Kurt Andersen’s book “Fantasyland” has changed the way I look at America, and my relationship with it. He suggests that Americans are predisposed to fantasy. That this strange post-truth era we are living in is actually nothing new. America was created by people resistant to reality checks, he says. A believe-whatever-you-want fantasy is deeply embedded into the American DNA. I think he might be onto something. He talks about guns and how the American appetite for immersive make-believe doesn't just end at Hollywood and hair dye. There is a line extending from flying saucer obsessives to knee-jerk conspiracists to weaponized children living out their combat fantasies. We are merely cast members in a 24/7 tableau vivant, proffers Andersen. I must confess to being a fully paid-up member of the "fantasy industrial complex" that Andersen talks so eloquently about. From my first dose of Disney World in 1988, I became intoxicated by America. As a frightened, lonely gay kid, magical thinking became my escape hatch, a portal to another world. "Movies were a powerful and unprecedented solvent of the mental barriers between real and unreal," says Andersen. I binged on its bottomless cocktail of fantastical wishfulness and became transfixed by the dazzling spectacle of make-believe from its dispenser-in-chief, Michael Jackson. Then in 2014 I moved to Los Angeles, the home of fairytales and show biz, a city that has been telling truth-adjacent narratives about itself from the beginning: palm trees were imported to match the fantasy image that was being sold to lure people in. As somebody who has always exerted a great deal of energy to get my realities to match my fantasies, I am right at home in California, named after Calafia, a fictional queen who ruled over a mythic all-female island thought to be a terrestrial paradise like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis. I’m always going to be fantasy-prone, but today I’m under no illusions about what America is, and isn’t. To truly love a place you have to let it be what it is. Myths are meant as inspirations. A myth lifts us up, carries us away to other possibilities, but real life is always going to fall short of our fantasies. The truth will set you free, but only if it’s the sort that isn’t just inside your head.