Synthisophy
Skinwalkers - Chapter 18
The following are direct quotes from the book Tribe, On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger, May 2016, except for statements in italic added.
The ultimate act of disaffiliation isn’t littering or fraud, of course, but violence against your own people. When the Navajo Nation—the Diné, in their language—were rounded up and confined to a reservation in the 1860s, a terrifying phenomenon became more prominent in their culture. The warrior skills that had protected the Diné for thousands of years were no longer relevant in this dismal new era, and people worried that those same skills would now be turned inward, against society. That strengthened their belief in what were known as skinwalkers, or yee naaldlooshii.
Skinwalkers were almost always male and wore the pelt of a sacred animal so that they could subvert that animal’s powers to kill people in the community. They could travel impossibly fast across the desert and their eyes glowed like coals and they could supposedly paralyze you with a single look. They were thought to attack remote homesteads at night and kill people and sometimes eat their bodies. People were still scared of skinwalkers when I lived on the Navajo Reservation in 1983, and frankly, by the time I left, I was too.
Virtually every culture in the world has its version of the skinwalker myth. In Europe, for example, they are called werewolves (literally “man-wolf” in Old English). The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. Anglo-American culture doesn’t recognize the skinwalker threat but has its own version. Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006. Rampages are usually defined as attacks where people are randomly targeted and four or more are killed in one place, usually shot to death by a lone gunman. As such, those crimes conform almost exactly to the kind of threat that the Navajo seemed most to fear on the reservation: murder and mayhem committed by an individual who has rejected all social bonds and attacks people at their most vulnerable and unprepared. For modern society, that would mean not in their log hogans but in movie theaters, schools, shopping malls, places of worship, or simply walking down the street.
Here is a list of skinwalkers, and their shooting rampages in the USA over the last 30 years. Note that from 1988 to 1997 there were 6; from 1998 to 2007 there were 9; from 2008 to 2017 there were 24. Why does it appear that over the last 10 years our society is generating a sharp increase in skinwalkers, individuals committing murder and mayhem who have rejected all social bonds and attack people at their most vulnerable and unprepared? Perhaps it is because, as Sebastion Junger stated, this “shows how completely detribalized this country has become.” Our neurological genetic predisposition, the warrior ethos, all for 1 and 1 for all, is no longer relevant in modern life. As individuals in society it appears we are now very far from our evolutionary roots.
In 2013, areport from the Congressional Research Service, known as Congress's think tank, described mass shootings as those in which shooters "select victims somewhat indiscriminately" and kill four or more people.
From: http://timelines.latimes.com/deadliest-shooting-rampages/
Mass shootings over last 30 years until October 1, 2017. And recent news from October 2 to December 31, 2017.
November 14, 2017: Rampaging through a small Northern California town, a gunman took aim on Tuesday at people at an elementary school and several other locations, killing at least four and wounding at least 10 before he was fatally shot by police, the local sheriff’s office said.
November 5, 2017: Devin Patrick Kelley carried out the deadliest mass shooting in Texas history on Sunday, killing 25 people and an unborn child at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, near San Antonio.
October 1, 2017: 58 killed, more than 500 injured: Las Vegas
More than 50 people were killed and at least 500 others injured when a gunman opened fire at a country music festival near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, authorities said. Police said the suspect, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock, a resident of Mesquite, Nev., was was found dead after a SWAT team burst into the hotel room from which he was firing at the crowd.
Jan. 6, 2017: 5 killed, 6 injured: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
After taking a flight to Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport in Florida, a man retrieves a gun from his luggage in baggage claim, loads it and opens fire, killing five people near a baggage carousel and wounding six others. Dozens more are injured in the ensuing panic. Esteban Santiago, a 26-year-old Iraq war veteran from Anchorage, Alaska, has pleaded not guilty to 22 federal charges.
May 28, 2017: 8 killed, Lincoln County, Miss. A Mississippi man went on a shooting spree overnight, killing a sheriff's deputy and seven other people in three separate locations in rural Lincoln County before the suspect was taken into custody by police, authorities said on Sunday.
Sept. 23, 2016: 5 killed: Burlington, Wash.
A gunman enters the cosmetics area of a Macy’s store near Seattle and fatally shoots an employee and four shoppers at close range. Authorities say Arcan Cetin, a 20-year-old fast-food worker, used a semi-automatic Ruger .22 rifle that he stole from his stepfather’s closet.
June 12, 2016: 49 killed, 58 injured in Orlando nightclub shooting
The United States suffered one of the worst mass shootings in its modern history when 49 people were killed and 58 injured in Orlando, Fla., after a gunman stormed into a packed gay nightclub. The gunman was killed by a SWAT team after taking hostages at Pulse, a popular gay club. He was preliminarily identified as 29-year-old Omar Mateen.
Dec. 2, 2015: 14 killed, 22 injured: San Bernardino, Calif.
Two assailants killed 14 people and wounded 22 others in a shooting at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino. The two attackers, who were married, were killed in a gun battle with police. They were U.S.-born Syed Rizwan Farook and Pakistan national Tashfeen Malik, and had an arsenal of ammunition and pipe bombs in their Redlands home.
Nov. 29, 2015: 3 killed, 9 injured: Colorado Springs, Colo.
A gunman entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., and started firing.
Police named Robert Lewis Dear as the suspect in the attacks.
Oct. 1, 2015: 9 killed, 9 injured: Roseburg, Ore.
Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer shot and killed eight fellow students and a teacher at Umpqua Community College. Authorities described Harper-Mercer, who recently had moved to Oregon from Southern California, as a “hate-filled” individual with anti-religion and white supremacist leanings who had long struggled with mental health issues.
July 16, 2015: 5 killed, 3 injured: Chattanooga, Tenn. A gunman opened fire on two military centers more than seven miles apart, killing four Marines and a Navy sailor. A man identified by federal authorities as Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, 24, sprayed dozens of bullets at a military recruiting center, then drove to a Navy-Marine training facility and opened fire again before he was killed.
June 18, 2015: 9 killed: Charleston, S.C.
Dylann Storm Roof is charged with nine counts of murder and three counts of attempted murder in an attack that killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. Authorities say Roof, a suspected white supremacist, started firing on a group gathered at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after first praying with them. He fled authorities before being arrested in North Carolina.
May 23, 2014: 6 killed, 7 injured: Isla Vista, Calif.
Elliot Rodger, 22, meticulously planned his deadly attack on the Isla Vista community for more than a year, spending thousands of dollars in order to arm and train himself to kill as many people as possible, according to a report released by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office. Rodger killed six people before shooting himself.
April 2, 2014: 3 killed; 16 injured: Ft. Hood, Texas
A gunman at Fort Hood, the scene of a deadly 2009 rampage, kills three people and injures 16 others, according to military officials. The gunman is dead at the scene.
Sept. 16, 2013: 12 killed, 3 injured: Washington, D.C. Aaron Alexis, a Navy contractor and former Navy enlisted man, shoots and kills 12 people and engages police in a running firefight through the sprawling Washington Navy Yard. He is shot and killed by authorities.
June 7, 2013: 5 killed: Santa Monica
John Zawahri, an unemployed 23-year-old, kills five people in an attack that starts at his father’s home and ends at Santa Monica College, where he is fatally shot by police in the school’s library.
Dec. 14, 2012: 27 killed, one injured: Newtown, Conn.
A gunman forces his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. and shoots and kills 20 first graders and six adults. The shooter, Adam Lanza, 20, kills himself at the scene. Lanza also killed his mother at the home they shared, prior to his shooting rampage.
Aug. 5, 2012: 6 killed, 3 injured: Oak Creek, Wis.
Wade Michael Page fatally shoots six people at a Sikh temple before he is shot by a police officer. Page, an Army veteran who was a “psychological operations specialist,” committed suicide after he was wounded. Page was a member of a white supremacist band called End Apathy and his views led federal officials to treat the shooting as an act of domestic terrorism.
July 20, 2012: 12 killed, 58 injured: Aurora, Colo.
James Holmes, 24, is taken into custody in the parking lot outside the Century 16 movie theater after a post-midnight attack in Aurora, Colo. Holmes allegedly entered the theater through an exit door about half an hour into the local premiere of “The Dark Knight Rises.”
April 2, 2012: 7 killed, 3 injured: Oakland
One L. Goh, 43, a former student at a Oikos University, a small Christian college, allegedly opens fire in the middle of a classroom leaving seven people dead and three wounded.
Jan. 8, 2011: 6 killed, 11 injured: Tucson, Ariz.
Jared Lee Loughner, 22, allegedly shoots Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in the head during a meet-and-greet with constituents at a Tucson supermarket. Six people are killed and 11 others wounded.
Nov. 5, 2009: 13 killed, 32 injured: Ft. Hood, Texas
Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, allegedly shoots and kills 13 people and injures 32 others in a rampage at Ft. Hood, where he is based. Authorities allege that Hasan was exchanging emails with Muslim extremists including American-born radical Anwar Awlaki.
April 3, 2009: 13 killed, 4 injured: Binghamton, N.Y.
Jiverly Voong, 41, shoots and kills 13 people and seriously wounds four others before apparently committing suicide at the American Civic Assn., an immigration services center, in Binghamton, N.Y.
Feb. 14, 2008: 5 killed, 16 injured: Dekalb, Ill.
Steven Kazmierczak, dressed all in black, steps on stage in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opens fire on a geology class. Five students are killed and 16 wounded before Kazmierczak kills himself on the lecture hall stage.
Dec. 5, 2007: 8 killed, 4 injured: Omaha
Robert Hawkins, 19, sprays an Omaha shopping mall with gunfire as holiday shoppers scatter in terror. He kills eight people and wounds four others before taking his own life. Authorities report he left several suicide notes.
April 16, 2007: 32 killed, 17 injured: Blacksburg, Va.
Seung-hui Cho, a 23-year-old Virginia Tech senior, opens fire on campus, killing 32 people in a dorm and an academic building in attacks more than two hours apart. Cho takes his life after the second incident.
Feb. 12, 2007: 5 killed, 4 injured: Salt Lake City
Sulejman Talovic, 18, wearing a trenchcoat and carrying a shotgun, sprays a popular Salt Lake City shopping mall. Witnesses say he displays no emotion while killing five people and wounding four others.
Oct. 2, 2006: 5 killed, 5 injured: Nickel Mines, Pa.
Charles Carl Roberts IV, a milk truck driver armed with a small arsenal, bursts into a one-room schoolhouse and kills five Amish girls. He kills himself as police storm the building.
July 8, 2003: 5 killed, 9 injured: Meridian, Miss.
Doug Williams, 48, a production assemblyman for 19 years at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co., goes on a rampage at the defense plant, fatally shooting five and wounding nine before taking his own life with a shotgun.
Dec. 26, 2000: 7 killed: Wakefield, Mass.
Michael McDermott, a 42-year-old software tester shoots and kills seven co-workers at the Internet consulting firm where he is employed. McDermott, who is arrested at the offices of Edgewater Technology Inc., apparently was enraged because his salary was about to be garnished to satisfy tax claims by the Internal Revenue Service. He uses three weapons in his attack.
Sept. 15, 1999: 7 killed, 7 injured: Fort Worth
Larry Gene Ashbrook opens fire inside the crowded chapel of the Wedgwood Baptist Church. Worshipers, thinking at first that it must be a prank, keep singing. But when they realize what is happening, they dive to the floor and scrunch under pews, terrified and silent as the gunfire continues. Seven people are killed before Ashbrook takes his own life.
April 20, 1999: 13 killed, 24 injured: Columbine, Colo.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, students at Columbine High, open fire at the school, killing a dozen students and a teacher and causing injury to two dozen others before taking their own lives.
March 24, 1998: 5 killed, 10 injured: Jonesboro, Ark.
Middle school students Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden pull a fire alarm at their school in a small rural Arkansas community and then open fire on students and teachers using an arsenal they had stashed in the nearby woods. Four students and a teacher who tried shield the children are killed and 10 others are injured. Because of their ages, Mitchell. 13, and Andrew, 11, are sentenced to confinement in a juvenile facility until they turn 21.
Dec. 7, 1993: 6 killed, 19 injured: Garden City, N.Y.
Colin Ferguson shoots and kills six passengers and wounds 19 others on a Long Island Rail Road commuter train before being stopped by other riders. Ferguson is later sentenced to life in prison.
July 1, 1993: 8 killed, 6 injured: San Francisco
Gian Luigi Ferri, 55, kills eight people in an office building in San Francisco’s financial district. His rampage begins in the 34th-floor offices of Pettit & Martin, an international law firm, and ends in a stairwell between the 29th and 30th floors where he encounters police and shoots himself.
May 1, 1992: 4 killed, 10 injured: Olivehurst, Calif.
Eric Houston, a 20-year-old unemployed computer assembler, invades Lindhurst High School and opens fire, killing his former teacher Robert Brens and three students and wounding 10 others.
Oct. 16, 1991: 22 killed, 20 injured: Killeen, Texas
George Jo Hennard, 35, crashes his pickup truck into a Luby’s cafeteria crowded with lunchtime patrons and begins firing indiscriminately with a semiautomatic pistol, killing 22 people. Hennard is later found dead of a gunshot wound in a restaurant restroom.
June 18, 1990: 10 killed, 4 injured: Jacksonville, Fla.
James E. Pough, a 42-year-old day laborer apparently distraught over the repossession of his car, walks into the offices of General Motors Acceptance Corp. and opens fire, killing seven employees and one customer before fatally shooting himself.
Jan. 17, 1989: 5 killed, 29 injured: Stockton, Calif.
Patrick Edward Purdy turns a powerful assault rifle on a crowded school playground, killing five children and wounding 29 more. Purdy, who also killed himself, had been a student at the school from kindergarten through third grade.Police officials described Purdy as a troubled drifter in his mid-20s with a history of relatively minor brushes with the law. The midday attack lasted only minutes.
July 18, 1984: 21 killed, 19 injured: San Ysidro, Calif.
James Oliver Huberty, a 41-year-old out-of-work security guard, kills 21 employees and customers at a McDonald’s restaurant. Huberty is fatally shot by a police sniper perched on the roof of a nearby post office.
Synthisophy
Synthisophy
Integrate the Wisdoms of History into Present Culture
Addressing the polarized political climate in the USA
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Fantasyland - Chapter 22, webpage 4, continued
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The Economic Dreamtime
Entrepreneurialism that produces useful, innovative new products and processes is one thing. Bravo to Jobs and these entrepreneurs. But the free-market fundamentalism that became our governing paradigm starting in the 1980s had unfortunate consequences when it extended into wholesale wishfulness and denial of reality. Near the end of a speech he delivered at a conservative think tank around Christmastime in 1996, during the long boom, our libertarian chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, wondered, "How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?" Irrational exuberance: Greenspan is in essence saying the Nation’s neuroreality was far from actual reality. In other words, were we in danger of slipping off the reality tether, becoming so financially delirious we were heedless of our delirium? Yes, as it turned out.
The dot.com bubble was a historic economic bubble and period of excessive speculation that occurred roughly from 1997 to 2001, a period of extreme growth in the usage and adaptation of the Internet by businesses and consumers. During this period, many Internet-based companies, commonly referred to as dot-coms, were founded, many of which failed. During 2000–2002, the bubble collapsed. This was the popping of the dot.com neuroreality bubble.
Source: Wikipedia
Regarding the mortgage crisis and real estate bubble of 2008, three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, on October 22, 2008, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. A long-time leader of deregulation, Greenspan admitted to a congressional committee yesterday that he had been "partially wrong" in his hands-off approach towards the banking industry. "I have found a flaw," said Greenspan, referring to his economic philosophy. "I don't know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact." He said: "I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," said Greenspan. Greenspan admitted his previous neuroreality was incorrect. It takes great depth of character to do such.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/24/business/economy/24panel.html
The bubbles in technology stocks and real estate were classic American phenomena. We'd been there before - with the Virginia gold hunters in the 1600s, overbuilt railroads in the 1800s, rocketing Florida real estate prices in the early 1920s, and the value of U.S. stocks tripling in four years in the late 1920s. As the prime interest rate fell from 20 percent in 1981 to 4 percent in 2004, however, credit had never been so easy for so many Americans. The irrational exuberance, the national fantasy of good times rolling forever, had never lasted longer or been shared more widely. The Great Depression had chastened people in the 1930s, but that was then - by the 2000s, everyone who'd lived through it was elderly or dead. We were ready and hungry to believe in financial and economic fantasies again.
In less than a decade around 2000, the value of the average home almost doubled. Many, many middle-class Americans suddenly felt rich. The country seemed to be on some incredible Vegas winning streak or at a multigenerational rave that went on and on. (Actual raves, no coincidence, also emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.) We decided that Mardi Gras and Christmas are so much fun, we should make them year-round ways of life. Maybe some people knew deep down it couldn't last forever, just as some people found the incredible performances of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens . . . incredible. But no one wanted to be a buzzkill. The fantasies were more fun, and in the financial domain self-fulfilling.
To the technology and real estate and financial businesses, the years on either side of 2000 were like what the years on either side of 1970 were to the rest of American life: the prudent old rules no longer applied, anything seemed possible. But then the dot.com and real estate bubbles burst - truth and reality struck. Will reality strike the stock market again, presently (1.14.17) at 25,800. The market knows only reality and truth.
In Silicon Valley, a few clever and lucky people occasionally found a pot of gold, which encouraged everyone else to keep believing and wishing. The
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odds of any individual entrepreneur becoming a megawinner are vanishingly small, as they are for buyers of lottery tickets, and the jackpots in tech are capricious. The first generation of digital entrepreneurs to get amazingly rich in the 1980s and '90s - Gates, Jobs, Bezos - became billionaires in early middle age. In this century before and after burst bubbles and meltdowns it happened to younger, digital billionaires at thirty (Larrry page of Google) or twenty five (Evan Spiegel of Snapchat) or twenty-three (Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook) Which serves only to make the dream all the dreamier. What's the new term of art for the most financially successful tech start-ups? Unicorns, after the magical creatures in which only children believe.
It's correct to say that the financial meltdown of 2008 resulted from too much deregulation, too many arcane Wall Street innovations, and some fraud. But that's just one way of explaining it, the one that comfortingly focuses all the blame on government and a small class of the rich and powerful and deceitful. The deeper causes were more widespread and unconscious, the fantastical wishfulness affecting at least a large minority of Americans, maybe a majority.
One undeniable virtue of markets is that eventually they reflect hard facts. The financial world isn't prone lo permanent fantasy. During the 1990s and the early 2000s, however, Wall Street "honed the art of creating and selling financial products with an increasingly tenuous connection to reality. Nick Paumgarten wrote in The New Yorker right after the 2008 crash, “It was more like what anthropologists and psychologists call magical thinking, magical neuroreality - the tendency to believe that wishing it so makes it so". Americans clung to the conviction that you can have outsize return with little risk, leverage without recoil. This is what the clever financiers claimed that their inventions could do. Their colleagues and clients
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wanted to believe them. They all wanted to believe that their credit-default swaps could continue to insure against debt defaults. . . .
Magical thinking enables you to see good where there may be only bad.
The financiers were a mixture of Cynics and Believers. When their faith in the financial magic ended in 2008, they promptly chucked those wishful beliefs, of course, and defaulted to pure, reality-based Cynicism.
What ended that period of extreme financial make-believe? It wasn't grown-ups in charge stepping up and announcing it was crazy and doomed, that enough was enough. Rather, we finally ran through the supply of greater fools willing to pay a premium for the houses and other things the last group of fools had just bought. When America and the rest of the world were spanked by reality’s invisible hand, we got the meltdown and crash and Great Recession, the inevitable results of Fantasyland economics. The Truth hurts.
In 2009, I sincerely argued that our national near-death experience, in which we glimpsed the economic abyss, could sober us up and put us back on the realitv-based stralghter and narrower - a national reset! It was pretty to think so. Our voracious national craving for fantasy, however, when denied in one area, quickly finds other places to satisfy itself.
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As Fantasyland Goes, So Goes the Nation
Consider the experience of one prominent republican congressman from California's Central Valley. When he arrived in 2003, at twenty-nine, he was among the most conservative elected officials in Washington. The right-wing Heritage Foundation now ranks him in the most "liberal" third of House Republicans. "l used to spend 90 percent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter" about some real issue, he told The New Yorker. His typical constituent back in the 2000s had an opinion about "actual legislation. Ten percent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that's out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head," he said, during the last dozen years or so. Now only a small fraction of the messages from constituents are "based on something that is mostly true. It's dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they're doing." That’s quite a change in neuroreality. The congressman who sounded so sensible in 2015 was Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee. By 2017, he was a stalwart defender of a president whose specialty is passing along untrue conspiracy theories, such as the one about having been wiretapped in Trump Tower.
During the two decades leading up to the financial and economic crash of 2008, the Right and Far Right built out an unprecedented new multimedia infrastructure. There are now ten times as many talk radio stations as there were in the 1980s. Of the several shows with the largest audiences, all but one are about politics and government by and for right-wingers, with a combined daily audience of forty-five million. (The other show provides "biblically based" financial advice aimed at evangelicals, and directly behind those is Coast to Coast AM, the nightly conspiracy-and-magic-and-falsehood clearinghouse.)
Skepticism of the press and of academic experts has been a paramount fetish on the right for years, which effectively trained two generations of Americans to disbelieve facts at odds with their opinions. "For years, as a conservative radio talk show host," Charlie Sykes wrote in early 2017, "l played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to . . . destroy much of the right's immunity to false information." The conservative talk-radio host John Ziegler made a similar confession in 2016: "We’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience. And now it's gone too far. Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don't see how you reverse it." What has happened to our neurorealities? Have they become virtual realities?
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During the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, the GOP turned into the Fantasy Party, with a beleaguered reality-based wing. A Far-Right counterculture empowered millions of followers and took over the American Right, as their extremist predecessors succeeded in doing to evangelicalism and the gun lobby three decades earlier.
This book had been under way for a couple of years when the 2016 presidential campaign began. The fact that Fantasyland candidates were the consistent front-runners for the Republican nomination (Donald Trump and Ben
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Carson at first, then Trump and Ted Cruz) was surprising and appalling but also, I have to admit, a little gratifying to me - empirical proof of my theory as it applies to politics. The day after the Republicans' second primary debate in 2015, at the Reagan Library, before the debates became completely cartoonish, a shocked New York Times editorial called it:
a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre, that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates' lecterns.
It felt at times as if the speakers were no longer living in a fact-based world where actions have consequences, programs take money and money has to come from somewhere. Where basic laws - like physics and the Constitution - constrain wishes. Where Congress and the public, allies and enemies, markets and militaries don't just do what you want them to, just because you say they will.
I read that and said out loud, "Welcome to Fantasyland." After his election, another Times editorial granted that “Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody," that the "breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity."
I started paying close attention to Donald Trump a long time ago. ln Spy magazine, which I cofounded in 1986 and edited until 1993, we devoted many hundreds of hours to reporting and researching and writing three cover stories and countless other articles about him, dozens of pages exposing and satirizing his lies, brutishness, egomania, and absurdity. Now everybody knows what we knew then. In the pretwitter age, whenever he sent threatening letters and called us names in public - "It's a piece of garbage," he said of the magazine - it was amazing, trippy, as if Daffy Duck or Roger Rabbit had turned from the onscreen cartoon universe and replied. It was kind of providential that he came along just as we were creating a magazine to chronicle America's rich and powerful jerks. And I guess it's sort of providence redux that Trump became the center of all attention as I was in the middle of writing a history of America jumping the shark.
Donald Trump is a pure Fantasyland being with his fantasyland neuroreality, its apotheosis. If he hadn't run for president, I might not have mentioned him at all. But here he is, a stupendous Exhibit A. To describe him is practically to summarize this book.
He's driven by resentment of the Establishment. He doesn't like experts because they interfere with his right as an American to believe or pretend
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that fictions are facts, to feel the truth. He sees conspiracies everywhere. He exploits the myths of white racial victimhood. His case of Kids R US Syndrorne - spoiled, impulsive, moody a seventy year old brat – is extreme.
And he is first and last a creature of the fantasy-industrial complex "He ls P.T Barnum," his sister, a federal judge, said to his biographer Tim O’Brien in 2005. Even as a teenager in the early 1960s, Trump himself told O’Brien, he understood that any racket in America could be turned into an entertainment racket. “I said, 'You know what I’ll do? I am going to go into real estate. and I am going to put show business into real estate. I'll have the best of both worlds.’” Back then, in 1961, the historian Daniel Boorstein already saw what was coming in politics, what would make Trump president. "Our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals," because we live in a "world where fantasy is more real than reality," Boorstein wrote. "Strictly speaking, there is no way to unmask an image. An image, like any other pseudo-event, becomes all the more interesting with our every effort to debunk it."
Although the fantasy-industrial complex had been annexing presidential politics for more than half a century when candidate Trump came along, his campaign and presidency are its ultimate expression, like nothing we'd witnessed in real life or imagined we ever would. From 1967 through 2011, California was governed by former movie stars more than a third of the time, and one of them became president of the United States. But Trump’s need for any and all public attention always seemed to me more ravenous and insatiable than any other public figure's ever, similar to an addict's for drugs. Unlike Reagan or Schwarzenegger (but like Barnum, who also entered politics in middle age, between the two halves of his show business career), Trump was as much or more of an impresario as a performer, and not just in his real estate hucksterism and his deals with the WWE. Before the full emergence of Fantasyland, Trump's various enterprises would have seemed an embarrassing, ridiculous, incoherent jumble for a businessman, let alone a serious candidate for president. What connects a Muslim-mausoleum-themed casino in New Jersey to a short-lived sham professional football league to an autobiography he didn't write to hotels and buildings he didn't build to a mail-order meat business to a beauty pageant to an airline that lasted three years to a sham "university" to repeatedly welshing on giant loans to selling deodorant and mattresses and a vodka and toilet waters called Empire and Success to a board game named after himself to a TV show about pretending to fire people?
What connects them all, of course, is the new, total American embrace
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of admixtures of the fictional and real and of fame for fames sake, Trump's reality was a reality show before that genre or term existed. His home in Palm Beach, a Mediterranean-fantasy castle built at the height of the first Florida real estate bubble, is also a private club that costs $200,000 to join. “It’s like going to Disneyland and knowing Mickey Mouse will be there all day long,” says one of the members, a local billionaire. Trump has always played the character Donald Trump, the way William Cody played the character Buffalo Bill, but more so, because now there is no offstage.
When he entered political show business, after threatening to do so for most of his adult life, his portrayal of that character was an unprecedented performance - presidential candidate as insult comic with a ridiculous artificial tan. And the hair - colored gold like a clown’s in a farce, shamelessly unreal and whipped into shape as if by a patissier. Successful presidents and candidates have had to be entertainers for a while, but Trump went all the way. He used the pieces of the fantasy-industrial complex as nobody had before. He hired actors to play, enthusiastic supporters at the kickoff of his candidacy, and unlike the other candidates, he was an exciting star, so TV shows wanted him on the air as much as possible - as people who worked on those shows told me, they were expected to be careful not to make the candidate so unhappy he might not return.
As he began his campaign, a nine-year-old in Iowa he’d brought aboard his helicopter asked, “are you Batman?" And Trump replied: "l am Batman." Before any votes were cast, he bragged compulsively about his polling numbers, not even ratings, like on TV, but hypothetical votes, virtual votes. The campaign turned from a Batman subplot to a new postmodern genre that broke the fourth wall. Like no candidate ever before, Trump riffed in campaign speeches about the campaign, about his performances and box office. When a longtime PR man for tyrants took over, he followed suit, commenting on the Trump character and script and show as part of the show. “When he’s on the stage," Paul Manafort said, "he's projecting an image that's for that purpose. The part that he's been playing is evolving into the part that now you’ve been expecting but he wasn't ready for, because he had first to complete the first phase.'' Act one had finished, he said, and during act two. "the image is going to change." It did not then and has not since. "We're in more of a WWE brawl stage as a nation right now," Ben Carson explained. "This is the ultimate reality show”, Manafort said before the national convention, a show where the prize would be "the presidency of the United States." Then, as on a reality show, Manafort was abruptly asked to leave the tribal council area, chopped, fired.
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First the Internet enabled and empowered full Fantasyland. Then it did so for candidate Trump in 2015 and 2016, feeding him pseudonews on his phone and letting him feed those untruths directly to followers on social media. He is the poster boy for the downside of our digital world. "Forget the press," he advised people as a candidate - just "read the Internet." After he wrongly declared during the campaign that a certain anti-Trump protester "has ties to ISIS," he was asked if he regretted tweeting that falsehood. "What do I know about it?" he replied. “AIl I know is what's on the Internet." That statement says a lot.
But then he decided the Internet is a doubled-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows him to find and circulate conspiracy theories easily. "It gives a forum for people to express their ideas," a senior minion explained, so "when he sees an idea that he thinks is worthy of having a discussion about," he can immediately tweet it. On the other hand, Trump read on the Internet (Breitbart, lnfowars) that his elite enemies operating the Internet (Google) conspired to spread lies to hurt him. "Google's search engine," he announced at a rally just before the election, was "suppressing the bad news about Hillary Clinton. How about that?"
Fantastical conspiracy theories, a recurring Trump motif, have also been a recurring motif in the history of Fantasyland – the supposed schemes of
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witches and Catholics and Masons and Jews, now of Muslims and liberals and internationalists. Trump launched his political career by embracing brand-new conspiracy theory twisted around two other deep American taproots - fear and loathing of foreigners and nonwhites. In 2011 Trump became chief spokesperson for the fantasy that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, a fringe idea that he brought into the mainstream – he wasn’t a nut, he was Donald Trump! - so that it could be regularly promoted on Fox News and by an anchor on CNN. A dozen House Republicans cosponsored a federal bill that would require presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate and other proof that he or she isn't a secret foreigner; similar bills were introduced in state legislatures. After the Hawaiian bureaucrat who released a copy of the president's birth certificate died ln a private plane clash Trump tweeted: "How amazing. . . . All others lived" - suggesting the official had been murdered by the Obama conspiracy. Finally in the fall of 2016, he grudgingly admitted the president was indeed a natlve-born American - at the same moment that an Econontist/YouGov survey found a majority of Republicans still believed Obama probably or definitely was born in Kenya. That's a false neuroreality.
A conspiracy of scientists, journalists, and governments perpetrated the false idea of climate change, Trump has said for years. "Global warming has been proven to be a canard repeatedly over and over again," he declared, "mythical," "nonexistent," ''bullshit" "based on faulty science," "a total, and very expensive, hoax!" So much for science, fact and truth. He tweeted, "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” On that last one, he later claimed he'd been kidding.
Conspiracies, conspiracies, still more conspiracies. "Scalia," the rightwing host of the Savage Nation asked him on the radio in 2016, "was he murdered . . . ?" Well, Trump replied, "they say they say they found a pillow on his face, which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow." In fact, the pillow was found on the mattress, not on Scalia. On Fox and Friends he discussed, as if it were fact, the National Enquirer's suggestion that Tec Cruz's father was connected to JFK's assassination, "What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly, before the death, before the shooting? It's horrible." The Fox News anchors interviewing him neither challenged nor followed up. He relived the 1993 fantasy' about the Clintons' friend Vincent Foster - his death, Trump said, was “very fishy” because Foster "had intimate
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knowledge of what was going on. He knew everything that was going on, and then all of a sudden he committed suicide. . . . I will say there are people who continue to bring it up because they think it was absolutely a murder." He has also promised he's going to make sure “you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Center." What do you think of Trump’s neuroreality? But it has all worked for him, because a critical mass of Americans is eager to believe almost any conspiracy theory, no matter how implausible, as long as it jibes with their opinions and feelings.
Not all lies are fantasies, and not all fantasies are lies; people who believe untrue things can pass lie detector tests. Trump's version of unreality is a patchwork of knowing falsehoods and sincerely believed fantasies, which is more troubling than if he were just a liar. His insistence that he didn't grab or kiss any of the dozen women who in 2016 said he had, unbidden - "Nothing ever happened. Didn't exist. This was all fantasyland” - is a lie, I'm close to certain. But he probably really believed that "the murder rate in our country is the highest it's been in forty-seven years,” the total and dangerous falsehood he told leaders of the National Sheriffs Association in the Oval Office. Whatever he believes or doesn't, he makes untrue assertions more frequently than any U.S. leader in recorded history. The fact-checking organization PolitiFact looked at four hundred of his factual statements as a candidate and as president and found that 50 percent were completely false and another 20 percent mostly false. After he became president, according to The Washington Post, he issued an average of more than four falsehoods or "misleading claims" per day.
The New York Times compared the number of lies Trump told in his first hundred days in office compared to Obama in his eight years as President:
How do you think their neurorealities compare?
He gets away with this as he wouldn't have in the 1980s and 1990s, when he first talked about running for president, because now factual truth is just one option, the consensus reality, and Americans feel entitled to their own facts. After he won the election he began routinely referring to all unflattering or inconvenient journalism as "fake news”. Trump's White House counselor, Kellyanne Conway, was explicit about that their first weekend in the White House, when the inauguration crowd estimate was at least 75 Percent smaller than the president wished it to be. "Our press secretary" she said on Meet the Press,"gave alternative facts to that." Is this an alternate neuroreality? When his public approval declined during his first months in office, Trump simply refused to believe it: “Any negative polls," the president tweeted at dawn one morning from Mar-a-Lago, "are fake news."
In Fantasyland, refusing to be fact-checked is celebrated - "his brazenness is not punished," the Economist noted, "but taken as evidence of his willingness to stand up to elite power." Lying works for Trump even when
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denying that he told lies he was recorded telling. "From the point of view of political psychology," the University of Connecticut philosophy professor Michael Lynch explains, "the more blatant the contradiction, the better. . . . If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really meant…… The most disturbing power of contradiction is that its repeated use can dull our sensitivity to the value of truth itself." Very disconcerting neurorealities. If our sensitivity to the value of truth is dulled, it's easier for everyone to become more like him and those in his thrall.
Did he really think he lost the popular vote because of a conspiracy that arranged for millions of noncitizens, "illegals," to vote for Clinton? "l'm a very instinctual person," President Trump said when a Time reporter challenged him on this claim, "but my instinct turns out to be right." Did he really think President Obama ordered his telephones to be tapped and that a conspiracy of government officials covered it up? My hunch is that both of those conspiracy theories were as much sincere beliefs as lies.
The people who speak on Trump's behalf to journalists struggle to defend or explain his assertions. They'll sometimes point out that a fantasy was asserted by somebody else, too - as when the press secretary quoted a Fox News commentator who'd said, without evidence, that British intelligence spied on Trump at Obama's behest. Or they'll ask that Trump be graded on a curve: because he's new to politics, the things he says mustn't always be taken literally. Asked about "the President's statements that are . . . demonstrably not true," the White House counselor asked the reporter to please remember all "the many things that he says that are true."
According to The New York Times, the people around Trump say his baseless certainty "that he was bugged in some way" in Trump Tower is driven by "a sense of persecution bordering on faith." And indeed, their most honest defense of his false statements has been to cast them practically as matters of religious conviction - he deeply believes them, so . . . end of story. That's what the press secretary did concerning the nonexistent three to five million illegal voters: in a single encounter, he earnestly reminded reporters that Trump "has believed that for a while" and "does believe that" and "it's been a long- standing belief he's maintained" and "it's a belief that he has maintained for a while."
Which is why a quarter of Americans subscribe to that preposterous belief themselves. And in Trump's view, that overrides any requirement for facts. Where are our neurorealities taking us?
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“Do you think that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence? The anchor of ABC World News Tonight asked President Trump. "No," he replied, "not at all! Not at all – because many people feel the same way that I do." Apparently, alternate facts and alternate truths are leading to alternate neurorealities.
America was the dreamworld creation of fantasists, some religious and some out to get rich quick, all with a freakish appetite for the amazing. Beyond our passionate beliefs in various kinds of magic and destiny, our particular religious DNA, supercharged, was the source of other defining American habits of mind as well, such as the craving for the mysterious to be literal, and the hair-trigger sensitivity to persecution by elites. Right now it appears fantasy may be beating truth. Is it in our DNA?
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I’ve referred repeatedly to full Fantasyland and to events and phenomena (such as President Trump) that wouldn't have happened before it emerged. Until now I’ve avoided setting a precise date. When did it begin? Obviously after the 1960s and '70s, and after Ronald Reagan. The 1990s where the hinge decade, Oprah and Behold a Pale Horse and the Satanic Panic and Limbaugh and The X-Files swept the nation, the NRA called law enforcement officers jackbooted thugs, a wrestler from the booming WWF was elected governor of Minnesota, Disney built its perfect make-believe town in Florida, the federal building in Oklahoma City was blown up, the Pats Robertson and Buchanan ran for president, President Clinton was investigated for murdering his White House counsel before being investigated for lying about adultery, Final Fantasy was launched, and so were the National Institutes of Health's Alternative Medicine Center and reality TV and Fox News. And, of course, the Internet: starting in1995 everyone could browse the Web, so let's call 2000, the first year a majority of Americans were online, the unequivocal first year of full Fantasyland.
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But then I look at the rise and fall of ancient Greece. The seven centuries of Greek civilization are divided into three areas - the Archaic, then the Classical, then the Hellenistic. During the first, the one depicted by Homer, Greeks' understanding of existence defaulted to supernaturalism and the irrational. Then suddenly science and literature and all the superstar geniuses emerged - Aeschvlus, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle - in the period we canonize as "ancient Greece." But that astonishing era lasted less than two centuries, after which Athens returned to astrology and magical cures and alchemy, the end. Why? According to The Greeks and the Irrational, by the Oxford classicist Eric Dodd, it was because they finally found freedom too scary, frightened by the new idea that their lives and fates weren't predestined or managed by gods and they really were on their own. Maybe America's Classical period has also lasted two centuries, 1800 to 2000, give or take a few decades on each end.
In any case, our circumstance doesn't seem altogether new. Fantasyland has been the norm for the run of humanity; the unusually rational and scientific centuries here and there along the way, like the last few, are exceptions. Dominant cultures have had their enlightenments and golden ages before, then returned to primitivism and murk.
Where will we go as a nation?