Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Thursday, November 9, 2017

Buster's Book Recommendation


FANTASYLAND:  How America Went Haywire 
A 500-Year History
 by Kurt Andersen

The author is a novelist, editor and radio host of Studio 360.  Fantasyland is an amusing chronological tour of our endless mental reliance on myth, superstition, delusion and magical thinking.  Andersen builds a convincing case that we Americans have always had a particular affinity for being bamboozled by "fake news and alternative facts" -- from our founding by religious nuts/cultists to George Washington and the cherry tree to snake oil to slavery to P.T. Barnum to McCarthyism to Billy Graham to movies, TV, advertising, suburbia, Vegas, Playboy, Disneyland, Beatniks, Hippies, drugs, Nixon, Reagan, the internet, and now Trump, we've consistently demonstrated a willing gullibility, an over-dependence on belief, and a devotion to the untrue.

I highly recommend Fantasyland.


(Andersen began writing this book well before Trump announced his candidacy.  By the time he finished writing, the Abominable Showman had been elected president.  Unimaginable, but it fits the pattern.)
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"The easiest thing of all is to deceive oneself; for we believe whatever we want to believe." -- Demosthenes

 "Unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities.  Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick

 "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan

 "My biggest concern is the rise of the idea that personal opinion should be given the same weight as what's scientifically understood." -- Bill Nye

"There was a time in this country when, if you were a dumbass, you had to shut the fuck up." -- Bill Nye

 "Face it, folks, we are a divided nation, divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart." -- Stephen Colbert

 "The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, with every individual free to believe anything he or she wishes, has metastasized out of control." -- Kurt Andersen





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