The Vanishing of Reality
Do I want to interfere with the reality tape?
And if so, why?
Because, he thought, if I control that, I control reality.—Philip K. Dick, “The Electric Ant”
Surreal and chaos have become two of those words invoked hourly by journalists trying to describe daily reality in America in the second decade of the new millennium, a time when nineteen kids are shot every day in the United States, when the president of the United States plays a game of nuclear chicken with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, when artificial-intelligence engines are writing poetry and novellas, when it’s getting more and more difficult to tell the difference between headlines from The Onion and headlines from CNN.
Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the sixties, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth writes of American reality: “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.” The daily newspapers, he complains, “fill one with wonder and awe: is it possible? is
