[lbo-talk] US as Fantasyland

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 21 11:02:15 PDT 2006


So it's a bit like a Thomas Kinkade painting. "There is even a Thomas Kinkade-themed community of homes, 'The Village at Hiddenbrooke,' outside of Vallejo, California," says WIkipedia -- a nostalgia for a time that never really existed but which the American popular psyche is so good at inventing.

Here in Dallas, TX, we have "Six Flags Over Texas." Many Texans don't like to remember that one of those flags was the French flag. (Dallas began as a French socialist colony.) The Six Flags park has six areas themed after each of the flags' regions (Spain, etc.). The "French" section of Six Flags is actually replica of a New Orleans square. During Katrina, while New Orleans was under the Gulf of Mexico, I still could have gone to Six Flags to enjoy "New Orleans."

-B.

Carl Remick wrote:

"[Best article on the Iraq war I've seen in a while.]

Living in a Fantasy

At Home and Abroad

These places are better than simple gated communities; these are gated communities of the mind and imagination, the final step out of the 21st century into timelessness, into never-never land, a sweet and safe place which did not exist in any of the wonderful back-thens but have become such a large part of the American here and now. What a strange situation: a backward-peddling nation, unable to look at its present, much less deal with contemporary problems, physically constructing a series of back-lot movie sets for itself to live in.



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