The HOT ZONE: "A Coney Island of the Mind"

The epigraph of Henry Miller’s short story “Into the Night Life,” reads:

Everything is sordid, shoddy, thin as pasteboard. A Coney Island of the mind. The amusement shacks are running full blast.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti liked the phrase “A Coney Island of the mind” so much that he borrowed it for the title for a 1958 book of poetry.

I thought of the phrase the day after the so-called debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, when the MSM dumped Biden like the red Ford Pinto containing the Illinois Nazis in The Blues Brothers—a dramatic moment described in a June 23, 2020 report in the Chicago Sun Times:

We live in strange times.