RAG RADIO: Politics in the Age of True Dystopia

Thorne Dreyer‘s guests on Rag Radio are two authors — Christopher Brown and Roddey Reid — who, in very different ways, anticipated some of the insanity of our current political climate, and offer fresh ideas on how to engage with it and find our way to the other side. We call it “Politics in an Age of True Dystopia.”

Christopher Brown, Austin-based author of Tropic of Kansas, a dystopian novel written before the elections and published last year by HarperCollins that imagines a revolutionary uprising in a mirror version of the USA where climate crisis has destabilized the nation, Canada has built a border wall to keep out illegal American immigrants, and a charismatic CEO has become a fascist president — a Seattle Times Noteworthy Book of 2017 that NPR called “a modern dystopian buffet… frighteningly prescient… the nightly news with the volume turned up to eleven” and Booklist said reads “like Cormac McCarthy meets Philip K. Dick.”

Scholar and activist Roddey Reid, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, whose new book Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era & Beyond looks at the current harsh public climate of fear and intimidation, where it came from, and how it works. Part of the background story is the American tradition of the bully boss and the degraded work place that have infected our politics. He provides a handbook for new modes of political engagement for an age of true dystopia — all of the proceeds of which go to support the Indivisible Project.

Running time: 56:06
Contact: ragradio@koop.org.

Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer

Rag Radio is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run, solar-powered community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The host and producer of Rag Radio, Thorne Dreyer, is a prominent Austin-based activist and writer who was a pioneer of the ’60s underground press movement. Visit the Rag Radio Archives.

Contact:ragradio@koop.org

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