I finished my Amazon review of Fantasyland tonight. There's a reference to SIM at the end. See below, if interested:

Mocking our Make-Believe by the Sultan of Snark

Having read a gushing review in The Atlantic, I was looking forward to reading Fantasyland: How America went Haywire: A 500-Year History. Written by Kurt Andersen and published in 2017, Fantasyland has the potential to tick off two-thirds of adult Americans, from squishy relativists, video game addicts and survivalists to end-time rapture brigaders, Star Wars/Trek nerds, devotees of intelligent design and many battalions of (already ticked off) Trump voters.

Midway through, I was poised to give Fantasyland a five-star rating. After a good bit of reflection – much more than this reviewer usually invests in a read – the score has been downgraded.

It isn’t that Prosperity Gospel hustlers, Old Testament bigots and 6,000 year-old earth adherents aren’t worthy of scorn and a proper skewering. They are.

Andersen addresses the giant themes of religious belief-as-anti-reason throughout the book. To his credit, he includes human potential movements and their true believers in his critique, throwing scores of his fellow baby boomers under the bus, mocking their Dianetics pamphlets, men’s drumming circles and healing crystals. Andersen finds general differences between large groups of Western religious believers and grades them accordingly. Jews and Catholics get a pass (sort of), Mormons are viciously skewered, and Protestants are graded on a curve. It is unfortunate that Andersen does not acknowledge one of the primary reasons for possessing religious faith: that there is potential for a joyous life after death, one that promises to be superior in every aspect to the actual one being lived in the present. That promise, illusory, elusive – all right, irrational - brings millions to pews on Sunday morning. Countless more tune in to religious broadcasts, hoping, praying, maybe still halfway believing in The Rapture. We agnostics, atheists and Unitarians can choose to respect those belief systems, hoping for a measure of reciprocation, or we can unleash sneering condensation in the manner of Richard Dawkins or the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat. Dire Straits recorded the Sultan of Swing. As regards matters of individual religious belief, Kurt Andersen is the Sultan of Snark.

There is one prominent theme that does not fit his Fantasyland paradigm; our post-World War II movement to the suburbs. Millions of Americans have moved from small towns, farms and inner cities to suburbs for very rational reasons: less crime, more green spaces, better performing public schools, compatible neighbors. We haven’t done so in pursuit of some little house on the prairie fantasy life. Andersen gives us a proper east coast progressive scolding, waiting until page 321 to share the real reasons behind his contempt for suburbanites. “Take the soft fantasies that underlay our monomaniacal suburbanization of the last seventy years” he writes. “Aesthetics and the illusions of pastoral life aside, they wound up creating a highly problematic national dependence on cars and oil, made commutes too long and too many good jobs too far away from where workers live, and encouraged people to become unnecessarily overweight and therefore unnecessarily expensive for society to keep alive.”

And there you have it: suburbanites drive cars – worse, SUVs and trucks. They – we – drive to work and back, to the grocery store and pharmacy, to hobby stores and soccer practices. They – we - hog all the good jobs in the city where the more deserving people live and get fat in the process and – to top it off – use more than our share of health care. We must have a time out and forego our afternoon whole wheat cracker and think about what we’ve done.

Most of the rest of the book is worth the purchase price. Fantasyland is chock full of delightful observations about our 21st century Civil War re-enactment world. There are spot-on observations about our national obsession with conspiracy theories, a topic worthy of a non-academic oriented book all its own. What do you say, Kurt?

A lot of our trips to Fantasyland represent nothing more than a re-prioritization of our leisure time. Quite a few of our fathers and grandfathers spent many an hour at the corner tavern hoisting a cold one (or seven), a pack of unfiltered Camels within easy reach. Their children and grand-children have discovered different leisure pursuits, most not involving alcohol or tobacco.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my SimLeague baseball teams. One of them is only four games behind the wild-card leader and we can make the post-season if our corner outfielders can just step up their offensive production.

amazing review and and a book that sounds extremely courageous......i dont know if this is covered in the book but the issue of greatest importance to me are the religions that threaten non believers and even non - adherents with hell and damnation...... to me that is an evil plain and simple that attacks the fundamental human right to think for themselves and all peoples and religions that espouse that inimical and insidious philosophy dangerously intersect.

Tax all Religions and Cults from Earth

a man without superstition is a man without foundation

"amazing review and and a book that sounds extremely courageous......i dont know if this is covered in the book but the issue of greatest importance to me are the religions that threaten non believers and even non - adherents with hell and damnation...... to me that is an evil plain and simple that attacks the fundamental human right to think for themselves and all peoples and religions that espouse that inimical and insidious philosophy dangerously intersect."
dino27

Thanks for the kind words...Andersen's book does not have a singular focus; i.e. religious fundamentalism, but he does address the topic, directly and indirectly. Chris Hedges addressed the issue head-on when he wrote American Fascists. This is a copy of my review from June 12, 2017.

The Cult of Hyper-masculinity
I will never forget my first impressions of a multi-level marketing rally I attended in 1982. It was a warm and sunny late summer day. I was surrounded by hundreds of clean-shaven young men wearing navy-blue sport coats, white shirts and red ties. Sporting a beard and wearing a brown sweater over a yellow golf shirt, I felt completely out of place. The rhetoric of the speakers was intense, the reactions of the audience members were equally intense. It was clear that we weren’t merely talking about the prospect of making a few extra dollars by selling household products. It was a poignant lesson in the power of top-down conformity and group-think.
Chris Hedges wrote about top-down conformity, group-think, faith, conversion techniques, hyper-masculinity and other timely topics in American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Published in 2006, American Fascists, is a snapshot of the evangelical Christian movement at the beginning of the new century. There have been dozens of books and scholarly articles written about Christian fundamentalism in the past quarter century – but American Fascists is well researched and organized into ten chapters built upon common traits that all right-leaning theologies have in common.
Hedges, a classic American Sourpuss – has the man ever cracked a full smile? – paints a dire picture of America’s future, IF the leaders of Christian fundamentalism ever get a firm grip on the levers of political power. Given the benefit of hindsight, Mr. Hedges may have overstated the size, scope and influence of the religious right. Church attendance continues to decline, both in terms of real numbers and the percentage of the overall population.
However. Alabama lawmakers are set to allow a church to create its own police force, which might be the first such law enforcement organization in the country. A bill in the Alabama Legislature would let a church in suburban Birmingham make an unprecedented move - establish its own police force. Critics say the bill isn't constitutional and vow to fight it.
Furthermore: The first clue that Donald Trump would embed the extremist views of Christian fundamentalism in his Cabinet was his appointment of the utterly unqualified Betsy DeVos to the post of Education Secretary.
Robert P. Jones (The End of White Christian America) believes the influence of the religious right is slowly waning. Their leaders will still be able to influence elections in the deep south and rural Midwest, but, hopefully, their national power will be neutralized by newer, more rational voices emerging from the evangelical ranks and by the implosion of the Trump Presidency.
American Fascists is a very polarizing book, as evidenced by the one-sentence negative reviews posted here. Nonetheless, it is an important addition to our understanding of religion, religious leaders, people of faith and the relationship between religion and politics in America.

We may be in the minority,, here and elsewhere, but it felt good to take my compassionate atheism out for a walk on this forum last night.

i think of myself as a compassionate agnostic who can step on the cracks........there is reason for optimism for the usa as the ranks of atheists and agnostics and believers without bibles is growing every year undisputed by all respected polling.

what i want from my government is good works

what i want from my god is transparency

hail jesus

hail science

Grab em' by the p*ssy

warpaths by keegan, art o maneuver by leonhard

No idea how I managed to get to be this old without having read it before but I just finished 'On The Road' By Jack Kerouac Just such unforgettable use of language. Not sure I would have appreciated it as much if I had read it when I was younger but who knows. Might have inspired me to do some things differently .... which would have been ... well different.

Now have a couple of different books going, I did get 'The Coldest Winter' by Halberstam and have just started it, and am meandering through 'The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning' by Jeremy Lent. I'm finding it to be slow going and am not sure I'm going to make it though but I'll give it a while longer yet.

"No idea how I managed to get to be this old without having read it before"

I said essentially the same thing after reading Kerouac's The Dharma Bums about ten years ago!

the twelve ceasars by suetonius

half the damn book is religion

the other half is 85 BC to 95 AD

the third half is now