I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s final novel, Radio Free Albemuth, which wasn’t published until after his death. I’ve read that this was the original novel which later came out as Valis, but I don’t know if that’s true. It definitely covers the same ground, but in a completely different way. It makes a good companion piece to that novel, I think. It’s much easier to follow, so far. I’ll write more about that when I’m done with it. For the time being, I just wanted to copy in this passage from page 64:

In the preceding passage, he talks about how American prisoners of war in North Korea were sometimes given a piece of paper and pencil, and told to write about themselves, because they would often give away more information this way than if they were interrogated straight out…

I was in effect exactly like those captured Americans: a prisoner of war. I had become that in 1968 when F.F.F. got elected. So had we all; we now dwelt in a very large prison, without walls, bounded by Canada, Mexico and two oceans. There were the jailers, the turnkeys, the informers, and somewhere in the Midwest the solitary confinement of the special internment camps. Most people did not appear to notice. Since there were no literal bars or barbed wire, since they had committed no crimes, had not been arrested or taken to court, they did not grasp the change, the dread transformation of their situation. It was the classic case of a man kidnapped while standing still. Since they had been taken nowhere, and since they themselves had voted the new tyranny into power, they could see nothing wrong. Anyhow, a good third of them, had they known, would have thought it was a good idea. As F.F.F. told them, now the war in Vietnam could be brought to an honorable conclusion, and, at home, the mysterious organization Aramchek could be annihilated. The Loyal Americans could breathe freely again. Their freedom to do as they were told had been preserved.

F.F.F. stands for Ferris F. Fremont, who is basically Richard Nixon under a thin fictional disguise, and who Dick uses on multiple occasions to stand for an ultimate sort of evil. Aramchek is an imaginary organization bent on destroying America that Fremont creates as part of his paranoid fantasy, and which he battles relentlessly. The parallels to right now are pretty striking.