Fantasyland

Yesterday I finished Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 5000 Year History (2017; Random House, 2018). I am also reading Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018). They books bleed into one another, intertwine at points, and often add to one another. Lepore, I have fallen in love with - with her prose, with her moral sense. They make her 788pages enjoyable and educational. Andersen's anti-religion stance tiresome. If I had to read only one that would be Lepore. Still, I think I reading them both at the same time was a profitable use of my time. Andersen makes me think I was not as crazy as the rest of the country. 

... You can see it in our very language - particularly where it comes to discriminating between the actual and the unreal and ridiculing fantasies purporting to be authentic. For a century, Americans had a wide-ranging, well-established vocabulary for this, talking about suckers falling for hogwash. After the 1920s, however, we invented fewer and fewer such disparagements. Soon words like balderdash, humbug, and bunkum were shoved to the back of the language attic and semi-retired or eliminated, along with hooey, claptrap, and malarkey. We also did a strange thing to a certain set of older words. For as long as they'd been English, incredible, unbelievable, unreal, fabulous, and fantastic were either derogator or neutrally descriptive, different ways of calling claims unlikely, imaginary, or untrue. But then they were all redefined to be terms of supreme praise, synonyms for wonderful, glorious, outstanding, superb. It was a curious linguistic cleansing and a convenient prelude to the full unfettering of  balderdash, humbug, hooey, bunkum, and malarkey. 

Chapter 20: Big Rock Candy Mountains: Utopia in the Suburbs and the Sun; p. 146 (Fantasyland) 

I call that a good example of Andersen's prose and thinking. Nobody hates getting scammed more than someone who thinks they're too smart to be scammed. [Check out The Grifters.] I scammed myself into thinking that since everyone else was thinking different from me, then my thinking must be wrong.  That's how I explained the country going for George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq and then his re-election,  Wasn't everyone who I thought was nuts was more successful than me? Eventually, I got my convinced the only cure for me was suicide. Yeah, that's how my depression spoke to me. You think my mental health issues have no analogy than the country's slide into craziness? I suggest you read Andersen's book. But then, if I'm any indication, you have want to be rational and lucid.

sch

3/17/20