Word: unrealism
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...changed was a U.S. state of mind almost as old as the Republic. Before Pearl Harbor there was only one world to U.S. citizens. The world, the only world that Americans believed in or cared about, was the U.S. The rest of mankind was in an American sense, unreal. The American might-and did-throng the tourist spots like London and Paris, "discover" Bali or the Dalmatian Coast, but he could never quite believe that these outlandish foreign parts could have a real connection with his world...
...whole thing was as unreal as a printed poster, while the voice of TIME dinned in my ears: . . . It was now plain that the U.S. could count on no other country to do her fighting for her. Henceforth the U.S. would have to decide and act for herself...
...speaker was finished, and the last wreath had been placed on the tomb of the newer Unknown Soldier. The bugler was sounding taps as Vag, shivering a bit from the damp which had penetrated his light reversible, left the enlarged Arlington National Cemetery. Outside it all seemed so unreal--Vag wondered if he had had a vision of the future or a nightmare of the past...
...years the U.S. has heard, in vast doses of oratory, that it could beat Hitler without fighting him. Now somewhere a mighty battle was raging, somewhere in some unreal thicket of unpronounceable names somewhere in the suburbs of Moscow. Each day the great armies clashed and retreated, were encircled, imprisoned, wiped out, again .encircled, again wiped out; each day innumerable unreal tanks were destroyed, attacked again, again destroyed; each day 100 airplanes were shot down, flew over again, were again shot down. Each day the Germans advanced, the defense stiffened, finally the Government fled...
Looking up from the unreal war news in his paper, a citizen could turn up images of U.S. life as disjointed as the visions of a fever: a 16-year-old boy, running away with two girls, 15 and 14, confessed killing a North Carolina carpenter because he wanted his automobile . . . in Raleigh, N.C., an obstreperous elephant, being put out of its misery, refused to die, sagged on its legs for 40 minutes while a prison warden pumped over 100 shots into it with a submachine gun . . . in Boston, showgirls demonstrated the V for Victory campaign and, incidentally, the unreality...