dystopia Archives - All That Chazz: Your Brain Tickle Destination

I’m a novelist who writes dystopian, apocalyptic, and crime fiction. My current income from over 40 books is far less than I made from far fewer books in 2011. I have to be honest, though. I can’t be mad about it.

Most of my readers are from the United States, where health insurance premiums are shooting up. Disposable income is down. It’s spiraled into a dystopian nightmare where Nazis write their own warrants to bust into homes. Children are getting kidnapped by government agents. Innocent people are assaulted and incarcerated without due process.

You’ve seen the video of a gaggle of ICE agents murdering people in Minnesota while gaslighters from the federal government libel the victims and tell you not to trust your lying eyes.

Reading novels isn’t the priority right now. Protesting, justice, and a general strike are top of mind. This is not to devalue art. It’s a sad acknowledgment of what is. I see you. I care. Yes, fiction can act as a wonderful distraction from ugly reality. Novels transport us. I love putting movies in your heads. That’s not the mood many are in right now. I get that, and I am sincerely sorry for all you’re going through.

My hope is that sanity will return. My wish is that all of you will be safe. My worry is that, though the chaos is concentrated in Minnesota at the moment, you are all in danger. One day, this will all be over. As the famous book title goes, one day everyone will always have been against this.

In the meantime, please stay as safe as you can.

A woman in a car waves for cars to go around her.
ICE agents issue conflicting commands, one telling her to go and another insisting she get out of the car.
An ICE agent steps in front of her car, phone in one hand recording, the other hand going for his weapon.
Terrified and confused, the woman backs up and turns her wheels so she won’t run over anyone. No one is in front of her car as she begins to go.
The woman is shot by ICE.
A physician begs to check on her.
ICE officers refuse. “We have our own medics.”
“Where are they?” a woman screams.
She is told to relax.
“How can I relax when you just killed my fucking neighbor?”
Medics don’t arrive for fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, two minutes after shooting the woman, the killer walks away calmly, gets in his car, and drives away.

In a normal world:

Law enforcement would look like law enforcement, not masked goons cosplaying their power fantasies.
They’d have better training.
ICE would conform to codes of conduct and have stricter rules of engagement than soldiers do in a war zone.
Peace officers ask themselves, “Must I shoot?”, not “Can I shoot?”
Being filmed should temper ICE response. It doesn’t.
The shooter shouldn’t have walked away. His superior should have taken his weapon as evidence for the investigation.
Call it what it is. He fled a crime scene.

In a better world, those in power could admit mistakes.
They would announce that there would be an investigation.
They wouldn’t lie so badly that anyone could see the difference between what they say and what all the video shows.
The President wouldn’t claim the shooter had been run over and was recovering in the hospital.
The vice president wouldn’t libel the murdered woman.
Yale-trained sophist JD Vance (AKA James Donald Bowman alias James David Hamel) would know the difference between “immunity” and impunity.”

And remember when Kristi Noem claimed they had arrested the girlfriend of the founder of Antifa?

Whatever happened to that case? How has the press forgotten it? The original Antifa emerged in Europe early in the last century. That girlfriend must really be a tough old lady not to have given up all her secrets by now.

At the conclusion of Citizen Second Class, I found a relatively peaceful way out from under a grasping authoritarian regime. That was fiction. Reality is not so neat.