FANTASYLAND
How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
Kurt Andersen
Random House
462 pages; $30
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 unravelling 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. But our real progenitors were the Puritans, who passed the weeks on the trans-Atlantic voyage preaching about the end times and who, when they arrived, vowed to hang any Quaker or Catholic who landed on their shores. They were zealots and also well-educated British gentlemen, which set the tone for what Andersen identifies as a distinctly American endeavour: Propping up magical thinking with elaborate scientific proof.
While Newton and Locke were ushering in an Age of Reason in Europe, over in America unreason was taking new seductive forms. A series of mystic visionaries were planting the seeds of extreme entitlement, teaching Americans that they didn’t have to study any book or old English theologian to know what to think, that whatever they felt to be true was true.
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. As soon as George Washington dies fake news is born — the story about the cherry tree, or his kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. 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.
In the 1960s fantasyland goes into overdrive. Psychedelics, academic scholarship and the New Age movement conspire to make reason and reality the realms of idiots and squares. After the Kennedy assassinations, conspiracy theories become not just a fringe hobby but a “permanent feature of the American mental landscape.” UFO sightings explode, and the stories become ever more elaborate, involving abductions and cover-ups and frolics and secret alliances with interplanetary beings.
In the meantime, a kind of comfort with small fibs settles into the populace. When Andersen was young, he recalls, it was rare to see a woman over 50 whose hair was not grey or white. And apparently there were only eight plastic surgeons in all of Manhattan. But the market for hair colour and plastic surgery explodes, as America starts writing its “national fiction of permanent youthfulness.”
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. They were supposed to be a counterpoint to narrow-minded evangelicals, but Andersen says the New Agers committed an even greater sin than the faithful. What Anne Hutchinson started, Gestalt therapy finished off in the ’60s. Fritz Perls, a psychotherapist and Gestalt founder, simply put it: “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.
It’s clear that Andersen is uncomfortable with the extreme relativism we’ve settled into. But he doesn’t grapple with what it might mean to give that up. If there’s a flaw in this book, it’s repetitiveness.
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 half-hearted. 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.
©2017 The New York Times News Service