OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM (9)
By:
May 3, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Seventies (1974–83) sci-fi novels and comics! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | PHILIP K. DICK | 1974
Life is short. And prosperity even shorter.
Philip K. Dick wastes no time in throwing us into the first of many existential dilemmas in this dystopian near-future tale. A jilted ex-lover traps singer and 3-D TV superstar Jason Taverner in her apartment with an alien creature that renders him unconscious. When Taverner wakes, he is in a scummy room, sans ID papers. Worse yet, almost nobody seems to remember his genetically-enhanced “Sixer” celebrity face. All his privilege is suddenly gone. He’s as worthless and degenerate as a student radical (who live in underground warrens, hemmed in by the political police). All Taverner has left are his wits and the egoistic certainty that his world, the “real” one where he’s a star, is still out there somewhere.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said spoke profoundly to me when I re-read it most recently, during the Biden interregnum. Dick’s “Sixer” celebrity elite and their genetic enhancements reminded me of our current tech ruling class’s obsessions with longevity and transhumanist body hacking… let alone the physical mutations that our fascist ruling class undergoes in the desire for a uniform “Mar-a-Lago face.” Dick projected, as is his wont, his own contemporary trends — the development of an electronic surveillance state; student radicals shot dead, sent to prison, or induced into becoming informers; a middle-class mass mystified by moronic television; racial strife driven by eugenicist fervor — into a future full of horrors.
Taverner goes to ground in this new reality, gradually growing from callow villain to at least somewhat sympathetic anti-hero in the course of his investigations. He meets the people he once pilloried as “ordinaries” and “morons,” and finds all of them are in one way or another finks for the “pols” (political police) and “nats” (national guard), and yet still look for small ways to resist. “We have a betrayal state, [Taverner] realized. When I was a celebrity I was exempt. Now I’m like everyone else: I now have to face what they’ve always faced.” Pursued by high-ranking secret policeman Felix Buckman, who fancies himself one of the last civilized men, Taverner, his Sixer looks (Buckman himself is a “Seven”), and his non-existence in the interplanetary data banks render him into Buckman’s latest quarry. “[Taverner]’s got a lot of power and we must consider him a major figure.”
Buckman’s twin Seven sister Alys, a dissolute drug addict with obsessions all her own, engages her brother in an incestuous pas de deux as Buckman apprehends and interrogates Taverner. Alys reveals she knows Taverner’s true, original timeline, showing him she owns all his record albums. She’s an inveterate magpie of collectibles, in fact, from stamps to law books to rare pornography. Taverner, it seems, is her latest acquisition. The ultra-rich live by different rules, amidst gross luxury and private pleasures (Alys is an aficionado of addictive “phone-grid orgies”). As with many Dick novels, reality actually isn’t what it seems. Alys had taken an experimental drug called KR-3 (tested on political dissidents) that allowed her to warp her perception of reality and make Taverner, with whom she was obsessed, into a literal nobody who would need to come to her in supplication. The wealthy and powerful, it seems, are always using and backstabbing each other, no matter the reality. Buckman and his assistant obsess over the ways to frame rivals among the pols for Alys’s KR-3 induced death before settling on bringing a famous-again Taverner back into police headquarters.
In the epilogue, we hear how the system asserts itself, seemingly forever: “Columbia University was rebuilt and a safe, sane student body allowed to attend its police-sanctioned courses,” a tossed-off ironic line with startling echoes in our reality. Felix becomes a Smedley Butler-type whistleblower against the system he served and gets an assassin’s bullet for his class treachery. Felix and Alys’s kid follows in both parents’ footsteps, becoming a cop who collects “an impressive library of the most ancient and sought-after [old television commercials].” And Taverner beats the charges, lives a long life and retires amidst his career’s detritus, ironically unmourned and mostly unremembered, just as he was during Alys’s KR-3 trip. The useless commercialized “kipple” that Dick talked about in other works seems to bury everyone in Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, as much a poison as the actual fascism that envelops the solar system.
There is beauty which will never be lost, [Buckman] declared to himself; I will preserve it; I am one of those who cherishes it. And I abide. And that, in the final analysis, is all that matters.
OMAC YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on RIDDLEY WALKER | Carlo Rotella on THE FACE | Sara Ryan on DREAMSNAKE | Matthew Battles on THE WORD FOR WORLD IS FOREST | Ramona Lyons on HIGH-RISE | Adam McGovern on SHADRACH IN THE FURNACE | Deb Chachra on THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY | Tom Nealon on DHALGREN | Michael Grasso on FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID | Stephanie Burt on BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR | Nikhil Singh on SABRE | Gordon Dahlquist on VALIS | Miranda Mellis on THE DISPOSSESSED | Marc Weidenbaum on SOFTWARE | Peggy Nelson on THE TRANSMIGRATION OF TIMOTHY ARCHER | Josh Glenn on ENGINE SUMMER | Mimi Lipson on A SCANNER DARKLY | Douglas Wolk on THRILLER | David Hirmes on ARZACH | Anthony Miller on THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER | Annie Nocenti on JIMBO | Seth on MR. MACHINE | Alex Brook Lynn on JUDGE DREDD | Joe Alterio on THE INCAL | Jason Grote on JOSIE AND THE ELEVATOR.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!