When did america become untethered from reality?<\/p>\n
I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush\u2019s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in \u201cthe reality-based community,\u201d he told a reporter, \u201cbelieve that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality \u2026 That\u2019s not the way the world really works anymore.\u201d A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called \u201cThe Word.\u201d His first selection: truthiness. \u201cNow, I\u2019m sure some of the \u2018word police,\u2019 the \u2018wordinistas\u2019 over at Webster\u2019s, are gonna say, \u2018Hey, that\u2019s not a word!\u2019 Well, anybody who knows me knows that I\u2019m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They\u2019re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn\u2019t true. Or what did or didn\u2019t happen. Who\u2019s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that\u2019s my right. I don\u2019t trust books\u2014they\u2019re all fact, no heart \u2026 Face it, folks, we are a divided nation \u2026 divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart \u2026 Because that\u2019s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen\u2014the gut.\u201d<\/p>\n