UBIK Philip K Dick

This scene takes place during this dystopian novel, where the protagonist is suddenly sent back to 1930, it is no different than what’s going on in a divided state of America.

I hope I can set this scene correctly as this takes place in a taxi ride in Des Moines, Iowa.

An explosion in this novel has allowed the world to regress back in time, including appliances, modes of transportation and every way we interact with the world so here we are back in 1930.

Source https://vusf.wordpress.com

In Ubik, Joe Chip and his associates have found themselves in an America that has temporally regressed to 1939. He’s just begun accepting this, having A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court-esque fantasy of even thriving in the past with his superior knowledge:

Suppose, he reflected, we can’t reverse our regression; suppose we remain here for the balance of our lives? Would that be so bad?

A few beats after Joe has this thought, his cab driver opens up a topic that will answer than last question for him. Bliss, the cab driver, asks Joe what he thinks will happen with World War II:

“‘Hitler will attack the Soviet Union in June 1941.‘

‘And wipe it out, I hope.‘

Startled out of his preoccupations, Joe turned to look closely at Mr. Bliss driving his nine-year-old Willys-Knight.

Bliss said, ‘Those Communists are the real menace, not the Germans. Take the treatmenti of the Jews. You know who makes a lot of that? Jews in this country, a lot of them not citizens but refugees living on public welfare. I think the Nazis certainly have been a little extreme in some of the things they’ve done to the Jews, but basically there’s been the Jewish question for a long time, and something, although maybe not so vile as those concentration camps, had to be done about it. We have a similar problem here in the United States…‘”

The taxi driver goes on to praise Charles Lindbergh, and expand the problem of the Jews to black people, using a racial slur the protagonists says he’s never heard spoken out loud before.*

This interaction thwarts Joe’s nostalgia