Our Cuckoo’s Nest Called 2025
by James Grady
Stay close as we sneak through our insane asylum called 2025!
All around us flow humans trapped staring into their cellphones beaming ever-smarter Artificial Intelligence that can now shape 4 percent of voters’ choices plus “influencers” who hijack addicted watchers’ tick-tocks of time.
Look: there’s A.I.’s humanity killer Arnold Schwarzenegger vowing “I’ll be back!” from THE TERMINATOR movie released in 1984, the year that George Orwell prophesized. There stands George staring at a screen showing this year’s documentary about him called ORWELL: 2 + 2 = 5.
Our asylum walls shimmer movies.
Oh wow! There’s SINNERS! A brilliant movie about more than vampires. Zombies beside us gurgle agreement. Look! It’s a confused Leonardo DiCaprio in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. Who isn’t confused? Quick! Scurry past the wall showing A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE. Having a brain can be worse than being a zombie if you’ve only got 18 minutes to decide Armageddon. That wall pulsates thrillers like THE SECRET AGENT and BLACK BAG. This noir wall hums like a strummed guitar showing DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE about Bruce Springsteen, the great American author of my generation.
“Brooce!” is one of America’s aging creators of “rock” music from turf when better seemed possible and who, like Neil Young, Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson went “(still) on the road again” through our asylum. So did Britain’s Richard Thompson and Beatle Paul McCarthy. Cellblock whispers say Mick Jagger will soon again be a rolling stone.
Way above those silver souls soars modern “pop” icon Taylor Swift, while around her songsters Drake, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Bad Bunny –
Shh! Don’t say his name!
You’ll trigger one of Bunny’s dangerous haters:
The Crazy Orange Clown named Donny.
Look at him fighting to be free of democracy’s unraveling straightjacket.
Blink: Did Kaiser Wilhelm II’s ghost just stroke Donny?
Like Arnold promised, Donny’s back.
The Crazy Orange Clown tortures Asylum 2025.
The Timekeeper who controls this asylum triggered Donny back to…well, call it a Presidency. Not a victory for “conservatives” because Donny hammers government into a more not a less powerful force. Many inmates who voted for him were right that they’d been wronged, but wrong about what and who would make things right, in part because “liberals” kept preening in their mirrors instead of walking our corridors to listen.
Look at straightjacketed Donny striding in his own parade.
Except he’s often Judo thrown by Black Belt Putin.
Russian drones whirr over Germany as Donny screams.
“Pardons for my mob of cop killers! For narco czars! Mercy for helpers of millionaire child rapists! Climate change is a con job!
“Peacemaker!” he yells as wars in Ukraine and all over the globe rumble our asylum floor while brave inmates with press badges like Germany’s public broadcaster NDR reveal stories like the horrors of Syria. Donny’s killer jets blow up boats in international waters and he seizes Venezuelan ships because.
“Europe is unrecognizable!” screams Donny. “Civilization erasure!”
That twitch in his face: It’s a…a…a wink at to groups like Germany’s AdF.
Six bankruptcies dealmaker Donny leers at a wall of flowing news. Reuters reports that in the first six months of Asylum 2025, his family crew raked in $864 million.
Check out Donny’s court jesters.
Pushups champion Pretty Boy Pete hangs a new brass plaque changing America’s muscle machine’s name from “Defense” to “War.”
Ex-heroin addict Brain Worm Bobby smashes our asylum’s medical carts of needles that save lives and protect us from plagues.
The top prosecutor Bleached Blonde contorts her job trying to handcuff leaders and critics who challenge the Crazy Orange Clown.
But uh-oh: Donny’s new secret-police called ICE who hide behind black masks might create danger for the Crazy Orange Clown.
Donny’s attacks on immigrants he calls “garbage” and the official reasons for his new ICE troopers might remind American inmates that their First Lady, Donny’s – what, third wife? I sometimes forget, should ask anti-divorce Christians who support Donny. Anyway, she’s an immigrant! But hey: she’s almost a quarter of a century younger than Donny, savvy in her “I just don’t care, do you?” jacket, beautiful, hard as a nail, so…so yeah, that makes sense.
Making sense.
Thomas Mann and Rainer Rilke shake their heads. They’re celebrating their 150th birthdays but books CrimeMag readers love didn’t inspire enough sense to save us from this asylum. Mann and Rilke glare at Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler who can only shrug.
“Contemporary literature” is now a landmine.
“Now” blasts to “No way!” in a blink of this asylum. Authors can’t trust any fictional world their steps create to seem plausible in such explosions of time.
But some make it happen anyway.
Look at gaggles of them sitting in group therapy circles.
There’s old pros like Michael Connelly and John Grisham. Jeff Deaver. Hilary Davidson. S.A. Cosby settling in his chair of noir.
Unbelievable! I thought Thomas Pynchon had morphed into a great screaming across the sky, but he dropped a new private eye novel in this asylum!
And there’s Jake Lamar via Brooklyn to Paris grinning beside Robert Brack who’s explaining to their cool colleagues how he mentored Jake in Germany. Frank Goehre, Johannes Groschupf and Max Annas smile.
Look: There stands this asylum’s key author.
But his novels impact Asylum 2025 more from our personal screens as corporate mergers threaten what we used to call Hollywood that gave us public movie theaters housing fleeting but felt communities. Now we’re mostly alone.
The key author in Asylum 2025 is Mick Herron.
How lucky are us inmates if we have the right TV screens!
SLOW HORSES. DOWN CEMETERY ROAD.
Years of Herron’s work came together in this asylum’s screens to help inmates feel and see and know what’s really going on beyond official reality.
Perception. Revelation. Comprehension.
Forces that let me slyly slip personal heartbeats into our spotlight.
Asylum 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the movie THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR from my first novel and also sadly gave us the death of the movie’s star and international hero Robert Redford.
Floating past us are sci-fi stars like Margaret Atwood and Blake Crouch.
As The Timekeeper catapults us toward 2026, picture Robert Redford aka Condor in a working-class dark blue Navy peacoat confronting a government bigshot wearing a business suit & tie in the December streets of New York. Redford shakes his head. Delivers the screenwriter-written question rocking Asylum 2025 and the villains of wherever we end up next.
“What is it with you people,” says Redford staring out of time’s screen. “You think not getting caught in a lie is the same thing as telling the truth?”
Fade Out
** **
James Grady’s new erotic noir novel “Shadows On Sidewalks” will be published in the U.S. in May, 2026 — assuming. His first novel „Six Days Of The Condor“ became Robert Redford’s 1975’s movie. Grady became a muckraking journalist, an award-winning author of more than a dozen novels and three times that many short stories as well as screenwriting. London’s Daily Telegraph named him as one of 50 crime writers to read before you die. The Washington Post compared Grady’s prose to George Orwell and Bob Dylan. Publishers’ Weekly compared him to Larry McMurtry. Grady’s 2022 novel was the crime thriller „This Train“ and his 2024 noir coming-of-age novel is „The Smoke In Our Eyes“. 2025 saw his novel „American Sky“. He hails from Montana, but lives in the Washington, D.C. suburbs now.
In der Februar-Ausgabe (online 01.02.26) erscheint dieser Text dann auch auf Deutsch, übertragen von Alf Mayer.
