If the Saunterer mistaketh not, these words of Andy Warhol need to be understood:
Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening in the Midwest, or down South, or in Texas, that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time. And your own life while it’s happening to you never has any atmosphere until it’s a memory. So the fantasy corners of America seem so atmospheric because you’ve pieced them together from scenes in movies and music and lines from books. And you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one. (Quoted from America, by Andy Warhol. New York: Harper & Row. 1985.)
Failure to grasp this raises the danger of basing our decisions on the captivating fantasy world rather than on the warts-and-all real world. Technology moves on, putting us in an increasing flux of media impressions. That may be growing our fantasy world at the cost of shrinking our sense of the real world. (A test of this idea would be to see whether or not the population-adjusted disillusionment rate is rising.) For a brief biography of Andy Warhol, click here.
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