There is an author that I exchange emails with, provide some feedback to her novels etc. She has an editor so I’m generally just commenting on the narrative flow, raising the obvious questions and being a huge fan. She writes dystopian fiction, or at least that series I’m most connected to is a piece of American dystopian fiction.

I can’t imagine how tricky it is to write dystopian fiction in a country where that dystopia is playing out in real-time in government. Obviously it’s missing the werewolves and other woohoo but everything else is pretty much there. Wait a few days and the net appalling thing will happen.

I am of an age to have grown up believing basically that the Americans were the heroes, that whatever might happen, the Americans were there to stand up for the downtrodden democracies around the world against aggressors.

I never expected to see video of Americans being pulled from their beds, from the streets by armed thugs wearing balaclavas.

Who imagined the American president siding with the Russian dictator Putin over poor Ukraine?

How did we reach a stage where Americans thought it right or reasonable to keep a body alive until it started rotting before cutting out a half-developed baby?

Where is the popular uprising, complete with excessive guns that were promised in the event of central government overreach?

The US president has crashed world markets, upended alliances, cancelled aid leading to the death of thousands, maybe millions worldwide. And all the time, the powers that should check him stay silent.

It’s not so much the single elderly man that leaves me worrying but rather the people around him riding his victory, encouraging his excesses.

The world is paying for the choice that America made between the competent black woman and this sh*t show.