Various dictionaries set forth similar definitions of this word and they generally follow these lines: “having the qualities of surrealism; bizarre.”a surreal mix of fact and fantasy” Synonyms: unreal, bizarre, unusual, weird, strange, freakish, unearthly, uncanny, dreamlike, phantasmagorical”a backdrop of surreal images”. In a family discussion of the current political circus, my Brother-In-Law came up with this word to describe what I am sure a lot of us are feeling right now, and I told him that was the word I had been looking for as it perfectly fits this bizarre “mix of fact and fantasy”, in which we have the following (a very abbreviated list, indeed):

1. The leading candidate for the Democrat party nomination is a person distrusted as totally untrustworthy and a well-known “pathological liar” according to one of the most highly respected columnists and wordsmiths of his time, a Socialist who, for all intents and purposes, is a walking, living Federal felon 2000 times over, if the American Rule of Law has any meaning left at all;
2. The other candidate for the Democrat nomination is a Marxist-Socialist who spent his honeymoon in Moscow, who espouses programs of freebies for all, who appeals primarily to uninformed millenials who have no idea what Socialism is and to the academic community who do not have that excuse but love him anyway, whose rally theme song is “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” (“where the handouts grow on bushes…”);
3. The Republican candidate with the best shot as getting the required numbers on the first ballot at the convention is a multi-billionaire and Reality TV star who believes in partial-birth abortion, making the rich pay more as they do not pay their “fair share”, who believes that 2 of the 3 primary duties of Government are to afford health care for all and education for all and who not only hurls personal insults at the wife of another major candidate but brags about the size of his penis;
4. A minor Republican candidate who stands not a scintilla of a prayer at getting the party’s nomination but who just announced he is in the final stages of picking his Vice Presidential choice;
5. Articles appearing now on an almost daily basis with such titles as “America in Wonderland”, describing the upside down world of political correctness we live in under the downright Orwellian administration of Barack Hussein Obama and his many sycophants, one of whom is the aforementioned leading candidate for the Democrat nomination;
6. A society faced with what many serious students of some of the threats faced by America consider existential threats, such as, no matter what the Happy Face Administration wants us to believe, the Islamic State, which finds ample time to utter millions of words and tons of ink and billions of bytes on the over-archingly important topic whether men should be able to use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms–and at the same time spending the same amounts of the above items preaching about a supposed rape culture. And states which try to walk the tightrope between the interests of the transgendered – estimated to be, at the very most, 0.03% of the population, and those of their constituents — those ignorant rubes who actually elected them to be their representatives–are called every name in the book, most recently by The First Lady of the United States only yesterday at a predominantly black college in Mississippi, Jackson State.
7. Exquisitely delicate students fainting –! — at the very sight of chalk messages on sidewalks at one of the “leading” centers of “Higher Learning” reading “Trump 2016” and demanding “safe spaces” to protect their fragile little sensitivities while other centers of “Higher Learning” routinely impose speech codes, allow racial segregation, suspend Due Process in cases of rape allegations and allow out and out violence to disrupt lectures and public assemblies;
8. Attorneys General promising prosecution–that really does need to be said again, as the entire idea fits perfectly the “theme” of this piece–promising prosecution against those who do not follow the sacred, Al Gore-sanctioned, “Party Line” about “Global Warming” in total disregard of one of the greatest statements of rights ever created by the mind of man, The First Amendment, and lest one think this is just a small group of State Attorneys General going off half-cocked on some cockamamie theory, the Attorney General of the United States has recently revealed that she, too, is looking into similar prosecutions of free speech, at the urging of the apparently truly loony Senator from Rhode Island, the interestingly named Sen. Whitehouse. As one prominent columnist observed, “[t]his is banana-republic stuff.”
9. A society in which a Christian owner of a bakery who refuses, on religious grounds, to participate in a gay wedding may be subject to fines, jail, and political intimidation but in which a Muslim owner of a bakery who refuses to do the same, that persn is left alone and is given the right to do so based on —his religious beliefs! That simply cannot, under any analysis, be logically explained and is straight out of “1984”.
10. A country whose President’s relation with the truth was always regarded as a sometime thing by many since his first days has now become a laughing stock around the world by drawing red lines if Syria continues to use chemical weapons against its own citizens, then disregards said red line, and then says he never said anything about a red line, etc., who insults world leaders apparently on an inverse proportion of how loyal their countries have been to America, such as Great Britain and, most egregiously, Israel, making its Head Of State cool his heels while he went upstairs to have dinner with his family, who lied repeatedly to the American people, and the World in general, about the real cause of the Benghazi catastrophe, vigorously aided and abetted by his then-Secretary of State, about whom refer to Number One, above, and whose administration is quite simply no longer beleived by anyone about anything, and this is “the short list”!

One could find no better summary of the surreal state we live in right now, and the dangers it carries for all of us, than that of the very astute Victor Davis Hanson, writing for the National Review recently, in which he concluded: “The tensions of 2016 are mounting. The center is not holding, as the foundations of our society–education, social cohesion, defene, and finance–erode. Trump and Sanders are mere symptoms of the collective fear about what is being lost. Far, far worse is on the horizon.”