I'm reading Neal Gabler's bio of Walt Disney, and it's good if long; portions could've used an editor. But the preface is breezy, a synopsis/analysis on the ying-yang of Disney—his love of nostalgia and the future, for example—and it includes this thought from Gabler:

... the most powerful source of his appeal as well as his greatest legacy may be that Walt Disney, more than any other American artist, defined the terms of wish fulfillment and demonstrated on a grand scale to his fellow Americans, and ultimately to the entire world, how one could be empowered by fantasy—how one could learn, in effect, to live within one’s own illusions and even to transform the world into those illusions.

I think this is true and it's in now way a positive. It's the forerunner to Ronald Reagan and Karl Rove and now Donald J. Trump. How thin is the line between the Big Lie and Hollywood wish fulfillment? Isn't the Big Lie just wish fulfillment? Aren't politicians and moviemakers both giving the people what they want? To get over their troubles? The movies just do it for two hours; the politicians we're stuck with for four years.

The real problem is when people can't distinguish between the two. I think we're in that territory now. I think a portion of the populace has been in that territory all of my life.

Mission accomplished.