw
[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of Americas cultural history.Newsday
Compelling and totally unnerving.The Village Voice
A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.The Guardian
This is an important bookthe indispensable bookfor understanding America in the age of Trump.Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci.
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