Philip K. Dick's Eye in the Sky and the Deterioration of the American Mind

     In 1957, Philip K. Dick, by then a prolific science fiction writer of short stories, saw published his fourth novel, Eye in the Sky.  I own a copy of the Ace first edition.  The cover artist interpreted the title literally, showing a gigantic eye in the sky, with several people on a flat ground running in terror from it.  This image can be looked at in several ways.  Is it God's wrath we're seeing?  Is the Eye technological, or a religious symbol come to life?  Like the eyeball at the center of the triangle atop the pyramid on the one dollar bill's reverse side, the book cover's Eye seems to suggest the prefix omni-, as in all-seeing, all-knowing.
     In the novel, a particle accelerator accident at the "Belmont Bevatron" causes eight people to lapse into eight different subjective worlds based on their own belief systems, which eventually bleed into one another.  Supporting the premise's nightmarishness (imagine being stuck inside the viewpoints of someone whose beliefs are abhorrent to you) is Dick's recurring theme of how reality is perceived.  Individual reality perception often differs from reality perceived by groups.  A psychotic person's viewpoints are not shared by those going about their own business in society.  Still, a group may form a gestalt, generating a viewpoint or viewpoints believed in collectively as real, whether true or not.
     Dick understood, and worked with the idea often in his fiction, that "absolute reality" may not even exist.  That it's a construct, sometimes consisting of mutually agreed upon viewpoints.  In his most existentially horrifying novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, reality itself dismantles into a series of failing beliefs as the characters find themselves struggling to escape back to normalcy after encountering an alien drug that makes them believe they've found freedom, even as they're pulled in deeper, their perceptions manipulated by a demiurgic former human space explorer, Palmer Eldritch, who has returned to Earth to become, in effect, God.
     For me, the most nauseating thing about the Republican Convention, unfolding this week in Cleveland, is the relentless bullshit coming from the mouths of Republicans, from Trump's family, from Governor Mike Pence (Trump's VP pick), from campaign staffers, from politicians who had nothing good to say about their nominee for the past year but now pretend he's the best man for the job.  Asked reality-based questions about Trump and the behavior of the Conventioneers (the viciousness of the people on the floor chanting, "Lock her [Hillary Clinton] up!  Lock her up!"), Republicans on camera in Cleveland suddenly lose eye contact with journalists asking the questions, as they struggle to form answers that just sound inadequate and ridiculous.
     It's difficult even for Republicans with hard-ons for the ideals of their party to speak with genuine feeling about a man so determined to inflict damnation and dysfunction on his own country.  That Trump is a lying piece of shit with no redeeming qualities is obvious to more than half of this nation's voters.  There's a great deal of pretending (he's on TV all the time, after all) with Trump, and with those covering him and talking about him, wherein everybody gets into serious mode, asking the tycoon often sensible questions.  He, or his surrogates, respond with utterly false, inane, contradictory, and even reprehensible statements, and then we all go on, as if something extraordinary hasn't happened: the total and perhaps irreversible bewitchment of the American press and political class by a master propagandist, so uncaring and soulless he uses the word "compassionate" to describe himself, yet anyone who understands the human heart knows he more closely resembles the Emperor Caligula, not Jesus.
     Are journalists and politicians, and millions of Americans, in a "Belmont Bevatron" accident?
     "Perception is reality," Lee Atwater, the late Republican propagandist and campaign manager said famously in the 1980s.  In my view, perception isn't reality.  Quality of perception influences the degree to which one sees reality clearly.  Cleveland right now is populated with a large number of right wingers who are convinced that Hillary Clinton should be "locked up."  Her execution was recently called for by one of this nation's state senators.  Does Donald Trump have anything to do with this hatred?  His followers would say no.  They're wrong.  From the beginning of his campaign, he's generalized about and spoken against people (Mexicans at first), for the sake of gathering followers of a racist bent to his side.  Hardcore Trump supporters don't give a shit about any horrible statement coming from their hero's gross mouth.  They'll even sometimes say they don't agree with many of the racist and bigoted statements, but nevertheless, they support him because he's a successful businessman, and "we need someone outside the system to run things."
     By that, they don't mean a Christian Black man who was born in Hawaii and received schooling in Indonesia.
     They want a man whose wife plagiarized Michelle Obama's 2008 Democratic Convention speech. Of course this happened.  Everything about the Trump Campaign is so fucked in their collective head it stands to reason that they couldn't even find a speechwriter to craft an original text.  Trump could've asked his recently college-graduated daughter Tiffany to ask one of her university friends to write a speech for her step-mother, for pay, and it would probably have been at least adequate.
     First, we were told the morning before delivery of the speech, by Trump and his wife, that she wrote the speech.  She speaks five languages, including English, so sure, maybe she did.  Similarities, though, with Mrs. Obama's speech, were noted the next day, causing much exasperated pushback from Trump surrogates like Chris Christie and Paul Manafort, the campaign manager who resembles a crooked lawyer in a Brian De Palma film.  After two days of denials, the Trump campaign let it be known that a woman staffer had worked with Melania Trump on the speech.  Our possible next First Lady liked some lines in Mrs. Obama's 2008 speech, and asked the staffer (who I gather actually wrote the thing) to include them, or lines like them.
     Trump's position on this, I guess, is that yes, we plagiarized, but so what?
     Oddly, for Melania Trump to say Michelle Obama's own words when describing her (Michelle's) husband, she, Melania, managed to speak lovingly and admiringly about President Obama, the man Melania's husband has slandered as not being an American citizen.  The Belmont Bevatron works in mysterious ways.
     Today, I saw a remarkable line at the bottom of the screen on the MSNBC news feed:
   
     "Donald Trump's speech to be analyzed by anti-plagiarism software."
   
     Trump gives his speech tonight.  I guess he and his people want to make sure we realize it's 100 percent Trump.  I'm struck, though, through my own knowledge of being a writer, that since I have a unique perspective and express myself in my own way, I don't need a computer program to tell me if I've plagiarized or not.  Maybe in life it's useful for undergraduate college students to have a sense of that, because in their case, plagiarism brings actual consequences.  In Melania Trump's case, I guess she's just too beautiful for it to matter, or, as I suspect, too much of an asshole to care.
     Genuinely expressed words mean something, even when they're mundane.  Donald Trump needs a machine to find out if he's real or not.
   
                                                                               Vic Neptune