The first great advertising campaign was more than just a sales pitch—it was the collective hallucination of an entire nation, a grand seduction that convinced a critical mass to Potemkin the very idea of America. It wasn’t about selling soap or cigarettes; it was about selling a dream, an illusion so potent that it seared itself into the DNA of every man, woman, and child who dared to cross the Atlantic or be born on its shores. The campaign was a savage testament to the power of belief, a psychotropic cocktail that spiked the national consciousness and led to the selective breeding of true believers.
Natural selection in this mad experiment didn’t favor the strong or the wise, but the gullible, the easily swayed, those who could be hypnotized by the flicker of a TV screen or the siren call of a jingle. They became the chosen ones, the ones who made it through the crucible of advertising and emerged on the other side, ready to swallow the next big lie. These survivors of the commercial apocalypse are not the masters of discernment; they don’t dig for truth in the rocky soil of reality. No, they’re a different breed, one that thrives on the fantastical and the absurd, hovering somewhere on the spectrum between the rational and the irrational, never quite landing on either.
We’ve become a nation of shape-shifters, gliding between overlapping domains of reality and advertising, like travelers hopping between trains on some godforsaken subway line, not quite sure which one will take them home. The borders between these domains are porous, and the fare is cheap; the ticket taker is blind and the map is a lie. But who needs a map when you’ve got belief? And belief, my friend, is the most powerful currency in this lunatic economy. It’s not pegged to gold or oil or anything you can touch or hold. It’s pegged to the collective willingness to suspend disbelief, to embrace the fictions that make life bearable.
Evolution, in its infinite wisdom—or perverse sense of humor—has equipped us with the uncanny ability to believe anything we damn well please. Facts be damned, we’ll twist reality until it screams if it means keeping our illusions intact. And when the continuum of reality and advertising gets too tangled, too messy, well, we’ll fix it in post. We’ll airbrush the mistakes, cut out the ugly parts, and make it look just right for the final cut. Because in the end, it’s not the truth that matters, but the story we choose to tell ourselves, the narrative that keeps the wheels spinning and the lights on.
And you know what? I’m actually fine with this. Because in a world where reality is just another construct, where the lines between fact and fiction have blurred into oblivion, what else is there to do but embrace the madness? Strap in, swallow the pill, and ride the wave of collective delusion all the way to the bitter end. It’s the American way, after all.
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It’s a balance, sure, but let’s not kid ourselves—it’s not a stretch to say that our wishes, our inclinations, and the “dictates of our passions” are constantly reshaping the state of facts and evidence. It’s not some grand conspiracy; it’s just the natural byproduct of a culture that has enshrined extreme cognitive liberty and the pursuit of happiness as its highest commandments. We are the architects of our own realities, our collective imagination the mortar holding together this fragile edifice of shared experience.
We’re still at it today, shamelessly connecting unrelated events, weaving narratives out of thin air, despite the absence of any plausible causal link. It’s the same old trick, the same mental sleight of hand, only now we’ve traded the campfires and whispers for pixels and algorithms. We stitch together the fragments of our lives, the headlines that catch our eye, the tweets that make us nod in agreement, and we call it truth. We’re magicians in a world where the only rule is that the audience has to want to be fooled.
But every now and then, reality rears its ugly head and smashes our illusions to pieces. These are the periods of adjustment, the moments when the cognitive dissonance becomes so unbearable that we’re forced to rewrite the script. We can’t just sweep it under the rug—oh no, we have to get creative. This is where retroactive continuity comes in, the art of retconning the past to fit the present. We look back and say, ‘Remember when we said this? We screwed up, forget about that,’ as if we could erase the past with a well-placed edit.
Retroactive continuity—there’s a term for you. It sounds almost clinical, like a surgical procedure or a legal maneuver, but it’s anything but. It’s the narrative equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, pretending that the iceberg was always part of the plan. It’s a tool of survival, a way to bend the past to serve a current plot need, to make sense of a world that refuses to conform to our desires. And we do it all the time, with history, with politics, with our own personal stories. We’re constantly retconning our lives, rewriting our memories to suit the person we’ve become, or the person we wish we were.
The beauty of it is that we’re so good at it, so practiced, that we don’t even notice we’re doing it. It’s just another part of the game, another trick in the magician’s toolbox. And in a world where facts are malleable, where truth is whatever you can convince others to believe, why shouldn’t we play fast and loose with the past? After all, if we can rewrite history to align with our current narrative, then we can keep the story going, keep the illusion alive just a little bit longer.
But the danger is always there, lurking in the shadows. Because the more we retcon, the more we warp the continuum, the more we risk losing touch with any semblance of a shared reality. We might wake up one day to find that the world we’ve constructed is nothing but a house of cards, teetering on the brink of collapse, and when it falls, there’ll be no fixing it in post. But until then, we’ll keep spinning our stories, keep connecting the dots, keep believing that we can bend the past to fit the present, and that somehow, it’ll all work out in the end. Because what else can we do? It’s the only way we know how to live.
Retcon—TV Tropes, Retroactive Continuity. Reframing past events to serve a current plot need. The ideal retcon clarifies a question alluded to without adding excessive new questions. In its most basic form, this is any tweak, twist, or outright rewrite that tries to patch the holes in a narrative. But we’ve become connoisseurs of the retcon, haven’t we? We don’t just patch the holes; we reconstruct the entire narrative tapestry, weaving in new threads where the old ones frayed, no matter how tenuous or absurd the connections might be. When that fails, we reach for the Ass Pull—a moment when we yank a solution out of thin air, defying logic and violating the Law of Conservation of Detail with a kind of reckless abandon. It’s storytelling on the edge, an improvisation that begs the audience to suspend disbelief just a little bit longer.
This post-truth collapse we’re living through is the ultimate magnification of those instincts and impulses that have been shimmering in this country from the very beginning. We’ve always been a nation of improvisers, of storytellers who can’t resist the urge to twist the narrative, to retcon history to fit our current needs. But what was once a subtle art has now become a sledgehammer, smashing through the barriers of truth and fiction until all that’s left is a haze of competing realities, each one more far-fetched than the last.
It’s always been closer to “it’s my way or the highway” in America, but the beauty of the old days was that there was always an infinity of highways, branching out in every direction, leading to new places where you could maybe try something else, start fresh, spin a new story. If you didn’t like one version of the truth, you could just pack up and find another, set up camp in a new reality where the facts aligned with your desires. The frontier was more than just a physical space; it was a psychological playground, a blank slate for endless retcons and ass pulls.
But something’s changed. The highways that used to stretch out into the horizon now seem to lead nowhere. They loop back on themselves, leading us in circles, trapping us in a never-ending cycle of retcons and reboots, each one more desperate than the last. So what happened this time? Where did all the highways go? How did we get stuck in this endless feedback loop, where every attempt to rewrite the narrative only tightens the noose?
Maybe we’ve finally run out of room. Maybe the retcons have piled up so high that there’s no more space for new ones, no more cracks to paper over. The highways didn’t disappear; they just got buried under the weight of too many stories, too many conflicting realities all fighting for supremacy. Or maybe the highways are still out there, but we’ve lost the will to find them. We’ve grown too comfortable in our constructed realities, too invested in the stories we’ve told ourselves, to venture out into the unknown and risk discovering that the truth is something we can’t control, something that won’t bend to our will no matter how hard we try.
Whatever the reason, we’re trapped now, boxed in by our own narratives, with no clear way out. The retcons have become a prison, and the highways that once promised freedom now feel like dead ends. And the most terrifying part? We might be fine with it. We might prefer the comfort of our illusions to the uncertainty of the open road. After all, as long as we can keep rewriting the past, who needs a future?
The HIGHWAY IS IN OIR HEADS
The simple answer is that now, the highways are in our heads. We’ve internalized the vast, sprawling networks that once stretched across the land, turning them inward, folding them into the labyrinth of our own minds. These highways aren’t made of asphalt and steel but of gray matter and white matter, the biological infrastructure that powers our thoughts, our dreams, our every perception of reality.
Gray matter is where the heavy lifting happens, where our brains compute, analyze, and process the world around us. White matter, on the other hand, is the connective tissue, the highways that allow the gray-matter hubs to communicate, to share information, to collaborate in the endless task of making sense of our existence. But just as a single traffic jam can gridlock an entire city, a single damaged white-matter highway can shut down whole swathes of cognitive and emotional processes. One blocked route, one severed connection, and suddenly the mind’s internal landscape is thrown into chaos, leaving us stranded in the mental equivalent of a ghost town.
These internal highways serve a critical purpose—they are the import/export routes for our natural fantasies, the pathways through which our deepest desires and wildest imaginings travel. They are the neural networks that transform abstract thoughts into coherent narratives, converting raw data into the stories we live by. But unlike the old highways, where the destination was always just over the next hill, these mental roads lead us to places that aren’t always what we hoped they’d be.
The hypotheses of these mental journeys are falsifiable, grounded in a reality that won’t bend to our will no matter how fervently we might wish otherwise. There’s no gold at the end of the road, no shortcuts to the truths we seek. There’s no such thing as a free lunch—not in the mind, not in the world. You might be able to make a living, but probably in the same way you did before, grinding away at the same old tasks, following the same worn paths in the hope of finding something new.
So here’s the real question: Do you accept the reformation without the Renaissance? Can you stomach the idea of a world where the highways in your head take you on endless loops, promising enlightenment but delivering only the same old grind? The highways are in your head, yes, but they are not boundless, not infinite. They come with their own tolls, their own detours, and they offer no guarantees of a grand destination.
You’re entitled to your own realities—each one of us is free to map out our internal highways as we see fit. But be warned: these realities won’t just vanish when you stop believing in them. They linger, like ghosts on the highway, like potholes you can’t avoid. The roads you build in your mind become part of you, shaping the way you see the world, the way you live your life. You can try to retcon them, rewrite them, even pave over them, but they’ll always be there, just beneath the surface, waiting for the right moment to rise up and remind you of where you’ve been.
In the end, the highways in our heads are both our salvation and our curse—a portmanteau of progress and stagnation, freedom and confinement. They offer us the chance to explore new worlds, but only if we’re willing to face the ones we’ve already built. So keep driving, keep dreaming, but don’t forget to watch the road. The highways may be in your head, but the journey is as real as it gets.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT
But the Enlightenment, for all its promise and grandeur, was a double-edged sword. It cut through the dogma and superstition that had held humanity in a chokehold for centuries, liberating minds from the iron grip of religion. But in that same stroke, it unleashed a torrent of thought—true, false, right, wrong, decent, evil, rational, crazy, implausible, clever, dumb—into the world. The Enlightenment wasn’t just about celebrating reason; it was about granting permission to the full spectrum of human thought, from the most absurd and untrue to the most sensible and factual. It was a revolution of the mind, but revolutions are messy, and the Enlightenment left us with a Pandora’s box of ideas, all clamoring for attention.
The champions of the Enlightenment believed that in the long run, reason would prevail. They put their faith in the marketplace of ideas, trusting that it would function like a Darwinian battleground where only the fittest concepts survived. They assumed that ideologies would be subjected to the rigors of rational scrutiny, that the false and the absurd would be weeded out, leaving only the truth standing. It was a grand experiment, the ultimate bet on human rationality, on the belief that, given enough time, people would naturally gravitate toward the best, most logical conclusions.
But what they didn’t account for was the chaotic nature of freedom itself. The marketplace of ideas, like any other market, is subject to whims, trends, and the occasional hostile takeover. Ideas don’t just rise or fall based on their inherent truth or falsity—they succeed or fail based on how well they resonate with the human psyche, with our desires, fears, and prejudices. And in a world where anything goes, where all thoughts are given equal standing, the rational is often drowned out by the irrational, the sensible by the sensational.
The Enlightenment’s architects assumed that truth would naturally float to the top, but they didn’t foresee the rise of the noise, the clamor of countless competing voices each claiming their own piece of the truth. In this cacophony, the line between truth and fiction, between reason and madness, has blurred to the point of invisibility. The marketplace of ideas hasn’t culled the inferior; it has merely amplified the loudest.
So here we are, in a world where the Enlightenment’s promise has been twisted into a parody of itself. Freedom of thought has become freedom to believe anything, and in this new reality, truth is just another commodity, traded and discarded as quickly as yesterday’s news. The Enlightenment gave us the tools to build a rational world, but it also gave us the means to destroy it, to replace it with a labyrinth of competing realities, each more fantastical than the last.
And perhaps that’s the real legacy of the Enlightenment: not the triumph of reason, but the triumph of choice—the ability to choose our own reality, our own truth, regardless of how it stands up to the facts. In the end, the Enlightenment didn’t free us from the clutches of religion; it merely replaced one set of beliefs with another, leaving us to navigate the highways of our own minds, searching for a destination that might not even exist.
Following Kant’s injunction to “think for yourself,” and with the Enlightenment triumphant, science ascendant, and tolerance required, a different kind of advertising was free to show itself in America—a land that was marketed not just as a nation of opportunity but as an enchanted realm, swarming with supernatural wonders. It was a place where the lines between the rational and the irrational blurred into a kaleidoscope of beliefs, where alchemy, astrology, the occult, freemasonry, magnetic healing, and prophetic visions were all given space to thrive.
America, in this fantastical narrative, became something akin to the early-first-century Holy Land, teeming with roaming prophets, healers, and witches. It was a place where miracles could happen, where the mundane was overlaid with the mystical, and where every plot of land could harbor untold riches. The fantasy that the land was studded with buried loot—old Spanish or Indian gold, tranches of robbers’ cash, lost jewels—was not just a folk tale but a driving force of settlement and exploration. Gold seekers, Puritans, and delusion-fueled adventurers set out across the continent, each chasing their own particular dream, often to their ruin, but sometimes to wild success.
And there was profit to be made in indulging these fantasies. America became a breeding ground for con men and visionaries alike, each one ready to cater to the latest craze. The markets for gold rushes, Puritanical fervor, satanic panics, religious deliriums, Mormonism, homesteading on the prairie, and the westward expansion were all just different flavors of the same basic scam: selling dreams to the desperate. If you had a fantasy, America was the place to live it out, no matter how improbable.
The Bible itself became fertile ground for this new American dream. If you think of the Bible as historical fiction, then it’s not a stretch to see figures like Joseph Smith as authors of a kind of Biblical fan fiction, spinning new tales from the old, recasting ancient narratives into the American landscape. In this light, Mormonism becomes less a religious movement and more a fantastical reimagining, a Don Quixote-esque quest in a land where the lines between history, myth, and reality were never firmly drawn. Smith’s Book of Mormon was America’s own Quixote of Avellaneda, a rival text that took the Biblical narrative and transplanted it into a new world, filled with “literal” Israeli émigrés, reimagined as settlers of the American West.
And why not? After all, the Bible, in its own way, pointed towards America—imagining cities upon hills, a “Promised Land” at least metaphorically akin to Jerusalem. For many settlers, this wasn’t just metaphorical; they saw the American frontier as a literal second Holy Land, destined to be the center of a reborn Christian world. The idea of a new kingdom rising in the American West wasn’t just a fantasy; it was, for many, a religious imperative, a continuation of the divine mission that began in the deserts of the Middle East and was now being fulfilled in the plains and mountains of the New World.
In this way, America wasn’t just a land of opportunity; it was a land of infinite possibility, where reality itself could be bent to fit the desires and delusions of its inhabitants. It was a place where the Enlightenment’s call to “think for yourself” had been taken to its most extreme, where every man was his own prophet, and every belief, no matter how absurd, was given the space to flourish. The highways of America were more than just roads—they were the paths to a thousand different realities, each one more fantastical than the last, and each one as real as any other, so long as you believed in it.
38 WIVES
Some would redefine Heaven in a mostly sci-fi way. In this vision, you’re not just one of a mass of a billion indistinguishable souls floating in some ethereal netherworld; instead, you are the king or queen of your own personal planetary fiefdom, a resurrected immortal physical being ruling over your celestial domain. This version of the afterlife appeals to a distinctly modern sensibility—where individualism reigns supreme, and Heaven isn’t just a place of spiritual contentment, but a universe where you are the center of it all.
In this uniquely American vision, the boundary between fantasy and reality was porous. Religious leaders who claimed divine revelation felt compelled to obey long-standing commands to become polygamous or face divine retribution. Some took this to extreme lengths—marrying 32 women in just two years, with 8 of those marriages occurring during a single three-month period, and 6 of those brides being teenagers. Yet, even amidst this frenzied pursuit of a “holy” mandate, the same men could turn around and run for president, boasting that they had kept their followers more loyal than Jesus had managed with his disciples.
America was, in many ways, built by people who were LARPing—engaging in live-action role-play, immune to fact checks, and convinced that they had exclusive access to the facts. It was a place designed to blur the line between the fictional and the real world, where players could fully immerse themselves in their characters’ goals within a setting that was no less real for being imagined.
In this environment, you could “rise up,” channel the Holy Spirit, be born again instantly, and be rewarded with an eternal afterlife, all while new technologies like high-speed travel, the telegraph, and photography were making “technology indistinguishable from magic.” The very concept of reality was flexible, and with the right beliefs—or the right tools—you could reshape it entirely.
You could communicate with ghosts through Morse code, and the advent of electrical transatlantic communication was taken as “proof” of the possibility of communication between two worlds: the living and the dead. The boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the real and the imagined, were dissolving in the face of rapid technological advancement and fervent belief. In America, the distinction between Heaven and Earth, the mortal and the divine, was as thin as a telegraph wire and just as charged with possibility.
TO BR CONTINUED
