May 27, 2018: Chasing Rabbits, Puppets on His String, Shrinking the Imagination

“One pill makes you larger

and one pill makes you small

and the one that mother gives you

don't do anything at all

go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall

and if you go chasing rabbits

and you know you're going to fall

tell em a hookah-smoking caterpillar

has given you the call

call Alice, when she was just as small

young men on the chessboard

get up and tell you where to go

and you've just had some kind of mushroom

and your mind is moving low

go ask Alice, I think she'll know

when logic and proportion

have fallen sloppy dead

and the white knight is talking backwards

and red queen's off with her head

remember what the door mouse said

feed your head

feed your head”

----Jefferson Airplane “White Rabbit”


This is the “Generation of Swine”. Conspiracy theories abound, paranoia strikes deep, foremost “Americans have always had” wrote David Brooks in last Friday's New York Times, “a tremendous capacity for fantasy. Jay Gatsby is a classic American hero because he constructed a fantasy version of himself and then attempted to live it. John Wayne constructed a fantasy version of the American West, which a lot of people try to imitate.” (1)

Citing author Kurt Anderson's “Fantasyland” Brooks writes that “for roughly three centuries America's fantasist and realist impulses existed in rough balance”.(2) From Hugh Hefner's “fantasy version of masculinity” (3) to Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary's of “an acid-dripping New Age” (4) the country seems to have disappeared down the rabbit hole.

“Two great writers who died this month tracked the explosion of fantastical thinking. In 1961 Philip Roth wrote an essay for Commentary called 'Writing American Fiction,' in which he endorsed Benjamin DeMott's observation that America was then experiencing a 'universal descent into unreality. Roth would go on to make the most of it. 'Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,' he told the Paris Review

“Tom Wolf “ continues Brooks, “blasted the American berserk into the stratosphere. He tagged along with the Pump House Gang. He chronicled the ESP believers and the Upper East Side aristocrats who imagined they were radical Black Panthers.

Recently we've let the fantasy dog out for a romp. 'Donald Trump is pure fantasyland being, its apotheosis,' Andersen writes. Trump is celebrity subsuming governance. Every day he produces great geysers of fantasy—some which rip the cultural fabric (Mexican rapists), some which merely tug it ('Obama had my 'wires tapped'). (5)

It matters not that the outcome of each collision vindicates reality and Trump's world “dissolves into nothing; its when he seduces the rest of us to move into it. It's not when he ignores the facts; its when he replaces them by building an alternate virtual reality...(6)

Citing historian Daniel Boorstin that one cannot “refute an image with a fact”, Brooks goes on to explain: “Every pseudo-event 'becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it.' Trump gets to monopolize attention ever more comprehensively and deepen his credibility as anti-establishment hero”. (7) And, it should be noted, ever since at least the release of “Mrs. Robinson” and motorcycle gang movies of the 1960's the anti-establishment hero has been the only hero the “Generation of Swine” have felt obliged to respect.

The second problem observed by Brooks is “that when you agree to operate within his fantasy, even if you are motivated by the attraction of repulsion, you've given the man your brain. Sometimes my Trump-bashing friends and I seem like puppets on his string.”

Therein lies the rub. This fascination with all things tRUMP has led to the losing “control of our own consciousness”. Citing “a fascinating essay in Literary Hub by the book agent Erik Hane”, Brooks continues, that “Hane reads through the slush piles of new novel submissions. These days they are often about Trump. The novelists, he writes, have lost control of their own consciousness: 'These authors are not writing the political moment so much as the moment is writing them.

“Hane, who writes at the top of his voice continues, 'it is one of fascism's goals to monopolize our attention. It would like to shrink our imagination'''...(8)

Gone is the nation that, like Paul Bunyan, stood astride the world. Gone is the nation that put men on the moon. Gone too is the ethic of practicality and compromise based upon scientific study and empirical reality. Gone are leaders who would, in the words written by Bernard Shaw and spoken by Robert Kennedy “dream things that never were and ask why not?” No, the two-dimensional fantasy world of the idiot wrong has diminished our imagination and with it our confidence; this fascism that shrinks the imagination also diminishes our democracy because we no longer believe in ourselves. No longer able “to seek a newer world” (9), we instead turn to the tyrant.

For half a century now the country has been sucked, slowly at first, through a worm-hole and into an alternate universe. It is a fantasyland where logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead and, indeed, the white knight is talking backwards as tRUMP struggles, like Gatsby, to live out a fantasy version of himself. That his fantasy has become our nightmare doesn't matter for “some hookah-smoking caterpillar has given us the call.” (10) Go ask “The Donald”, now that the 'tar baby' sits ten feet tall.

“'An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh

Impeach and Imprison

_______

1. Brooks, David. “Trump's Magical Fantasy World” The New York Times. Friday May 28, 2018.
   Page A21
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. From a poem by Tennyson from which the title to Robert Kennedy's campaign book was taken.
10. From the song “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane.