In the summer of 1835 an enslaved black woman — blind, toothless, paraplegic — caught the attention of a young white man seeking to make his fortune. She had claimed to a newspaper reporter that she was “George Washington’s mammy” and was 161 years old. The white man bought her and took her on tour, “carrying out my new vocation of showman.”
The poor woman was soon dead, but P. T. Barnum was on the way to fame and fortune. The man we associate with the circus was much more than an entertainer; he was a principal actor in the construction of an all-American tradition: the blurring of truth with fiction.
America is the home of magnificent human achievement. I used to complain to the BBC that our coverage of it contained little besides stereotypical stuff about guns and poverty: why, if the place was as ghastly as we portrayed, was it so successful? So rich? Why did half the world want to live there? Why San Francisco, rather than Irkutsk?
Go and tell us, the BBC said, and for many years, as North America Editor, I did. But a decade later, with the benefit of distance and hindsight, I realise that the real story of America cannot be told by separating out the rational positive stuff from the dross. It’s all one, folks. It’s a show. The greatest show on Earth in some respects but in others the most dangerous, the most distressingly foolish. A show that entertains us, hypnotises us, and might eventually destroy us all.
One book above all others knits together the strands of American thinking — and lack of thinking — that combine to bring us this uniquely peculiar brew of madness and sanity, kindness and cruelty, civilisation and dystopia. Fantasyland, by Kurt Andersen, was a rip-roaring success among the NPR-listening New York Times-reading metrosexual elites, when it was published in 2017. As one reviewer observed, “The people who should read this book won’t — because it’s a book — but reality based citizens will get a kick out of this winning romp through centuries of American delusion.”
That’s the point, and the joy of Fantasyland. In a literary world weighed down by formulaic, squealing Trump-phobia, this is a work of history that tells us why Trump is where he is and why this is an entirely predictable consequence of how America is. There is nothing new about the Donald. Nothing unique. Nothing, even, that is outside the normal. This is the conclusion, baleful as it is, of Fantasyland.
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