So Far Gone

by Jess Walter

Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought: What have I done?

It, Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathrooms.

Some days, reading the news felt like being on a plane piloted by a lunatic, hurdling toward the ground.

Who knew quiet had its own sound?

As a journalist, as an American, as a rationalist, Kinnick had come to terms with the fact that 20 percent of his countrymen were greedy assholes. But then, in 2016, the greedy assholes joined with the idiot assholes and the paranoid assholes in what turned out to be an unbeatable constituency,

what if you went back over thousands of years of philosophical history from this new vantage, trading human experience for environmental ethics.

Technology, as he saw it, had finally succeeded in shrinking the globe, so much so that every news story felt dangerous and personal, every war a threat to his family, every firestorm, hurricane, and melting ice cap a local disaster,

seas boiling up around them, every cynical political and legal maneuver

part of the same rotten fabric—and half the country somehow seeing it exa...