The Fantasy Continues

ONCE you try to make a fantasy intellectually defensible it becomes stupid. Much in the same way a joke ceases to be funny if you have to explain it, a fantasy that tries to prove its plausibility inevitably gets stuck on stupid. This is obviously so with sexual fantasies: The Socratic method will never deliver a reasonable defense of foot-fetishism and very few of us expect the pornography universe to intersect with our own. Xerox repairmen actually don’t get ravished by randy business executives who could pass for underwear models. Alas. Generally speaking, if fantasies were plausible, we wouldn’t call them fantasies. We’d call them “plans.”

This is a particular dilemma for Hollywood liberals. With science fiction, for example, filmmakers rely on the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief. But when it comes to politics, they desperately want to vomit up their political fantasies on the big screen and have the audience exclaim, “That could happen!”