Of Loughner and Philip K. Dick and Me

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/386585

John Podhoretz - 01.14.2011 - 12:17 AM

A few days ago, I speculated that, based on some things said about him by 
high-school friends, Jared Loughner was more likely to have been 
influenced by the world view of the brilliant but schizophrenic 
science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick than he would have been by Sarah 
Palin and the Tea Party. For this observation, a writer at the Atlantic 
said my theory was one of the five strangest suggested about Loughner, 
along with David Frum's speculation that marijuana might have had 
something to do with his behavior.

Well, shut my mouth. Except that, in a long Washington Post story about 
Loughner's descent into fantasy, there appears this passage:

     Loughner's favorite writer was Philip K. Dick, whose science-fiction 
tales travel a mystical path in which omnipotent governments and 
businesses are the bad guys and the average man is often lost in an 
identity-shattering swirl of paranoia, schizophrenia and questions about 
whether the universe and the individual are real or part of some vast 
conspiracy.

The point I was making is not that readers of Philip K. Dick, of whom 
there are many millions, are going to go out and shoot people. It's that 
people who live in a disordered reality would be especially susceptible to 
a portrait of the world that suggests disordered realities are real and 
actual realities are false. That this notion seemed less plausible to many 
than that Loughner was driven to a murder spree by talk radio says a great 
deal about the reality distortions that grabbed hold of the minds of eager 
liberals over the past six days.

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