inessential by Brent Simmons

Two TV Shows

Orange leader. Dominance and narcissism and corruption and bullshit and lies. Families breaking up. The claim of making the world great masking a business empire.

See Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. It’s riveting.

And I can’t help but feel like, in a way, all of America just joined Scientology. (Not literally, of course.)

* * *

The Man in the High Castle has long been my favorite Philip K. Dick novel, and one of my favorite novels ever.

(My Mom pushed it on me when I was a teenager. I’ve been a Dickhead ever since.)

In it, the Germans and Japanese won the second World War (or did they?) and America is split up and occupied — by the Japanese empire on the west and the Reich to the east.

I’m five episodes into the TV show. It doesn’t faithfully track the novel — it’s much more of a thriller than I remember from the book. Which is fine: the novel is a novel, and the TV show is a TV show.

And I can hardly pull myself away, not least because it also speaks to the current moment.