A couple months ago, I wrote a blog proclaiming that America was immersed in a civil war.

It clearly is worse than that. I've become detached and dismissive of things that once would have either got me heated or at least caught me off guard - weapons talk, casual racism, strange and bizarre fits of frustration and rage in people I typically saw as almost sage like. In other words, I've become used to things feeling like they are falling apart, a disturbing feeling when I grew up in one of the most stable parts of what was, up until a few years ago, the most powerful country on earth.

I wrote in a review for "Man in the High Castle," which I submitted to the Hampton Institute, that we're clearly headed toward a new era of fascism. The epicenter seems to be the United States - where a flamboyant, Mussolini type figure is at the top of the Republican pack - but the fascist impulse is all over. Vladimir Putin seems an idol of our Republican front runner and his lengthy stay as leader of Russia, combined with his repression of the press and dissenting voices and the sponsorship of nationalist groups in Ukraine and elsewhere, shows his role as a new brand of fascist. Other countries are jumping on - while at odds with Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, has taken on his own fascist tone - shooting down Russian jets and allowing for the pilot to be executed on camera and then proclaiming in a speech that he viewed Adolf Hitler's Germany as an ideal governing system.

One of my Christian friends that I talk to regularly said that this world is headed "for a rebirth." That may perhaps be the case. The second world war led in to a reordering of the world's power structure, with many countries, like Germany and Japan, governed by others and essentially left to economic growth. I think, with how out of control the United States has become, that some sort of situation like that for the United States is not unimaginable.

The world's crazy and it's been like this before. The thing about the second world war is that we didn't have YouTube or iPhones. The horrors of that war may as well have happened in black and white for most of us. I'm not sure if people are ready for what a world altering war would look like with everything visible.