The U.S. and maybe California in particular are the "Most Successfully experimental culture in the world". However, having grown up in Los Angeles I know that being experimental is "Controlled Chaos". Not everyone can survive being this experimental. And in the process many people die. So, being experimental can be dangerous just as never changing for any reason is often fatal too. So, maybe the Greek statement "Moderation in everything" is the one to live by.
And then there is Trump who is a New York Version of Hollywood experimentalism and Bannon is a form of experimentalism too. However, most of the time you don't find this "Las Vegas" Gambling level of experimentalism in a Conservative Republican Guise because that isn't really what it is to begin with. You might call it a form of Libertarianism gone amuck but that would be slightly untrue too. So, maybe what I would call it is "Hucksterism 'Barnum and Bailey' Style gone Amuck because what Trump sells is mostly the lies you need to tell to make a lot of money swindling the common people out of everything.
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FANTASYLAND by Kurt Andersen | Kirkus Reviews
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kurt-andersen/fantasyland/
Jun 15, 2017 - GET WEEKLY BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS: ... All are waystations of Andersen's “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false ...
FANTASYLAND
How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
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KIRKUS REVIEW
When did Americans come to shun reality? When did the American
experiment become a congeries of solipsisms?
“As I pass by fish in barrels,” writes Studio 360 host Andersen (True Believers, 2012, etc.) at the outset of this entertaining tour of American irreality, “I will often shoot them.” Indeed he does, but then, as writers as various as H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens long ago discovered, American society offers endless targets. Andersen finds a climacteric in Karl Rove’s pronouncement, a dozen years ago, that those people who live in “the reality-based community” need to understand that “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” True enough: Andersen closes with the rise of Trump-ism and its “critical mass of fantasy and lies” that is in danger of becoming “something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudoconservatism.” It’s not just the Trumpies who are ruining things for everyone; by the author’s account, the nice liberals who refuse to vaccinate their children are as much a part of the problem as those who flock to creation museums and megachurches. All are waystations of Andersen’s “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false beliefs, but whole lifestyles cobbled from them, which lands us in the 1960s and its ethos: “Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.” It’s not, but that’s where we are today, at least by Andersen’s account, though he hastens to add that approving nods to political correctness are not necessarily the same thing as endorsing perniciousness. Throughout, the author names names—Dr. Oz, for one, won’t be happy, and neither will Oprah—and takes no prisoners, offering incitement for the rest of us to do the same. “We need to become less squishy,” Andersen writes, and instead gird up for some reality-based arguments against the “dangerously untrue and unreal.”
A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.
“As I pass by fish in barrels,” writes Studio 360 host Andersen (True Believers, 2012, etc.) at the outset of this entertaining tour of American irreality, “I will often shoot them.” Indeed he does, but then, as writers as various as H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens long ago discovered, American society offers endless targets. Andersen finds a climacteric in Karl Rove’s pronouncement, a dozen years ago, that those people who live in “the reality-based community” need to understand that “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” True enough: Andersen closes with the rise of Trump-ism and its “critical mass of fantasy and lies” that is in danger of becoming “something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudoconservatism.” It’s not just the Trumpies who are ruining things for everyone; by the author’s account, the nice liberals who refuse to vaccinate their children are as much a part of the problem as those who flock to creation museums and megachurches. All are waystations of Andersen’s “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false beliefs, but whole lifestyles cobbled from them, which lands us in the 1960s and its ethos: “Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.” It’s not, but that’s where we are today, at least by Andersen’s account, though he hastens to add that approving nods to political correctness are not necessarily the same thing as endorsing perniciousness. Throughout, the author names names—Dr. Oz, for one, won’t be happy, and neither will Oprah—and takes no prisoners, offering incitement for the rest of us to do the same. “We need to become less squishy,” Andersen writes, and instead gird up for some reality-based arguments against the “dangerously untrue and unreal.”
A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.
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