Author Posits Political Future in "Virtually Yours, Jonathan Newman"

"Virtually Yours, Jonathan Newman" by Robert Rosell is a taut political thriller that puts a dystopian spin on a future America after the Tea Party and anti-"Big Government" factions have taken over and gutted the government, removing programs like Social Security and Medicare, and government agencies like the EPA and the IRS. Word of mouth marketing has already allowed Rosells book to garner 70 people attending his book signing next month at .

Former Mercer Island resident and author Robert Rosell summarizes his book:

“Nearly two decades after the Freedom First Party swept Democrats and Republicans from power in an election that transformed the political landscape, a new libertarian social order has taken over the United States. Government control over the economy is gone, taxation has been replaced by a national lottery and private corporations do as they please, unfettered by regulations or oversight. American families struggle to cope with a society that no longer funds public education and where healthcare services are out of reach for all but the wealthiest citizens.

In this new world, musician Jonathan Newman must figure out how to pay for his critically ill son’s ever-increasing hospital bills. He takes a two-year contract job with the global laboratory supply company, QualLab, which offers a generous salary and a great benefits package. But there’s a dark side to this dream job and Jonathan finds himself confined to a cell where a web of wires, tubes and sensors collect his bodily fluids and tissues to make the bio-laboratory tests he sells as he lives in a virtual reality that he comes to prefer over his messy real life.”

Montreal native Rosell was a political science and sociology major who got his graduate degree in theater and went from teaching to theater direction, writing screenplays and directing videos in Hollywood. Rosell and his wife Pat started an educational video production company, but became increasingly disenchanted with the Hollywood environment as a place to raise children, so they moved to Mercer Island and then Bellevue in the late 1980s. “We’re outdoors people,” said Rosell. “We’ve climbed all the mountains in this area, and my son celebrated his 15th birthday at 15,000 feet.”

But after 9/11, long before the Tea Party came into existence, Rosell started writing a screenplay for a feature film in response to the conservative views he was hearing on radio and TV that espoused less government interaction in the daily lives of American citizens. “I ended up setting it aside for years in order to build my (educational film) business,” he said. “Then the recession hit, and I suddenly had time, so I dug it out and thought ‘this would be a great novel,’ though history had already started catching up to what I wrote about 10 years ago.”

With the rise of pundits like Glenn Beck and Tea Party protests (the local chapter of the Tea Party had a picnic on Mercer Island in 2009 and 2010) came the ideology that freedom was being curtailed by big government. “So if you see government as an obstacle to freedom, then it is logical to get government out of the way” said Rosell. “The Great Change” as I call it in my book, is not that far-fetched, it’s a reasonable conclusion to the political choices being made by (the Tea Party and conservatives or libertarians).”

Like George Orwell (Animal Farm) and Aldous Huxley, (Brave New World) who wrote socio-political novels that posit a future based on political trends surfacing at the turn of the last century, Rosell noted that he’s sounding the alarm for today’s Americans on the dire future that might await us. “We’re facing complex arguments about our future, and most people don’t know what is truth and what is political posturing,” he said. “Sometimes fiction can give you a broader view, and allow you to look ahead and see the consequences to regular people of a world without any government control.”

Part of that future Rosell sees as tragic is people losing vital social interaction to an increasingly virtual society, where humans never physically interact in person, but spend their time talking to others via texting, talking on cell phones/computers or via Facebook. “When you go to another culture, in Spain or Ireland, for example, you see how their whole lives revolve around in-person social interaction at the neighborhood pub or in cafes,” he said. “It’s what makes us human, where we develop our values, our important relationships and learn about our communities—but now it’s increasingly difficult to have social relationships that aren’t begun on virtual networks---which poses a lot of questions about what is real and significant in our lives, about the tension between biological and virtual relationships.”

Yet Rosell said that he wants people to come away from his novel entertained, as well as enlightened. “My book doesn’t have a tragic ending, but it does challenge the reader to really think things through, about the political landscape and the lure of technology—so it’s not a political polemic, this book is an exploration, and a warning that fear leads to poor judgment, and decisions based on empty promises and fear may have a ripple effect and lead us to the situation in the book 20 years from now.”