Fantasyland, Part 3

 I needed to break up this book report - recall, lunch, back to the Education Building getting in the way - and so here I am, back in the saddle again. listening to WPRB while copying from Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 5000 Year History (2017; Random House, 2018). 

I like Andersen's Kids R Us Syndrome even though I never was in a Kids R Us store. 

Middle-aged people wearing Halloween costumes or attending Burning Man are expressions of a phenomenon I described earlier - the commitment of Americans, beginning with the baby boom generation, to a fantasy of remaining forever young. The treacly kids of all ages had popped up when baby boomers were kids. But its currency skyrocketed during the 1980s and '90s, when American adults, like no adults before them - but like all who followed - began playing videogames and fantasy sports, dressing like kids, grooming themselves and even getting surgery to look more like kids. Its what I call the Kids "R" Us Syndrome. It became pandemic and permanent. It ranges from the benign to the unfortunate. 

Chapter 28: Forever Young: Kids "R" Us Syndrome; p. 247

I  do recognize some of this behavior - but maybe no to the degree set out by Andersen. Too many people were spending their time trying to make a living. With the people I knew, it was more a problem of what to do when we did not die young.  I am left with a persistently aching knee and ruined lungs. Maybe the people Andersen describes know they're grownups and want to fight off the effects of their knowledge and the people I knew had not clue what to do with themselves. We probably all wind up at the same place. CC smoking crack to ward off the memories of a bad childhood, of not having what Americans were supposed to have, is probably no different than the person getting surgery to look young except in terms of addiction and income tax bracket.

WPRB plays The Clash's "I'm Not Down." Today it sounds like an anthem.

sch

3/17/20

[Looking back between the time I wrote that and now when I type it, how much of our fantasies led to people dressing up and invading the Capital?]