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row prisoner in Texas awaiting his lethal injection, a demand so outrageous that it led to
calls for the custom of tailor-made last meals to be abolished. One likes to imagine that the
prisoner in question was a satirist. Perhaps he intended to beat the needle with a carefully
timed coronary.
Like a popular singles bar, the United States is a place which teems with infinite possib-
ility. It does not just contain pockets of fantasies like Hollywood and Disneyland, but is in
some ways a full-blown fantasy in itself. In America, de Tocqueville remarks, “something
which does not exist is just something that has not been tried yet.” Fictions are just facts
waiting to happen. The nation does not accept that a shadow may fall between the con-
ception and the execution. Because the mind is what matters, anything you dream up is as
good as done. All you need is will-power. This is one of several ways in which America is
a godly nation. God, too, is thought to manifest no gap between the possible and the actu-
al. His thoughts are his deeds. He does not sit around biting his fingernails and wondering
whether to bring Jack Nicholson down with a nasty bout of flu.
The line between fact and fantasy continually wavers. Fiction can be truer than reality,
as the career of Charlie Sheen exemplifies. Sheen, who despite his dishevelled private life
is an immensely talented actor, is much more real in front of the cameras than he is in real-
ity. Reality for him is largely fantasy. It is only when he is acting that he can be himself.
Only the act of transporting himself into fiction can impose enough discipline and coheren-
ce on his personality for him to come truly alive. Otherwise he dissolves into a soggy mess
of conflicting moods and impulses. His shambolic off-stage persona is a mere shadow of
his genuine, fictional self. Those who have too few restraints tend to fall apart, which is
not what the doctrinaire free marketeers want to hear. Some bits of American reality strike
an observer as blatantly fictitious. One hears that there is to be a federal investigation into
whether Donald Trump is a real or imaginary character. The Dickensian resonance of his
surname points to a likely conclusion. One or two celebrities who have been frozen out of
Britain for illicitly masquerading as real people have made their mark in the United States.
It is a commonplace that Americans tend to describe what happens in the real world by
reference to movies. Life exists to imitate art. An American to whom I once showed the
half-timbered Tudor buildings of Stratford-upon-Avon high street exclaimed: “Great shot!”
Artistic dreamers try to tell it like it is, while hard-nosed Wall Street stockbrokers manifest
a kind of communal madness. Life in the transnational corporations becomes more sur-
real than a Buñuel film. The world of business was once associated with sober realism, but
nowadays it is closer in some respects to a crazed religious cult. From time to time, it acts
out the economic equivalent of collective suicide. Corporate executives are admonished to
ignore unpalatable facts and disavow inconvenient problems. Mao would have been proud
of their delusional zeal. Realism is socialistic and unpatriotic. There are times when self-de-
ception and megalomaniacal self-belief oust rational decision-making altogether. To com-
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