Kenneth Bloomfield (letters, Feb. 18) has the wrong analogy. We aren’t living in an Orwellian “1984” America. Instead, we are living in a Lewis Carroll “Alice in Wonderland” America.
Somewhere in the last decade, America went through the looking glass.
Consider the evidence: A former president of the United States is now hawking his own sneaker brand and non-fungible token trading cards. His evangelical base looks past his adulterous affairs with a porn star and a Playboy model. The same former president invites Vladimir Putin to attack NATO members who are underspending on defense and attacks his Republican opponent because her husband, who is serving on duty in the U.S. military, is not on the campaign trail with her.
In Fulton County, Georgia, the district attorney in the Donald Trump electoral-fraud case hired and paid more than $650,000 to a prosecutor who is also her lover. Three presidents of elite Ivy League universities have a simultaneous collapse of moral reasoning by refusing to say that calling for the genocide of Jews would constitute a violation of the code of conduct at their schools.
As Alice said, it gets “curiouser and curiouser!”
Nearly one in five Americans believe in the Taylor Swift psyops conspiracy.
How to explain any of this? Perhaps the branching universe theory, which holds that every time a state, or outcome, is observed, there is another “world” in which a different outcome becomes reality.
The rational, sensible, and reasonable world is still there, only we got spun off somewhere in the last decade into this mess.
Say what you will about President Joe Biden, Gov. Gavin Newsom and Rep. Adam Schiff, Mr. Bloomfield, but the odds of a Trump-supporting, anti-choice Republican winning a Senate seat from California are slim to none, and slim is on the bus to Las Vegas.
If all of this makes you think you’re living in a nightmare, listen to the White Rabbit. “When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!”
Philip Wasserman
Stevenson Ranch
