This Side of Reality

By Gary Floyd

In 2020, author Gary Floyd published Liberté: The Days of Rage. He labeled it "the little book with big ideas." The book hinted at existential questions that were hidden in plain sight. They soon grew into fruition in Washington, European capitals, and eventually the world over. Four years later, after a sojourn into a devastating pandemic and a riot/insurrection further undermined America's unity, This Side of Reality picks up where Liberté left off. The book asks troubling questions about the level of representation Americans and, by extension, Western allies enjoy. It questions whether anything other than preapproved narratives are allowed—something that Orwell wrestled with 80 years ago. The chapters in Floyd's earlier works were limited to a thousand words, a common criterion for flash fiction. This Side of Reality doesn't strictly adhere to this, but Floyd, always the iconoclast, still packs a wallop in his condensed pieces of contemporary prose. They make for short, thought-provoking morsels that can be consumed in several one- or two-story sittings, or devoured in their entirety all at once. Like a modern-day Tiresias, it's a compelling mélange of prose, nonfiction, and essays that reads like a clarion call that will inspire readers toward a more sustainable future.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary Floyd
• Release date: Apr 24, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224212149

Gary Floyd

Gary Floyd is the author of four books. His short stories and flash fiction have appeared in several magazines. He is based in Massachusetts and operates a blog that showcases his work. The Road Sometimes Travelled can be found at https://theroadsometimestravelled.blogspot.com. Floyd graduated with a history degree with a concentration in American Studies, including several graduate-level American Studies courses. He was a member of the history honor society. He has worked as a journalist as well as worked with at-risk youth. He has attended the Wildacres Writers Workshop in North Carolina annually for nearly 30 years, where he hones his writing skills with a community of writers. From 2011-2014, he edited a Boston labor blog called Labors Pains where he was on the periphery of covering US Uncut movement as well as Boston's Occupy Wall Street movement. He was a member of SEIU who took part in the union's lobbying effort in Washington, DC. 

Book preview

Looking Down the Rabbit Hole

The Developing Trends

Inside the Rabbit Hole

In THAT direction, the (Cheshire) Cat said, waving its right paw round, lives a Hatter: and in THAT direction, waving the other paw, lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both mad.

But I don’t want to go among mad people, Alice remarked.

Oh, you can’t help that, said the Cat. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

How do you know I’m mad? said Alice.

You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn’t have come here.

-  Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865.

The Western elite makes no secret of their goal, which is, I quote, Russia’s strategic defeat. What does this mean to us? This means they plan to finish us once and for all. In other terms, they plan to grow a local conflict into a global confrontation...

… Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy, and it looks like there is no cure for that.

- Russian President Vladimir Putin, during his address before the Russian Federal Assembly, February 21, 2023

An Absence of Media

Extra!

Extra!

Hot off the presses. The country’s journalists have abandoned us. Turn on the news and you’ll get your latest around-the-clock infotainment devoid content, pablum, where it’ll be hard to tell where news begins and commercials end. The mainstream news is the Muzak playing inside our elevator to nowhere.

Almost all the real journalists are gone. Even the successful are in danger of being squashed by mainstream platforms for reasons other than their commitment to a sustainable business model. Many real journalists self-publish on Substack or put out content, free of interference, on Locals, Rumble, or Telegram. These outlets hopefully will continue to promote freedom of speech and allow the mainstream to continue promoting innocuous travel images as well as cute animal memes, providing a kitty’s smirk isn’t deemed to be too subversive that it undermines the electorate’s faith in our government or our media. Don’t ask the mainstream companies what they think of independent platforms. They lie, a lot, and you’ll probably get the answer you suspect. Replace them. All of them.

Citizen journalists are needed. All are welcome. We will put out a paper disguised as a book. Bring whatever talents you’ve got. If you’re a poet, rhyme. If you’re a painter, paint. If you’re a songwriter, write and sing. Your country needs you. You need to document the times we’re living through. Make the people aware of the things you saw. In the future, people won’t believe what your leaders routinely tried to convince you of.

Welcome to the Dystopian States of America, 2024. Maybe I can alter our ultimate downward spiral if only I could do a better job writing my diatribes. If only I was more influential, more pointed, I could pull us out of this morass. I could use any nearby writing utensil to scratch out my ideas on a broadsheet. I’d publish it in crayon if I had to. I’d self-publish. Pass out flyers on the street. Free of charge. Each new reflection would make the citizens aware that we are heading toward an abyss and that we must turn this ship around… People would sense that I’m either the sincerest truth-teller or a raving lunatic. Perhaps a little of both. You be the judge.

Now let’s begin…

John Pilger’s Farewell Article

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair, and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn (also Hemingway’s third wife and one of first female war correspondents) spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and all of us under the shadow of violent great power.

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda: The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see, and hear…

How did it come to this? Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website (Declassified Australia) and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete.

— John Pilger’s last essay was published on January 1, 2024, one day after he died. I used Pilger’s journalism in a chapter for my book Eyes Open with Masks On, from a documentary that he had narrated concerning the island of Diego Garcia.

The European Union (1990-2020)

Originally published in Gary Floyd’s Liberte: The Days of Rage, pg. 6. The narrator longs for a collective future, rather than a continuation of the divisive discord that destroys unity.

"The front ramp is gradually lowered, in slow electronic increments. A couple dozen backpackers stand, inside the lower deck’s muted light, like an army of extraterrestrials. Paros is refilling with English, German, French, Italian, Scandinavian, Australian, and South African tourists. The town remains in motion. Some come. Some go. The cycle appears endless. The entire world appears to wash up on Paros.

Jim and I rise and make our way further up the beach. As we do we see the African guy, who’s really from Brooklyn, heading toward us, glassy eyes and still smiling. There’s a couple of different (English) girls under his arms. We nod. He nods. Like a specter of the Paros night. A harbinger, I hope, for what this world could be.

Despite his positivity, the narrator still senses an undercurrent of tension within the rapidly developing European Union. The passage appeared later in Gary Floyd’s Liberte: The Days of Rage, pgs. 34-35.

"Europe’s leaders systematically ratify the Maastricht Treaty. Denmark first rejects it and then, by the slimmest margin, ratifies it. The citizens celebrate by throwing rocks at the police in Copenhagen. Can a country leave the (European) Union after it joins it?

"European leaders, in Brussels and Geneva, continue to talk about a new united Europe….

"Twenty years later, there’ll be riots in Greece over debts incurred under the European Union. Pensions will be wiped out. Swastika graffiti will be painted on Athens walls, to protest the German banks that call in Greek loans. The Golden Dawn—an anti-immigrant, neo-Nazi Greek party who copies Nazi uniforms and flags—becomes the third largest party in Greece. Apparently, European experts had no better idea