I once had a work colleague—otherwise
seemingly sane—who confessed to me that he believed in aliens.
“They’re all around us,” he told me solemnly.
I remember this conversation well, because I’d never had one
quite like it before and never have since. When I asked why we couldn’t
see the aliens, he didn’t answer the question directly, but
he assured me they were about to reveal themselves. (This was 14
years ago; I’m still waiting.) He went on to explain his theory
that our intuition knows more than our conscious minds allow us
to believe; our intuition was preparing us for the revolution that
would come about when the aliens made themselves known. “People
sense big changes coming,” he said. “You notice how
anxious people are, dude? Everyone’s on edge. People can’t
settle down and they don’t know why. They’re on the
move, getting away from the water. They’re moving to higher
ground.”
If only that were true. When Hurricane Andrew hit the following
year, I recalled my colleague’s strange, earnest assertion
and wondered what he would have made of the widely-reported fact
that more and more people were actually moving closer to the coasts.
The recent obliteration of large swaths of New Orleans, our national
Atlantis, has only confirmed the obvious fact that if our inner
voices are telling us to move inland, we’re not listening.
My colleague believed our intuition and the aliens would save us
from our many follies; the leaders of New Orleans and Louisiana
believed (when and if they thought about it at all) that the levees
and a merciful God were going to protect them from the folly of
building a major metropolis in the mother of all flood zones.
Now that we’re blithely and aggressively moving into the “healing”
and “rebuilding” phases along the Gulf Coast, with public
officials on the right and left falling all over each other in the
rush to hold forth on the immovability of New Orleans, it may finally
be time for us to reconsider the strong component of fantasy we’ve
indulged in our public culture for many decades. By fantasy, I don’t
mean the usual human tendency to downplay danger and put the best
face on a bad situation. That’s called “coping.”
Nor do I mean the worthy effort of imagining how a disaster might
be prevented. That’s called “problem solving.”
Fantasy is the conscious invention of an alternate, solipsistic
reality that undercuts, upends or altogether effaces actual reality.
My daughter, nearly three years old, is already an expert fantasist:
“Who are you pretending to be?” she asks several dozen
times a day. If she’s being Zoe from Sesame Street, then I’m
supposed to be Elmo; if she’s being the princess, then I have
to be the friendly dragon. Everything we do, from breakfast to bedtime,
must be somehow reconciled with the fantasy of the moment. “This
whole room is the castle,” she says, indicating the living
room. “That’s the witch’s tower,” she says,
pointing to the closet. Of course, the world of fantasy is the three-year-old’s
natural domain. But adults have been encroaching on the child’s
turf little by little. The most popular movies of the past 30 years,
from Star Wars to Titanic to The Matrix have been fantasies; the
video game industry is built entirely on people’s desire to
immerse themselves in alternate worlds; the hottest thing in the
publishing industry is the frequently surreal Japanese graphic novel;
and even in the real world, people increasingly book vacations to
fantasy lands like Walt Disney World or Las Vegas or a cruise ship
in the Caribbean. If this fascination with fantasy were confined
to the world of entertainment, there would be little reason for
concern. But when people begin talking about putting New Orleans
right back where it was in the bathtub (“This whole big area
below sea level is a city!”), or building several thousand
new homes in the Nevada desert (“That’s the Eiffel Tower,
and this is the Egyptian Pyramid!”), or teaching intelligent
design in science classes, it’s as if the three-year-olds
have taken over.
New Orleans itself—the city as it was, and, increasingly,
as it is remembered—is emblematic of our cultural propensity
for fantasy. Tourists have long imagined the Big Easy as a playground
for adults, a place where men and women could indulge themselves
without judgement or consequences. Even the food had a pornographic
quality about it. Yet for its residents, few cities in America were
more violent, polluted or poor. Many news organizations have reported
on the inequities and iniquities of New Orleans as if they had somehow
been veiled from our sight. Yet these same news organizations continue
to evoke the Big Easy myth and eulogize its passing, thus helping
to gild the image of what will undoubtedly be known someday as Old
New Orleans. Of course it is sad to lose the aesthetic marvel of
that unique city, and something will be lost if its seething cultural
stew never manages to return to a full boil. But it would be far
more unfortunate if the fantasy of New Orleans is allowed once more
to supplant the reality and clear the way for future cataclysms.
My remarks may seem callous at a time when a large percentage of
the Gulf Coast remains devastated and thousands of people are still
homeless. But given the events of the four years since 9/11, it
should be obvious to a whole lot more of us just how dangerous our
fantasies have become. Katrina, Iraq and 9/11 have all, in different
ways, punched holes in the notion of a hyperpower America that is
the culmination of our liberties and character and is the leader
and envy of the world. If we continue to blunder along the way we’ve
done lately, trusting in aliens, angels, the Bush Administration,
or any other flight of fancy to set things straight, we’re
going to drown just like every other nation in the history of the
world that has lost touch with reality. The storm is here and the
waters are rising. My fellow Americans, it’s time to move
to higher ground.
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