Brett Redmayne-Titley: “On-Scene Reporting from World Gone Mad”

Brett Redmayne-Titley‘s new book THERE! On-Scene Reporting from a World Gone Mad incriminates the author in “real journalism in the first degree”—a crime for which he is lucky not to have been executed. Brett repeatedly shows up at confrontations between US imperial authority and its victims, sometimes getting uncomfortably close to the lethal violence…and occasionally finding a chance to verbally push back at its perpetrators. Too craftily elusive to have suffered Gonzolo Lira’s fate, and luckier than Serena Shim and Shireen Abu Akleh, Brett Redmayne-Titley offers an alternately righteous-anger-inducing and heartbreaking succession of scenes from the moral, spiritual, and material decline of empire. Tied together by the narrative of Brett’s close-up-and-personal view of the police execution of Evan Quik for the crime of briefly borrowing then returning his mother’s car, the book takes us  from the birth of Occupy to Zionist-afflicted Lebanon, NATO-besieged Transnitria, methane-poisoned Los Angeles, Erdogan-addled Turkey, a Wells Fargo branch that won’t let you withdraw your money, and perhaps most horrifically, the pedo-gang scene around Child Protective Services (CPS) that appears to have murdered Fox reporter Martin Burns, Georgia State Sen. Nancy Schaefer and her husband, and God knows how many others.

Closer to home, Brett introduces us to various San Diego debacles including a toxic Trumpfest, a rapper jailed for gangbanger lyrics (if bad lyrics were a crime most of the pop music world would have to be executed) and a nuclear disaster waiting to happen.

There is a great read, if you can handle emotions like righteous anger and utter and complete disgust. Devouring it in one sitting, I emerged happier than ever that I left the USA.