Just about the only interesting feature for me in reading scifi is called Magical Realism; the slow lumbering camel suddenly lifting from the desert like a Leer off a runway. The author will take some agreed details of recognized reality and toss them into the future as concepts or dream inverted, like rain up from the ground. Fascinating to one who cannot stand trite and hackneyed computer-run-amock or spaceship timetravel dreck. There's still a place for imagination, I hope.
Once there was a movie, which is not a novel but it'll do on a rainy Sunday. The year was1976, and the scene was a fourth-rate teevee studio on obvious hard times. Just another dreary telecast of the evening news. That's the runway.
Then something happens.
The simple premise is, what would be the effect on ratings, or public consumption, of an obvious case of schizophrenia? Answer: it works well, both here and in the realtime future of broadcast. Note how Howard Beale resembles Ron Paul, and him not even the most acute case on the air today. I only see the more pitiful subjects on Comedy Central, Countdown, and Rachel, but the whole scrum at Faux Noise is scary, and Coultergeist and that Beck character seem truly certifiable.
Madness was once the means by which dissent was suppressed. If you didn't go along with the collectivist rapture then you were by nature and simple definiition insane and thus a candidate for a bunk in Siberia. Then along came the sixties with the seventies right behind, and that allegory, chaining as mad dissidents, became a feminist rallying cry. Undutiful wives were locked away in wards willy-nilly by chauvinist husbands, according to Chessler and Marge Piercy.
Now insanity is only another bent arrow in a very starved quiver.