Fantasyland : how America went haywire : a 500-year history / Kurt Andersen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Andersen, Kurt, 1954- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, American.

United States--Civilization.

United States.

Popular culture--United States--History.

Popular culture.

Physical Description:

xiii, 462 pages ; 25 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Random House, [2017]

Summary:

"Kurt Andersen, demonstrates that what's happening in our country today--this strange, post-truth, 'fake news' moment we're all living through--is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers. Believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries--from 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 extraterrestrials--our peculiar love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged....Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies--every citizen free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. Little by little, and then more quickly in the last several decades, the American invent-your-own-reality legacy of the Enlightenment superseded its more sober, rational, and empirical parts. We gave ourselves over to all manner of crackpot ideas and make-believe lifestyles designed to console or thrill or terrify us. In Fantasyland, Andersen brilliantly connects the dots that define this condition, portrays its scale and scope, and offers a fresh, bracing explanation of how our American journey has deposited us here. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand the politics and 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."--Jacket.

Contents:

Now entering fantasyland

Part I. The conjuring of America: 1517-1789

I believe, therefore I am right: the Protestants

All that glitters: the gold-seekers

Building our own private heaven on Earth: the puritans

The God-given freedom to believe in God

Imaginary friends and enemies: the early satanic panics

The first me century: religion gets American

Meanwhile, in the 18th century reality-based community

Part II. United States of amazing: the 1800s

The first great delirium

The all-American fan fiction of Joseph Smith, prophet

Quack nation: magical but modern ?

Fantastic business: the gold rush inflection point

In search of monsters to destroy: the conspiracy-theory habit

The war between states of mind

Ten million little houses on the prairie

Fantasy industrialized

Part III. A long arc bending toward reason: 1900-1960

Progress and backlash

The biggest backlash: brand new old-time religion

The business of America is show business

Big rock candymountains: utopia in the suburbs and the sun

The 1950s seemed so normal

Part IV. Big bang: the 1960s and 70s

Big bang: the hippies

Big bang: the intellectuals

Big bang: the Christians

Big bang: politics and government and conspiracies

Big bang: living in a land of entertainment

Part V. Fantasyland scales: from the 1980s through the turn of the century

Making make-believe more realistic and real life more make-believe

Forever young: kids r us syndrome

The Reagan era and thestart of the digital age

American religion from the turn of the millennium

Our wilder christianities: belief and practice

America versus the godless civilized world: why are we so exceptional?

Magical but not necessarily christian, spiritualbut not religious

Blue-chip witch doctors: the re-enchantment of medicine

How the mainstream enabled fantasyland: squishies, cynics and believers

Anything goes

unless it picks my pocket or break my leg

Part VI. The problem with fantasyland:from the 1980s to the present and beyond

The inmates running the asylum decide monsters are everywhere

Reality is a conspiracy: the x-filing of America

Mad as hell, the new voice of the people

When the GOP went off the rails

Liberals denying science

Gun crazy

Final fantasy-industrial complex

Our inner children? They're going to Disney World!

The economic dreamtime

As fantasyland goes, so goes the nation.

Notes:

Includes index.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Miller Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9781400067213 : HRD

1400067219 : HRD