Awake, for morning in the bowl of night has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight

And, lo, the hunter of the east has caught the sultan’s turret in a noose of light.

Spanish life is not always likeable but it is compellingly loveable – Christopher Howse: ‘A Pilgrim in Spain’.

Cosas de España/Galiza

Ceuta

• The Moroccan authorities are reported to be prosecuting 25 people for organising the ‘invasion’. Possibly the usual susects.
• Reader David in La Coruña has told me of this podcast, entitled Who Really Benefits from the Ceuta Migration Crisis? The claim is that it is the far-right, who’ve certainly made strenuous efforts to use it for their purposes, as many US-origin commentaries in my Spain feed have shown. Often showing an alarming ignorance about Europe. Which is nothing new, of course.
• On the same theme . . . The psyop of the European far-right.

Non-Spanish workers took more of the country’s new jobs than Spanish nationals for the first time on record this year. These jobs have been centred in a few sectors – domestic and care work, construction, farm work, retail and, especially, hospitality. Given the many complaints from the hostelry sector about the difficulty of recruiting staff, it’s not a surprise to see it cited in this list.

Talking of increases . . . In one year, Galicia has gained 15,000 residents. Thanks to foreigners, the region has surpassed 2.73 million inhabitants. Non-Spanish residents now make up 7% of the population against less than 3% 20 years ago—and as they are of working age, they are increasing the workforce in many sectors.

Our octopus catchers are demanding that imported creatures are identified as such. Which restaurateurs won’t like, as they will command lower prices than the local stuff, even if superior. And will/might stop any labelling of foreign octopuses as ´local´’.

The Middle East War

The latest update from Naked Capitalism. A harsh dose of reality.

Trump is trapped between escalation and an Iran deal on Tehran’s terms. The US president faces few good options to exit a war he once said would end swiftly with the Islamic republic’s surrender.

The United States of Trump America

You and I might agree that RFK is not fit for any public office but he clearly disagrees and is making a naked bid for the presidency. Well, why not? In TrumpWorld anything is possible, if you have enough money. Special treat . . . The podcast begins with an insight into the secret of Trump’s new hair.

At the end of this post, I’ve attached the last pages of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland – effectively a summary of it. Worth a read. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might have said.

Meanwhile, a few things he wrote about Trump. Whose 2nd term will surely have confirmed Andersen’s view that Trump was the logical endpoint of trends of the last 50 or 60 years in particular. All written 10 years ago, before we reached peak Trump:-

• He is the poster boy for the downside of our digital world.
• White born-again Christians and Trump really do share a contempt for (and from) the so-called elites. Fantasyland’s regions have open borders: specifically Christian make-believe isn’t part of Trump’s make-believe, but both he and they definitely do make believe and feel the truth regardless of facts.
• 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.
• 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. 
• He gets away with this as he wouldn’t have in the 1980s and ’90s, 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.
• In Fantasyland, refusing to be fact-checked is celebrated.

AGW

Ignorance disguised as knowledge. Classic USA?

AI

The boom is certainly burning a lot of cash.

Spanish

• Alquitrán: Tar
• Becerro: Calf
• Descantarse: To choose

Did you know?

The hula-hoop craze of 1958.

You Have to Laugh

‘Sparkling wit’: How come there’s no other name for thesaurus?

Finally . . .

FANTASYLAND

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. In addition to being the first designed-built Protestant nation, America was also the first designed-built Enlightenment nation. The two fed each other—and sometimes became toxic in combination . . .

Mix the Protestant impulse to find the meaning and purpose in everything with the Enlightenment’s empiricism, and you get our American mania for connecting all the dots, irrationality in rationalist drag. You get phrenology and homeopathy and intelligent design. You get complex data-rich schemes calculating the dates that God created the world and everything on it and the dates when God or Quetzalcoatl will erase and reboot it. You get books packed with facts and factlike assertions proving that this or that omnipotent conspiratorial enemy—witches! Masons! extraterrestrials! Muslims!—has infiltrated America to enslave or destroy us.

Our special American alloy of Protestantism and the Enlightenment also generated our extreme, self-righteous individualism. I have searched for the truth and discovered it (Protestant and Enlightenment). My intuitions are equal to facts (Protestant). My skepticism is profound (Enlightenment) except concerning my own beliefs (Protestant). Who I am is whatever I imagine myself to be (both), and You’re not the boss of me (both).

As we did with our founding religious legacy, we’ve taken from our Enlightenment legacy certain pieces of the program—skepticism, freedom of thought, mutable truth—and selectively amped them to extremes at the expense of other Enlightenment virtues, such as reasonableness and rigorous self-doubt. It’s what pathologists call hypertrophy, when an organ or muscle grows too big, or like an autoimmune disease, when an essential process that normally keeps us healthy runs amok and makes us sick.

It wasn’t only our peculiar amalgam of new sixteenth-and seventeenth-century religion and new seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophy that laid Fantasyland’s groundwork. Other American idiosyncrasies had roles. Ours was a country created by wildcatters and entrepreneurs, hustlers of every kind. Wide open spaces made for solitude as much as for community, which in turn made for still more extreme individualists—people alone for months on end marinating in their own thoughts and feelings and fancies. The spaciousness also made it easy for Americans, especially at the start and again more recently, to sort themselves into homogeneous, self-reinforcing geographic clusters where all the inhabitants share the same script. Fantasies were always synergistic in America. The wild new religions prepared people for wild new pseudoscience and vice versa. If serious people took mesmerism seriously, why shouldn’t other people regard homeopathy and phrenology and cure-all pills as state-of-the-art science? If Yale professors believed there were winged men on the moon, why shouldn’t other people believe it was possible to communicate with the dead? If America’s great men were convinced of a hidden government of occultists and a Vatican plot to destroy liberty, who could gainsay the claims of any vast scheme of evil genius?

Our nostalgia tic also explains a lot. Americans have always been apt to think of America as the best place on Earth—but also that it used to be so much better, more pioneering, more charming, more virtuous, more authentic. People imagined in the 1700s that it was better in the theocratic wilderness of the 1600s, then in the 1800s that it was better back in the 1700s, before the racket and speed of factories and railroads; in the 1900s we imagined it had been so much better back in the 1800s, when we still depended on guns, before we moved from farms and small towns into noisy crowded cities; today, on top of most of those older nostalgias, we miss the good old days when Americans worked at secure well-paying jobs for years on end. In 1900 a lot of people were nostalgic for the time when Americans were all Protestant, later for when Americans were all Christian, and now for when we were practically all white—and when men were men and women were women and the love that dared not speak its name didn’t speak it.

Like other fantasy-flavored impulses, American nostalgia can express itself happily or fearfully, as wishful stage-set charm or they’ve-wrecked-our-stage-set rage. Nostalgia enacted and gratified by the fantasy-industrial complex is mostly the happy kind. The kinds of nostalgia that drive our politics can either be fond, like Ronald Reagan’s, or angry and scared; lately it’s the latter.

In fact, our political culture sometimes comes in happy and scary forms inside the same big tent. The late 1960s were experienced simultaneously as the threshold of violent revolution and as a romp through cloud-cuckoo-land. Most of the Americans who have recently been most certain that America is both wrecked and the best place ever call themselves Republicans. Our tendencies to fear the new and to reject reason have appeared on the left as well as the right, often in a tag-team fashion—first Transcendentalists and utopian communards in the mid-1800s, then Protestant fundamentalists in the early 1900s. But during the last half-century, the cycles got faster. The right-wing conspiracists of the 1950s were followed in the 1960s by conspiracists on the left, then the hippies of the 1960s appeared almost simultaneously with extreme Christians.

The spectrum from madly full of dread to madly optimistic also applies to our spiritual beliefs. There are the believers in irremediable human depravity, Armageddon any day, most people bound for hell, in the meantime persecution of the virtuous by Satan’s agents. Then there are the more hopeful—instant E-Z salvation, imminent global alakazam, plenty of room in Heaven. And finally the superhopeful, believing that angels are here improving the world right now, that shamans and healers channel mystical energies, that actionable magic can increase your net worth or in the afterlife send you to your own planet as an immortal. Then there are people with strong beliefs in both supernatural terror and bliss, bipolar optimist-pessimists—they can chat with God or Jesus or ancient spirits but may also be possessed by demons; they believe that chants and diluted poisons give them virtual superpowers but also that an evil corporate-government conspiracy is out to sicken them with vaccines and genetically modified food

By the mid-1800s, entertainment was bigger here than anywhere (theaters, popular music, superstar singers, circuses, dime museums, magicians), but the new wrinkle was that other businesses and professions were becoming show businesses—religion, medicine, journalism at first—and that real-life heroes (Daniel Boone, Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull) morphed into fictionalized show-biz versions of themselves. The zone between make-believe and true was expanded and became a quintessential product of entrepreneurial America.

The fantasy-industrial complex invented and dominated by Americans continued to sprawl exponentially, taking over parts of every conceivable realm—politics, real estate, retail, “hospitality,” lifestyle, life. We have encased ourselves in a wall-to-wall 24/7 collage of fantasy and fantastic reality. Sure, at Disney World or an IMAX theater or playing Mortal Kombat, we know we’re in fictional domains. But otherwise? In so much of the rest of our lives, the nominally authentic parts—the ways we look and dress, where we live and eat, the world depicted by infotainers and news commentators and Internet exhorters—many, many distinctions between fake and real have been erased. A lot of American reality is now virtual. We’re often unaware whether we’re inside or outside of Fantasyland.

FOR THREE CENTURIES, in culture and religion as well as in politics and economics, the fantasist and realist impulses existed in a rough balance, with a powerful animating tension between the two tendencies. That dynamic balance was key. We were like an internal combustion engine, a great machine powered by endless little explosions—every idiosyncratic vision and dreamy ambition permitted to ignite—but with control mechanisms and gaskets and a sturdy engine block, all keeping the contraption from blasting apart. Or if you will, the American id was kept in check by a strong ego and superego.

For instance, when the U.S. government was created, the Founders invented a cautious Senate to overrule the House fiends when necessary—Washington told Jefferson it was like a saucer to cool impossibly hot coffee. Jefferson’s nemesis Alexander Hamilton hoped the Electoral College would do something similar every four years, that a sober, deliberative group could have the final say in case the People ever elected some unacceptable charlatan or demagogue with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity.”

Renegade religious sects emerged, then calmed as they grew and matured. We submitted our faith in free markets to constraints so that the system seemed fair enough to continue operating successfully. Dream the impossible dream, build it and they will come, put the pedal to the metal, let your freak flag fly—but play by the rules, and don’t drink and drive. Being an American always meant having a chip on your shoulder about fancy-pants know-it-alls, but when push came to shove, the know-it-alls who actually knew important things remained firmly in control. Most of the time it worked okay.

As life became easier, however, the easier climate was more conducive to the loosey-goosier parts of the American psyche. A tipping point came in the 1960s, when our yin began to be overwhelmed by our yang. We discarded the good residue of our founding Puritan ethos—discipline, austerity, hyperliteracy—and doubled down on the old Puritan beliefs in magic and an imminent apocalypse and utopia. After 1970 certain ingrained American habits—individualism, righteous conviction, open-mindedness—were all at once out of control, like flora and fauna in a newly tropicalized climate, blooming luxuriantly and shooting out seeds.

Then the economic climate changed again. Postwar prosperity had afforded fantasy-prone Americans the luxury of indulging more and more fantasies, and the Internet allowed them to inhabit more all-encompassing fantasies even more of the time. But around the turn of this century, the economic balminess ended for at least half of America. As a chilly dead-end dusk and gloom descended on the disappointed and newly disempowered, we did not as a nation cope by reverting en masse to old Yankee virtues—self-restraint, realism, pragmatism, and compromise. Too many of us had become too habituated to our various forms of magical thinking. As the American dream of endless upward economic mobility came to seem increasingly like myth, all sorts of pure myths and fantasies became still more appealing and seemed more real. The unprecedented and broadly shared affluence of our twentieth century—with its go-go blowout starting in the 1960s—was a prerequisite to Fantasyland, but the arrival of full Fantasyland was accompanied by the end of those economic glory days for most people.

According to psychologists, stress can trigger delusions, and engaging in fantasy can provide relief from stress and loneliness. According to sociologists, religion flourishes more in societies where people frequently feel in economic jeopardy. According to social psychologists, belief in conspiracy theories flourishes among people who feel bad about themselves; they may be powerless to improve their lives, but knowing about all the alleged secret plots gives them a compensatory jolt of what feels like power.

When Barack Obama first ran for president, his most memorable campaign gaffe was to describe this dynamic. “You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania,” he told a group of supporters in San Francisco in 2008, “and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for twenty-five years and nothing’s replaced them. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment … as a way to explain their frustrations.” Sure, it was condescending, but it was also true. The political scientists who wrote American Conspiracy Theories (2014) found that the least educated are almost twice as likely as the most educated to be highly predisposed to believing conspiracies.

For half a century, several generations of Americans lived with a binary view of the world, totalitarian bad guys versus the Free World. But after the Soviet Union collapsed and China became a normal country, global geopolitical reality was exposed in all its messy, confusing, shades-of-gray complexity. Russia is no longer Communist or much of a superpower, but it’s still evil or … what, no, maybe not? China still calls itself Communist and is now our fellow superpower, but … economically it’s even more unequal than we are and it’s also our indispensable economic partner? Muslim countries used to be either pro-American or pro-Soviet, but now they’re either secular (good) or fundamentalist (bad) … but wait, the United States is allied with and fighting regimes and rebels in both categories?

As a way to make the world seem understandable again, to focus on a single enemy, the idea of the existence of some kind of elite cabal became irresistible to more and more Americans. Somebody must be pulling the strings. It can be simultaneously terrifying and comforting to believe that bad people are tyrannizing you. So conspiracists squint at the real world and see the exercise of power as both ridiculously simple and brilliantly complex. They fictionalize reality. Instead of the real-life Rube Goldberg contraption with no single designer or operator, they imagine a few puppet-masters in charge of a global Borg in which all the circuits and software operate in perfect synchrony. It’s the way religious fundamentalists see physical reality as God’s perfectly designed masterwork rather than as it really is, a somewhat kludgy but astounding accumulation of happy accidents with nobody in charge.

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 were 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 in 1995 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.

Here’s the thing: the fraction of Americans who believe that the Bible is “the actual word of God … to be taken literally, word for word,” is unchanged—33% in 1990, 32% now.

As far as religion goes, then, America isn’t so much secularizing as splitting into two distinct societies, one more secular and reality-based, one much less so. Rationalism and reasonableness are gaining some ground, but the true believers, still the bigger cohort, are sticking to their guns. We are polarizing religiously the way we have been polarizing politically. As I’ve said, that’s not coincidental, it’s synergistic.

Which makes America exceptional in a curious new way. Instead of the Puritans’ shining city upon a hill, a newly invented model society to which the rest of the world should aspire, we’ve become a warts-and-all model of the messy, mistrustful rest of the whole world—split between cosmopolitan seculars and tribal fundamentalists, between educated people hopeful about possible futures and others desperate to return to some dreamy past.

Arendt wrote: A mixture of gullibility and cynicism have been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.… Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

History doesn’t repeat. But damn, this rhyme is chilling.

The idea that progress has some kind of unstoppable momentum was always a very American belief. But it’s really an article of faith more than a historical law—the Christian fantasy about history’s happy ending was reconfigured during the Enlightenment into a set of secular fantasies about inevitable improvement. One version was our blithe conviction that America’s forms of freedom and democracy and justice and affluence must prevail in the end.

I can imagine, for the first time in my life, that America has permanently tipped into disarray and decline.

I wonder if it’s only America’s destiny, exceptional as ever, to unravel in this Fantasyland fashion. Or maybe we’re early adopters, the canaries in the global mine, and Canada and Denmark and Japan and China and all the rest will eventually follow us down our tunnel. The German historian Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, a complete pessimist about our civilization, wrote in 1931 that “only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.” I’m not there yet, but why should modern civilization’s great principles—democracy, freedom, tolerance—guarantee permanently great outcomes? Just as Christian believers think God granted humans free will to sin, the Enlightenment granted us the freedom to create the Dark Ages all over again.

“Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out.… I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago.

The historical period of superstition and darkness that looms in our rearview mirror is the closest one, the Middle Ages in Europe, preceding the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. Renaissance, of course, means “rebirth”—the rediscovery six hundred years ago of much earlier golden ages of intellectual clarity and rigor and brilliance, in ancient Rome and Greece. For a moment this cheers me: give us some time, and we’ll have another renaissance!

But then I look at the rise and fall of ancient Greece. The seven centuries of Greek civilization are divided into three eras—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—Aeschylus, 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. Because I’m an American, a fortunate American who has lived in a fortunate American century, I remain more of an optimist than a pessimist. I haven’t abandoned hope. Even as we’ve entered this winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well. During these same last three decades, Americans accomplished the miracle of reducing murders and other violent crime by more than half. We decoded the human genome, elected an African-American president, recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion years ago, and created Beloved, The Simpsons, Goodfellas, Angels in America, The Wire, The Colbert Report, Transparent, Hamilton, and, in my extended family alone, a dozen excellent babies. Since 1980, the fraction of Earth’s people living in extreme poverty has plummeted from more than 40 percent to 10 percent. I do despair of our devolution toward unreason and magical thinking, but not everything has gone wrong.

What is to be done? I don’t have an actionable agenda, Seven Ways Sensible People Can Save America from the Craziness. But I think we can slow the flood, repair some dikes and levees, maybe stop things from getting any worse.

If we’re splitting into two different cultures, we in reality-based America must try to keep our zone as large and robust and attractive as possible for ourselves and the next generations. We need to adopt a guiding principle, based on those aphorisms of Daniel Moynihan and Thomas Jefferson I’ve quoted so often: You’re entitled to your own opinions and your own fantasies, but not your own facts—especially if your fantastical facts hurt people.

We need to become less squishy. We must call out the dangerously untrue and unreal. That may sound impractical, but a grassroots movement against one kind of cultural squishiness has taken off and reshaped our national politics—the opposition to so-called political correctness. Antifantasy is different, because PC is more in the eye of the beholder, ranging from the dopey and annoying to expectations of common decency, and everyone in a culture as diverse as ours is bound to draw those lines differently. However, distinguishing among the factually true, the dubious, and the false, at least outside of religion, doesn’t involve many judgment calls about taste or “appropriate” and “inappropriate.” This struggle should be less fraught.

But it will require a struggle to try to make America reality-based again. We few, we happy few, we band of sisters and bothers—in fact, we’re not really so few. Fight the good fight in your private life. You needn’t get into an argument with the stranger who claims George Soros and Uber are conspiring to make his muscle car illegal, but do not give acquaintances and friends and family members free passes. If you have children or grandchildren, teach them to distinguish between true and untrue as fiercely as you do between right and wrong or between foolish and wise. We need to adopt new protocols for information media hygiene. Would you feed your kids a half-eaten casserole a stranger handed you on the bus, or give them medicine you got from some lady at the gym? Do you have unprotected sex with people you just met? Remember when viral was a bad thing, referring only to the spread of disease? The same goes for what you read and watch and believe.

And fight the good fight in the public sphere. One task, of course, is to contain the worst tendencies of Trumpism and cut off its political-economic fuel, so that a critical mass of fantasy and lies doesn’t turn it into something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudoconservatism. Progress is not inevitable, but it’s not impossible either.

Cultural predispositions and national characters are real, and societies do come to crossroads and make important choices. But while our Fantasyland tendencies were present from the beginning, the current situation was not inevitable, because history and evolution never are. Nor now is any particular future. We could regain our national balance and composure. These last decades may turn out to have been a phase, one strange act of our ongoing epic, an unfortunate episode in the American experiment that we will finally move past and chalk up to experience. Nations and societies have survived and recovered from far more terrible swerves, eras that felt cataclysmic as they were happening. The good news, in other words, is that America may now be at peak Fantasyland. We can hope.

My thanks to those readers who take the trouble to Like my posts.

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For new readers: If you’ve landed here looking for info on Galicia or Pontevedra, try here. If you’re passing through Pontevedra on the Camino, you’ll find a guide to the city there.

If you´re thinking of moving to Spain, this link should be useful to you. And this, on the annual costs of owning property here.