IDEAS
How Fantasy Triumphed Over Reality in American Politics https://apple.news/A-SW362mLT3a3Qft349guhw

"As America enjoyed the glories of a postwar boom, what had been a serious, hardworking nation began a radical transfiguration. The characteristic sobriety was fading, the center of gravity shifting away from New England and New York to the dream world of California.

"By 1955 America could feel pride in a young coterie of writers and artists it might finally call its own. Would anyone ever mistake Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs or Elvis Presley for Europeans? It was the year Disneyland opened."

"After his movie career was effectively over, Reagan starred in what was television’s first reality show, opening his new ranch-style house to the public in order to exhibit all the latest domestic gadgets with which General Electric had equipped it.

"The nightly reel made him an instant celebrity. Unknown to the viewers, it would eventually make him president."

Synchronicity! I was just tweeting about Reagan hosting this show! I keep seeing the same themes being written about by better writers than myself, on our narrative. https://twitter.com/jhamby/status/1303420976424611843

Bruno Maçães writes, "My hypothesis — the subject of my new book, History Has Begun — is that American life continuously emphasizes its own artificiality in a way that leads participants to believe that they are living a fantasy."

That's a great framing of our challenge now.

Here's my contribution. I grew up in Covina, a small suburb outside of Los Angeles. Sometimes I got to see our downtown in a big movie, like a few of the exterior shots in the famous "Bohemian Rhapsody" driving scene from Wayne's World.

So I didn't get "messed up by Hollywood" by being a child actor or growing up too close to any of the ugliness, but I did get a bit of an inoculation from a young age by seeing the land where I grew up as part of a big movie set that wasn't real.

We visited Universal Studios.

We visited Disneyland. We saw "Tomorrowland" and the "Monsanto Home of the Future", but we didn't necessarily confuse Hollywood with the real world because we were already grounded in seeing the semi-paradise of Southern California reflected in the entertainment we created.

Other artistic media don't have that groundedness in place. I was looking at the Wikipedia page for "house music" and "deep house" and both genres originated in Chicago, but I think about Daft Punk or Deee-Lite and I don't think of it being grounded as anywhere near to Chicago.

I think about acid house and Manchester, England, not Chicago and Detroit and the midwest. Maybe part of that is prejudice from being on one of the two coasts.

Getting back to the problem of Americans retreating into fantastical universes of positive thinking, it's a big one.

My dad got suckered into that way of thinking, big time: "the Secret", "positive thinking", "think and grow rich". Success stories and success self-talk are ways to soothe anxiety that don't actually help you as much as making progress in your own unique real-life life story.

It's no coincidence that Donald Trump is a product of the Norman Vincent Peale "Power of Positive Thinking" church. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/donald-trump-2016-norman-vincent-peale-213220

Even if you use such teachings to become personally powerful, it's in the way Trump did, with no purpose beyond self-worship and hedonism.

And for most people who get suckered into the "positive thinking" school, it doesn't even do that much, but rather just gets people set up for cycles of disappointment or just not challenging themselves because of fear of failure.

The useful types of self-therapy are practical.

I have some good books with titles like "How to Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything" that talk about talking yourself down from anxious modes of thinking where you think you're going to die and fail and everyone hates you and all that sort of rejection sensitivity.

The kind of self-help guru cult "mind over matter" thinking that Donald Trump represents is a dangerous, narcotic, dopamine hit kind of thinking that is the explanation for why Americans are suffering under the pandemic and recession and collective delusions believing in saviors.

oh, because you can find everything on YouTube, here's what Downtown Covina looks like today, in case you want to compare it to the shots from Wayne's World or any other media you might have seen that was filmed there.

They renovated the street lights not long before Wayne's World was filmed, in large part because the city was hoping to attract movies and TV production companies to film scenes there as a visual substitute for any generic Midwestern town anywhere in North America.