George Saunders' short story Love Letter has followed me across several years, multiple forms and in deteriorating real world circumstances. I first heard it in audio form, read by Saunders himself back in 2020 when things seemed bad, but what now in retrospect could be thought of as the good old days by comparison. I then heard it read again on a beautiful sunny weekend afternoon driving through the leafy back roads of upstate New York by David Sedaris four years later. By then the story still had weight as a cautionary tale but it was plausible to hope that the worst was maybe behind us. The United States that the story describes is a much darker version of something becoming recognizable. One scene in particular cuts like a dagger in our present situation. A state trooper makes a traffic stop and issues an oblique but blunt threat against the protagonist with a chilling knowledge of his private activities. That all this would become a daily truth, this criminalizing of thought and dissent made the story timely and timeless and scarily prescient. I reread it again yesterday and it comes across like a prophesy of the inevitable, right down to the details of judicial complicity. The story's protagonist, a well-meaning grandfather, offers  a series of rationalizations for his passivity in the face of a state apparatus ramped up to crush resistance. How familiar those rationalizations would become is something few of us saw coming.