Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

Source of book: I own this.

This was this month’s selection for our “Literary Lush” book club. One of the things I enjoy about this club is that I end up reading interesting books that I never would have discovered on my own. This book is definitely in that category as I would never have picked it up on my own. 

It would be fair to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the book. I didn’t have that high of expectations since I am not really a pop culture maven, and I’m not really in to genre fiction. First, the bad stuff: there are a number of places where the writing is awkward. The characters aren’t particularly well developed, although that is rather par for the course with most genre fiction, particularly ones centered on action. The interpersonal interactions were particularly wince worthy. Cline doesn’t seem comfortable writing offline dialogue.

On the other hand, the book flows well, and makes for a compelling read. Although I will admit I didn’t get all the references (my family didn’t watch movies hardly at all during the 1980s), I was enough of a computer nerd to appreciate a good number. To a degree, it was a nice nostalgia trip back to the days of huddling over a computer - either our Commodore 64 or our cousin’s Apple - with my brother and cousins playing text-based games or dungeon style stuff like Gauntlet.

The universe in Ready Player One is well thought out. It is a dystopian future (like roughly half of new books these days it seems…), and a rather plausible one. A combination of environmental and economic factors have mostly destroyed society. Fossil fuels have run out, so vehicles are useless for the most part. Most people are deeply impoverished, and jobs are hard to come by. Children, at least, get food credits, so they don’t starve. The protagonist, Wade, lives with his aunt in “the stacks” - large towers of mobile homes and RVs which were created to make easy density within walking distance of public transit. But where Wade - and indeed most people - really live is in virtual reality. A system called OASIS is essentially the world of virtual reality, and contains millions of “planets” with different things to do on them. (To even begin to describe a few of them would take a chapter.) Even schooling for many is done in this reality. As our club - which contains a number of teachers - discussed, a lot of the features in this virtual school sound pretty cool, actually. Certainly, the fact that the student avatars can’t disrupt class or surf on their phones is a nice change from reality.

The creator of OASIS dies, and leaves his vast fortune to whoever can first successfully complete an elaborate quest he has left behind. Because the prospect of becoming the richest person in history has a lot of appeal, millions join the quest. They are hunting for what is essentially, the greatest “Easter Egg” ever. They are dubbed “egg hunters” - or “gunters” for short.

Because the creator was really into the 1980s, the gunters become serious students of 80s pop culture, hoping to find the clues necessary to lead them to the prize. In a very real sense, the creator becomes god, and his followers immerse themselves fanatically in the scriptures - the creator’s journal and those things known to be the creator’s favorite games, movies, songs, and so on.

For five years, nobody makes any progress. Then, Wade is able to solve the first riddle, and the game is on. Four other gunters are successful in clearing the first “gate,” and become the main competition to the IOI Corporation, a sinister global entity intent on taking over and monetizing OASIS. Two of these are particularly central to the story: Wade’s best - perhaps only - online friend, Aech (that’s the screen name - we don’t find out the real name until near the end), and Art3mis, a blogger who Wade has a huge crush for.

The bulk of the book is a fast paced narrative of the quest from Wade’s point of view. It is pretty easy to become immersed in the virtual world that Cline creates - I read through the book pretty quickly.

In addition to the fun of the plot itself, I thought the social commentary was well done. The book wasn’t particularly preachy, but it did gently bring to light some of the troubling trends of our own times, which in the book become even more pathological. One, of course, is growing economic inequality. When you combine this with the lure of affordable virtual reality, it is no wonder most people want to escape their crappy lives and live in a world where things are better and more equal - and meritocratic within the rules of the game. It is, at least, less destructive than drugs and booze. But, as it does for Wade, it becomes his entire life. After his early success, product endorsement money enables him to create his own fortress where he need have no actual interaction with other humans. His eventual liberation therefore requires that he set foot outside of virtual reality and experience real life.

The part about the nefarious corporation seeking to monetize everything was all too realistic. (Hello Facebook and Google...lately particularly?) Also too close for comfort was the idea of slavery as a result of debt. We are not that far removed from the days of debtors’ prison. Or from the days when half the population teetered on the brink of starvation, and lived literally decades shorter lives than the wealthy. It is the natural result of treating human beings as expendable cogs in the machine - and valuing them according to the money they bring.

Ready Player One isn’t a perfect book, but it exceeded expectations. I’m glad I was given a reason to read it.

The Giver by Lois Lowry

Source of book: Audiobook from the library   

This is another in our Newbery Award winning series of books. A law school classmate assigned one of his kids the entire list (which is impressive). I haven’t gone that far, but we are always looking for good audiobooks to pass the time when driving.

This book was also recommended by my classmate’s wife. Since she comes from the same cultic background as me, I think she should have given me a trigger warning. (I’m mostly kidding.) Because seriously, there are some elements of this book which were hard for me to withstand, because they were so similar to what I went through. 

The Giver is, as far as I can figure, one of the very first dystopian works directed toward children. It is particularly powerful because it starts off as a utopia - kind of in the pattern of Thomas More’s classic, which gave birth to the name, which means “nowhere.” The society seems so perfect in many ways - and it has some distinctly admirable qualities. For example, it is egalitarian as to gender. Both men and women serve in all capacities, and the intent is that each serves according to his gift. Children are selected for specific careers at age 12, based on their aptitude as determined by observation and their own choices as to how to spend their volunteer hours. Alas, as we find out later, once you have your career selected, you can’t change - so you had better hope the Elders get it right the first time. This is indeed a better system than one where birth and genitalia are destiny.

Likewise, the society does appear to take seriously the idea that everyone should start off with the same advantages. One (in theory) rises or falls in status as one’s gifts and effort dictate. This is a definite improvement on our current (and indeed the vast majority of historical) societies, which most certainly do not give everyone the same starting line. (I can’t believe I actually have to say that, but a certain political philosophy loves to pretend we start in the same place.)

Also utopian is the idea that compassion and kindness are emphasized. There is a format for apologies and forgiveness. But more on that later, because that was one of my trigger points.

I might also mention the emphasis on precision of language - because that part might be my utopia. No more use of “literally” when “figuratively” is intended. And Alanis would get a slap on the wrist...

Perhaps most in the utopian tradition is the idea that there is no want. Everyone has enough to eat, to wear. A place to live, a supportive family. There is no warfare, and death is mostly predictable and from old age. An accident is such an unusual tragedy that it is remembered for years afterward.

But there is a dark side, as the protagonist, Jonas, learns. He is selected to have a very special job, one that comes with “great honor.” He will be the next “Receiver of Memories,” and be trained by the previous holder of that job.

As it turns out, memories, emotions, and every unpredictability have been eradicated in favor of “Sameness.” Only the Receiver of Memories can remember weather, sunshine, and other commonplaces - and also the negative counterparts: war, death, hate, pain. And Jonas must receive all of these from the previous Receiver, who is now The Giver.

And then, he also learns of the terrible truth of the community. People are “released,” which means that they are killed. After the elderly reach a certain age, they are “released.” If twins are born, one is “released” so that the population remains steady. (As far as that goes, babies are genetically engineered and birthed by designated birth mothers, then assigned to family units. Sexual desire is chemically repressed so that there are no pregnancies outside the system.) And those who fail to conform to the rules of the community must change or they too are released.

I won’t give away any more of the plot, because the way it unfolds is interesting. But I do have some observations. My second daughter pointed out the similarities between this “sameness” and the one in A Wrinkle in Time. There certainly are similarities. Everyone does things on a schedule, and love has been essentially eradicated. So definitely some influence from the earlier book, I would wager.

The theme has some similarity too. All utopias require control in some way or another. (Even the libertarian utopia would require a police state to keep the lower classes from revolting.) There is simply no other way to force the messiness and diversity of humanity into a single mold.

One of the interesting twists in this book, though, is that it makes you consider just how far you would be willing to go to end war. I guess this is always the question that has no easy answer. Safety versus freedom? We see this in our discussion of gun and immigration laws, for example. And incarceration laws. There are more, to be sure, and it isn’t always easy to draw the line. If this was the only question posed by the book, it would be a doozy.

But the Community makes an additional choice, which is to eliminate conflict by “sameness,” which goes considerably beyond a sacrifice of some options. Instead, it forces individuals to become alike. Races have been eliminated, for example. (It’s a Steve “I'd like to see an America that is just so homogenous that we look a lot the same” King utopia…) This is much different from the idea of tolerating (or embracing) diversity and difference. It is enforcing conformity.

It is in this that I strongly recognize my own past. The ideal to which one must conform is obviously different - the center of Bill Gothard’s teaching was the subordination of women and rigid gender roles - but the point is the same. Conformity must be rigid, differences must be eradicated, and failure to conform must be ruthlessly punished.

Another parallel: the apologies. I may have mentioned this somewhere in one of the blog posts I did in the past, but I want to state it outright here: apology is used as a weapon to enforce conformity in the Gothard system. It is one where subordinates apologize, not leaders. It is one where failing to follow the rules exactly requires an apology. And it was rather ritualized and used to control. Someone who learned to use the system could - and usually did - bully others by using the language against them.

Maybe the most triggering, though, were the evening “emotion” sessions. The family unit would gather, and each would tell the emotions they felt throughout the day. These would then be processed in an “appropriate” way, so they would be defused. It is a bit like therapy turned on its head. Some of it sounds good - and most of us parents have probably done some of the same things to talk through emotions with our kids. But this was more. Negative emotions were either explained away, or rejected. There was not really the space to express negative emotions - particularly if they were directed toward the “authority” of parents or others. I had flashbacks to the concept of “yielding rights” (which really only was something subordinates did, not leaders) which was very much used as a weapon against feelings that one was being abused or hurt. “You are angry because you haven’t yielded your right to [perfectly normal desire].” It was a way of conditioning one to accept toxic behavior and demands without pushing back. (Some of us did indeed push back big time - particularly after we left home.) Then you throw in the insistence on “confessing sin” - basically a chance to inflict guilt for “rebellious” thoughts. So yes, this was a highly triggering bit in this book.

Like Jonas, though, I too held back. I have never, with anyone, shared everything about me. Some emotions and experiences are not public. (And anyone who knows me knows I actually wear my heart on my sleeve - but even I have my inner life that nobody sees entirely.) And no, my wife and I do not make an exception for each other. We see more of each other than anyone else - but we have our private parts of our minds too. And that is a very good thing.

And then there is the issue of sex. It is easy to see parallels with classics such as 1984 and Brave New World. But I think Lowry really nails this issue. Perhaps it is because she has to dance around sex in a book for children, but the idea that at puberty all humans are put on pills to eliminate sexuality is brilliant. This would be the killer app for a fundamentalist utopia. Seriously. As it is, Gothardism and other fundamentalist movements attempt to use psychologically abusive techniques to suppress sexuality. They insist women’s bodies are the source of sin, and preach that the worst sins are all sexual. They try to eliminate contact between the sexes prior to marriage through “courtship” and “betrothal.” They systematically attempt to repress sex in favor of what is essentially a return to the values of arranged marriage. Sexuality and marriage are about alliances between “likeminded” families, not about love.

This is why the pill would be a killer app. If sexuallity could be repressed - turned on and off a will - then you could avoid all the messiness. No out of wedlock pregnancies. No people falling in love without parental sanction. It’s utopia, right? So much easier to control people. And honestly, since the age at which it makes financial sense to start a family gets older and older (due to political decisions, I should add), the only hope to ensure sexual purity until that time seems to be to invent such a pill. Otherwise, you keep setting basic nature against societal expectations - something is going to give. Not everyone will willingly give up the peak of their sexual and reproductive years for the good of “society.” Unless you can reprogram biology itself.

This book has been one of the most challenged books - meaning that parents (or others) have objected to its presence in school reading lists or libraries. One reason why is undoubtedly that it talks of suicide and infanticide. These are heavy themes, and how your children react might be different than mine, who did fine. But the other reason, I strongly suspect, is that the book is disconcerting. It makes one question. Question authority. Question the status quo. It makes you wonder about who in our society is being quietly left to expire. (Do not get me started on the GOP “health care” plan.)

I found it interesting that at least one critic believed the book was a cautionary tale against Progressivism. I believe that conclusion is only possible if you use a strawman version of “Progressivism.” You know the one, that we have regulated things so much that people cannot hurt themselves anymore and this has deadend life. This is the libertarian fantasy writ large. A more accurate description of the Progressive goal (see, for example, Theodore Roosevelt) is that it is a movement to prevent the oppression of the weak by the strong, a check on the unrestrained power of the wealthy. I would hardly imagine, for example, that Canadians are somehow emotionally dead and repressed because they are more Progressive in some sense.

Rather, the caution here transcends Right and Left. The core value of dystopia is the elimination of differences through control. The right wing of the Nazis resembles the left wing of the Stalinists more than either resembles modern Belgium. Bill Gothard resembles Kim Jong Un more than either resembles Tony Blair or Margaret Thatcher. It is a utopian ideal, the elimination of conflict not through the cultivation of empathy and balancing of the needs of different people and groups, but through the forced conformity to the goals of the leadership, no matter what the human cost.

The cure in this book (and in A Wrinkle in Time as well) isn’t laissez faire economics or some other abstract ideal, but a return to true humanity, an embrace of the value of all, not just those of economic worth, and a celebration of human connection. It is an embrace of all the messiness and risk that humanity entails, not just those who fit in perfectly. In that sense, it is an embrace of the teachings of Christ, not the teachings a utopian, whether Ayn Rand or Karl Marx.

In an interesting twist, a later book by Lowry, using some of the same characters, envisions another village that becomes actively xenophobic, refusing to accept and embrace the unwanted and displaced from other villages. Because this is always the other half of the picture. Forced conformity goes hand in hand with fear and hatred of the “other.”

It’s an interesting book, not the most pleasant read for me, given my history, but one which does provoke thought. 

***

Late addition to this post. A friend commenting on my Facebook post triggered a memory of a quote from Steven Pinker's outstanding book, The Better Angels of our Nature - which should be required reading. It concerns the way that utopian ideology of all kinds leads to mass murder of citizens:

"Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would only kill one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or - projecting into the indefinite future - infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain. Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math."

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

This is my selection for Women’s History Month. I finished it just at the end of March, but haven’t had a chance to sit down and write about it until now. Here are the past Women’s History Month selections:

Are Women Human? By Dorothy Sayers

A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft

I picked this book because, in the aftermath of several high-profile meltdowns of leaders of the Christian Patriarchy movement, some observers started pointing out just how much the subculture resembled this book. Perhaps most interesting was the suggestion that Doug Phillips’ victim was intended to be his “handmaid.”

Once I got into the book, the parallels were unmistakable, and in that sense, I am wondering if ignorance would have been bliss. Because this book seems all too prescient 30 years later about the trajectory of the Religious Right and shows all too well the real way that totalitarianism could come to the United States. (Hint: it isn’t the Affordable Care Act…)

First, a bit of background. Margaret Atwood is a Canadian author with a fairly wide range of works, from poetry to fiction to essays. She has a connection to the United States, though, that is quite interesting.

Back in 1683, in Puritan Massachusetts, there was an elderly widow named Mary Webster. She was accused of witchcraft, apparently for having “made” a man get sick and die by her spells. She was convicted, and hanged.

Except she didn’t die. The next morning, she was discovered to still be alive. She would go on to live for another 14 years.

The Webster family, however, was, understandably spooked by this whole episode, and high-tailed it to Canada. While not a direct descendant of Mary, Margaret Atwood was a descendant of the Webster tribe.

Appropriately, Atwood would write The Handmaid’s Tale during 1984, the setting of another work of dystopian fiction of that name by George Orwell. The impetus for the book, according to the author, was the claims that she kept hearing from Americans that totalitarianism “could never happen here.” Atwood granted that the United States would not likely end up with a Stalin or a Mao - but she contended that the United States could absolutely become totalitarian. But it would happen differently.

The theory was this - and I think it is a good one: totalitarian regimes do not simply arise de novo, but instead are incremental worsening of existing ideas and institutions. For example, Atwood notes that the KGB was just a meaner, more powerful version of the Tsarist secret police. And the agricultural bureaucracy of Mao just became a more dysfunctional and oppressive version of what already existed before communism. Atwood didn’t mention the Nazis, but I will. Hitler didn’t invent the holocaust. He simply made existing antisemitism and pogroms (dating back a couple thousand years) far worse. And he built on existing undercurrents of nationalism as well. It wasn’t a new idea, just a tapping of the worst instincts of what existed.

[I]f you wanted to seize power in the US, abolish liberal democracy and set up a dictatorship, how would you go about it? What would be your cover story? It would not resemble any form of communism or socialism: those would be too unpopular… Nations never build apparently radical forms of government on foundations that aren't there already. Thus China replaced a state bureaucracy with a similar state bureaucracy under a different name, the USSR replaced the dreaded imperial secret police with an even more dreaded secret police, and so forth. The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself. Like any theocracy, this one would select a few passages from the Bible to justify its actions, and it would lean heavily towards the Old Testament, not towards the New.

For Atwood, then, her view was that American totalitarianism wouldn’t be something imposed from outside, like a communist takeover, or a total change in natural character. It would be a combination of a return to the supposedly glorious past, combined with the exploitation of the most pernicious parts of our national character.

I believe Atwood is correct that it is our puritanical history - which continues to influence us today - that would function as the driving force in a revolution. She also notes our continuing problem with racism and white supremacy. These appear in the book, but they are not the main point, as she chooses to focus on the issue of gender and sexuality. Also prescient is her choice to use a faked Islamic attack to trigger the revolution.

In fact, the Islam connection is a double one. We often tend to forget that it was in the 1970s that the rise of radical Islam came to pass. The Iranian Revolution in 1978 started a cascade wherein expressly “Islamic” regimes came into existence in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia followed, with Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon a few years later. While the characters of the different governments differed - and have taken different paths - a combination of anti-Western sentiment and suppression of dissent brought an instability to the world that continues today. I’m far too little of a history scholar to trace the effects of repeated foreign intervention in Afghanistan, but I can say that the Taliban - which took over in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union roughly in 1996 - is the closest analogue to Atwood's dystopian vision in The Handmaid’s Tale. In that sense, she was a true prophet. A bit off on time and place, but astonishingly correct nevertheless.

Atwood also draws ideas from other countries, from the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe (for the way that people were bought off for privileges) to the Philippines (for state sanctioned murders of dissidents by the citizens) to Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu (obsession with fertility and outlawing of birth control - leading to the orphanage crises and a generation of psychologically damaged orphans).   

In the book, a faux-Islamic attack succeeds in assassinating the president and blowing up Congress. Martial law is instituted, and the Christian Fundamentalists behind the assassinations takes over before anyone can realize what is happening.

The revolutionaries promise to restore order, and set about consolidating their power. The story is hard to figure out at first, because the narrator tells things in a series of flashbacks. But she is so traumatized by what has happened to her that the past comes in pieces, and out of order. It is not until near the end that one can really figure it all out.

At the risk of spoilers, here is the end result.

SPOILER WARNING!

Like with the Taliban, the fundamental goal of the fundamentalists (sorry) is to undo all the gains of Feminism and “restore” things to how they were in the glory days of the past. And that past is defined much the same way as the Taliban defines it.

It is nothing less than a return to the power structures and social hierarchies recreated from the respective holy books. And not just, say, Greco-Roman society, as unpleasant as that may be. Rather, going full Old Testament.

I will also add here that the vision of both radical Islam and fundamentalist Christianity in this book is worse than either’s past. Because you can’t just turn the clock backwards. You have to actively destroy institutions, rights, and a great many people in order to institute the grand vision. (That this sounds like the Communist purges is no accident. See above.) Just one example, throughout most of the ancient world, women may well have been sub-human, but they usually had the ability to have employment and money - at least in some circumstances.

Because toxic waste and diseases have lowered fertility catastrophically, women are suddenly in great demand. At least fertile ones. The others, well, they are expendable for the most part.

In this fictitious “Republic of Gilead,” there is a patriarchal hierarchy. At the top are (of course) the bigwigs. These are the architects of the revolution, and the ones with the real power. Below them are the soldiers (fighting an endless war against, well, it isn’t exactly clear), the police forces (militarized), and the secret police. Those who don’t make the cut are eliminated. And, boy, are there a lot to be eliminated.

First, this is a theocracy, so all non-Christians must go. For the Jews, well, they can convert or be shipped to Israel. (Unfortunately for most of them, the job was contracted out to the Halliburton of this world, who dumped most of them in the ocean to improve profit margins.) Muslims and others are murdered. Oh, and this isn’t a multi-cultural republic either, the “Sons of Ham” - that is, as any student of the history of American Slavery can tell you - African Americans - are cordoned off on reservations.  (It is strongly implied that Hispanics and other minorities are either evicted or murdered. In any event, only whites get to reproduce.)

And then there are others to purge. Only those who have been married only once have “legitimate” marriages. So any remarried persons (like the narrator, who married a divorced man) have their marriages broken up. More on them later. And what about sexual minorities? Well, it depends, doesn’t it? Gay men are easy. They are “traitors to gender” and are either executed, or if they are “lucky,” sent along with the childless or otherwise undesirable women (aka “unwomen”) to collect toxic waste and die an early death.

Lesbians are different, though, because they are potentially fertile. They, like the narrator, have a different destiny.

Women too have a hierarchy. Those married to the head honchos are “wives,” dressed in blue (like the Virgin Mary). They have certain privileges, but are still practically prisoners in their own homes - as are all women. (The parallels to the Taliban regime a decade later are incredible.)

Below the “wives” are the “cheapwives.” These are the lower class, married to a man who can support them, and perhaps children, but nothing further. They wear a multi-colored garment representing the fact that they have to do everything.

Lower still are the “Marthas,” the servant class. These are typically older women who are considered safe, but not sources of children. They fulfil the basic roles that servants of the past have - for the rich households, of course. And, because they have no real choice in employment, they are really slaves. Similar in status are the “aunts,” who train and supervise the “handmaids.”

The lowest legitimate class, before you get to the “unwomen” are the “handmaids.” These are named after the “handmaids” of the Old Testament patriarchal period. Bilhah and Zilbah, who bore Jacob sons, and Hagar, who bore Abraham’s son Ishmael. They are, as the narrator describes it, “two legged wombs,” intended to bear children. These are those of childbearing age who are believed to be fertile, usually because they have already had children. (Those children have been taken from them and adopted out to rich families.) The job of a handmaid is to have sex (in a ritualized manner) with the wealthy man to whom they are given, so that she can have a child for the infertile legitimate wife. If they fail, they are declared unwomen and shipped out to the death camps.

I noted above the way one became a handmaid. One needed to be young and fertile, naturally. But generally, one ended up that way because one had engaged in some perceived sexual transgression. More than one lifetime sexual partner. Lesbian. Married a divorced man. And on and on. According to the epilogue, when “legitimate” fallen women ran short, offenses were created to drag more young women into the ranks of handmaids.

I won’t go further into the plot than that at this time. It is a dark vision, where women have lost nearly all autonomy. They are forbidden to read, kept in their homes, and viewed as being worth only as much as their uterus can create. Sex for pleasure is forbidden (although it occurs, certainly), and any sense of equality between genders is considered the height of evil.

One thing I wanted to specifically note in this review is that Atwood has clearly done her research. She knows the language of fundamentalism.

I have noted often on this blog that my family spent time in a fundamentalist cult when I was in my teens. In fact, my law school education came from the school started by that cult.  My wife, likewise, spent time in a similar - and if anything more misogynist - group. Even if we hadn’t, we have spent enough time in Evangelicalism to know the language well ourselves. Part of my journey over the last decade and a half has been to realize just how much American Christianity has been seduced by fundamentalism (in the cultural sense) and how much the language of misogyny has infiltrated the politics of the Religious Right.

The language of the Republic of Gilead could be lifted from today’s Religious Right - and our current Republican Party.

It was just a bit scary. Women belong in the home. Women are raped because of what they were wearing. Women's bodies are dangerous and cause men to sin. Men only want one thing. The greatest calling a woman can have is that of wife and mother. Women need men to protect them from other men. And many more that I didn’t write down as I read it. The whole freaking culture is the same.

Atwood is writing fiction, so she takes things to their logical extreme. That is part of her craft, and it is a useful device in literature. (Orwell was a master of it as well. And Jonathan Swift.) But the uncomfortable part is that she may have thought she was exaggerating, but she was closer than I would have believed, had I read this back in the 1980s. (I mean, assuming I was old enough to understand it...work with me.)

But seriously, the Taliban wasn’t far off. Actually, the evidence is that the Taliban came darn close to re-creating the Republic of Gilead.

And within certain sub-cultures here in the United States, the Republic exists. Just minus the backup of military force. One great example is that of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. Who apparently have had their own fertility issues due to generations of inbreeding

But also within the Christian Patriarchy movement. I know. I have heard nearly everything in this book from acquaintances, friends. And yes: family too if I am honest.

Let me note just a few:

One of the handmaids-in-training as part of the brainwashing, is forced to confess that she was raped and had an abortion at 14. (Or at least make up a story that she did.)

But whose fault was it? Aunt Helena says, holding up one plump finger.

Her fault, her fault, her fault, we chant in unison.

Who led them on? Aunt Helena beams, please with us.

She did. She did. She did.

Why did God allow such a terrible thing to happen?

Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson. Teach her a lesson.

Oh wait, that sounds like it came straight out of a Bill Gothard teaching!

Or how about this one, about childbirth?

Once they drugged women, induced labor, cut them open, sewed them up. No more. No anesthetics, even. Aunt Elizabeth said it was better for the baby, but also: I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.

Yep, heard that one as an argument for mandatory home childbirth from fundies. Not that I am opposed to home birth, exactly. I was born at home, and for uncomplicated births, sure, why not? And, bottom line, I’m not a woman. Your body. Your birth choice. But this isn’t about choice. It’s about telling women their pain is a punishment for the evils of Eve and womankind in general.

Oh, and about one I mentioned above.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn how to manipulate them, for your own good. Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor. It’s nature’s way. It’s God’s device. It’s the way things are.

Honestly, from Fascinating Womenhood on down, this is THE message of pretty much every “Christian” book on marriage and relationships. Men want sex. Women (who don’t deserve equal power in relationships) have to learn to use sex to manipulate men into getting what they want. That’s really what “Men trade love for sex, women trade sex for love” actually means. It is hard to think of one idea that I had to unlearn about women after my own marriage that is as damaging as this one. And yet it sells. And is presented as a key part of the Gospel itself.

There is another passage that really hit home. The narrator, Offred (meaning “Of Fred,” because her identity is that of the man who has the legal right to rape her to produce offspring) has a complicated relationship with Fred, because he wants to conduct an illegal personal relationship with her behind his wife’s back. And what can she do? Damned if she does and damned if she don’t. He is “mansplaining” to her how much better things are now than they were, when women had to spend vast sums of money and time trying to catch a suitable man, and even if she did, he might leave her, etc. He dismisses the idea that having a job and income was worth it.

Money was the only measure of worth, for everyone, they got no respect as mothers. No wonder they were giving up on the whole business. This way they’re protected, they can fulfil their biological destinies in peace. With full support and encouragement.

When Offred points out that all this overlooks love and romance, he dismisses that as well.

Oh yes, he said. I’ve read the magazines, that’s what they were pushing, wasn’t it? But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love? Arranged marriages have always worked out just as well, if not better.

I. Have. Freaking. Heard. Both. Of. These. From friends. And yes, from family. The points missed, among others, of course, are that the reason that parenting in general is sometimes disrespected is that it is “women’s work,” and that the reason arranged marriages were “more successful” is that women were bought and sold and couldn’t leave even if abused. Yep, definitely better.

And it goes on and on. Women need to dress “modestly,” “shamefacedly.” Women should not teach. (In fact, at the handmaid indoctrination center, scripture is played on an otherwise forbidden phonograph in a man’s voice so that the women do not have to “teach.” Oh, yes, I’ve been part of groups that believed the same thing. And John Piper won’t allow women to read scripture in his church…) Women are more easily deceived. They should remain silent. They are saved through childbearing.

Just one more. The Republic of Gilead presents their vision of female subservience through two perspectives. First is, obviously, the theonomic application of Old Testament texts. Second, though, is an appeal to “nature.” The era of feminism - and the idea that women are fully human and not the property of men - is fairly recent in the history of human civilization. As Fred puts it, talking about Offred’s past:

Those years were just an anomaly, historically speaking, the Commander said. Just a fluke. All we’ve done is return things to Nature’s norm.

Oh yes. Heard this one a lot as well. Gender essentialism and the misogyny of the past dressed up as “the way things are.” Here’s the ever-loathsome Doug Wilson:

When we quarrel with the way the world is, we find that the world has ways of getting back at us. In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.But we cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity. When authority is honored according to the word of God it serves and protects — and gives enormous pleasure. When it is denied, the result is not “no authority,” but an authority which devours."

See, the way the world is, according to Doug - and according to the Republic of Gilead - is that women MUST be submissive to men. And their bodies are not their own, but belong to men. That’s the whole foundation of the belief. As I pointed out previously, for Doug, orgasms themselves MUST be had only in the context of a man dominating a woman. 

That’s “nature.” (I might say, “that’s Darwinism.” But I’m sure that’s heresy, right?)

I want to touch on just a few more points.

The first is this. It is easy to forget in our modern times, but Patriarchy was never just about gender. It is about a whole system of hierarchies wherein the superior rule (hopefully benevolently) over the inferior. As Aristotle put it in Politics, the freeman ruled women, children, and slaves. The slavery is every bit as important to the system as the subjugation of women. The defenders of American Slavery understood this point well, and the modern defenders of the “peculiar institution” likewise make no bones about it.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, there is likewise a need for a hierarchical social structure to preserve power and control the masses. Without the hierarchy, the whole system crumbles. As any dictator could tell you, one major threat to any system is young men without a future. Gilead utilizes the same technique to control the young men while preserving power for the privileged old men that Radical Islam uses. First, there is an endless war, which decimates the male population, while giving opportunities for glory and advancement. If the young male just works hard enough, long enough, he might, just might, eventually get to have sex. Thus, sex is used as a motivation so that the young do the bidding of “the tired old [men] that we call kings.” (Thank you, Don Henley.) Speaking of the young soldiers:

They think instead of doing their duty and of promotion to the Angels [full soldiers], and of being allowed possibly to marry, and then, if they are able to gain enough power and live to be old enough, of being allotted a Handmaid of their own.

Offred sways her hips a little, enjoying the only power she has, which is to drive these men mad.

Then I find I’m not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there. I hope they get hard at the sight of us and have to rub themselves against the painted barriers, surreptitiously. They will suffer, later, at night, in their regimented beds. They have no outlets now except themselves, and that’s a sacrilege.

And that, I believe, is a distillation of the Religious Right’s message to the young men right now. Never mind that we have made it harder and harder to marry before age thirty. Maybe if you work hard enough you can marry someday. Oh, and don’t masturbate, because that is a sacrilege…

One more that I need to mention. The first step of the “revolution” was to take away the financial independence of women. There were two parts to this. First, because electronic payments had replaced cash, all female accounts were terminated, and the balances transferred to husbands or male next of kin. Second, women were forbidden the right to employment. (Okay, they could still be servants - slaves, really.)

This, as the narrator notes, changed everything. I will also note that it is harsher than it has been in history, but it is also very much the goal of fundamentalist religion. (From the Taliban to Christian Patriarchy.) Once a woman has something of her own (as the saying used to be), she has some degree of power. Here is the scene after Offred loses her job. Luke is her then-husband, before they were separated and their child taken from them.

That night, after I’d lost my job, Luke wanted to make love. Why didn’t I want to? Desperation alone should have driven me. But I still felt numbed. I could hardly even feel his hands on me.

What’s the matter? He said.

I don’t know, I said.

We still have...he said. But he didn’t go on to say what we still had. It occurred to me that he shouldn’t be saying we, since nothing that I knew of had been taken away from him.

We still had each other, I said. It was true. Then why did I sound, even to myself, so indifferent?

He kissed me then, as if now I’d said that, things could get back to normal. But something had shifted. Some balance. I felt so shrunken, so that when he put his arms around me, gathering me up, I was small as a doll. I felt love going forward without me.

He doesn’t mind this, I thought. He doesn’t mind it at all. Maybe he even likes it. We are not each other’s, anymore. Instead, I am his.

Unworthy, unjust, untrue. But that is what happened.

This scene has haunted me.

Just to turn the tables, imagine as a man, losing the ability to make a living. And having to depend on a woman for every dime one has. I’ve seen it happen. And very, very few marriages survive the change in power. Particularly the ones in which the man was the sole provider. His very identity has been stripped away and now he is “unmanned,” so to speak.

My wife has always been employed, and currently contributes roughly half to our family’s finances. And this makes for a particular dynamic. I happen to like it, as I am an egalitarian, and prefer a companionate marriage. But it would be hard on both of us if either were to be out of work. It would shift a dynamic in a way that would be unpleasant for both of us. Either direction.

The reason this is haunting is that the “Christian” ideal within Evangelicalism these days is that the man bring home the bacon. The thrust of the Religious Right has been, since the days of Phyllis Schlafly, to “restore” the world to “nature’s” way, where men are manly, and women are dependent, and so on. I fear that this is the ultimate end game for the Religious Right, both in the church, and in society, and I know in my heart that the loss of this independence and a demotion to a dependent status would be crushing to so many women - and terrible for many of us men as well. Offred knows Luke hurts for her - and his later actions prove it. But still, psychologically, she is correct. He has lost NOTHING. If anything, he has gained power and privilege. While she has lost.

As the Commander puts it eventually, after his attempts to draw Offred into having an opinion fails:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, is what he says. We thought we could do better.

Better? I say in a small voice. How can he think this is better?

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

Indeed it does. And the heartrending part of this book is that Offred yearns - as we all would - for the days when she could just be. She could be married. She could have a daughter. She could have a job, and money of her own, and go running in normal clothes, and tan by the beach in a bikini, and read, and be. I suspect many in the totalitarian states of today feel the same way. (The Kite Runner is similarly haunting for the destruction of a way of life.) The very point of the fundamentalist desire for a theocracy is that women (and to a lesser degree, men) have no right to just be, to live their lives as they choose. They are to be owned and controlled by men at all times.

My own fundie experience wasn’t this bad, obviously, although my wife’s was worse. But over the last few years, watching friends and acquaintances emerge from the nightmare of Christian Patriarchy. It is very much like waking up from Offred’s nightmare, where their bodies and selves were owned by their fathers, then by their husbands - if they didn’t escape first. It’s all there. The rape culture, the Modesty Culture, the hostility toward education for women. The whole thing.

Offred discovers a pseudo-Latin quote inscribed by her predecessor handmaid, who later hung herself. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

I can say with honesty that this has been the unspoken motto of so many who have escaped this subculture. And it remains a motivating factor for me, in my own battle against the creeping Patriarchy within the American church and politics. Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

***

Note on past politics:

Atwood patterned a character, the Commander Fred’s wife, “Serena Joy” after two real-life persons. First is Phyllis Schlafly, mentioned above. She was the foremost female face of the dawn of the Religious Right, which coalesced around the cause of opposing desegregation. (See the notes at the bottom of this post.) The secondary cause was to oppose feminism, which, as fellow Religious Right founder and now certified loony Pat Robertson said at the time, “encourage women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” (Wait, I’ve heard that sentiment a thousand times too!) Schlafly would, to paraphrase, encourage women to “return home, to let their husbands provide, and to use their femininity and feminine wiles as the core of their success and fulfilment as women." Serena Joy was also patterned after Tammy (Bakker) Messner, the wife of televangelist Jim Bakker (who later did time for financial crimes.) The composite character used her fame to call for women to stay home, but then found herself miserably unhappy when her only outlets were knitting and gardening, and her only way to get out of her own home was to call on a “sick” neighbor. The hypocrisy, of course, of a Schlafly, who farmed her own child care out to nannies while having her own bank account, is palpable.

Schlafly, of course, appears to have not changed at all, openly endorsing The Toupee Who Shall Not Be Named in significant part because of his racist platform.

Messner’s story was both more tragic and yet heartening. After Jim fell from grace, she took the brunt of the blame, despite the fact that he controlled everything. (Good submissive wife, yo.) Because, as in Gilead, in American Christianity, the woman is always to blame. Jim is now selling survivalist gear to people who were probably his audience before. Tammy died a few years back from cancer, after years as a pariah. Ironically, before her death, she was embraced by the very people she castigated during her televangelist years: the LGBT community. She would later say that the love and, yes, grace she received from her LGBT fans exceeded anything she got from the “Christian” community.

Note on current politics:

The Republic of Gilead remains alive and well in the Republican party these days. I’ve already blogged on the re-emergence of racism as a driving force in the success of The Toupee Who Shall Not Be Named among Evangelicals. 

Less known is the connection that the second choice candidate has with the Dominionist movement. I won’t get into all of it here, but just note that Ted Cruz has been a featured speaker at a conference led by Kevin Swanson. Right before Cruz spoke, Swanson openly called for the execution of gays and lesbians. That’s not all of his crazy, either. He has claimed that women who take birth control have thousands of dead babies embedded in their uteruses, claimed that Frozen will turn kids to beastiality, claimed that the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks deserved it because the rock concert was “a worship service to Satan,” and so on and on. Google him. Primary sources are easy to find.

Perhaps most telling is his claim that sending girls to college will result in them “having two abortions or becoming lesbian.” And even worse, the idea that a woman might work. 

Basically, plug him into The Handmaid’s Tale as a bigwig in The Republic of Gilead and he would fit right in. And this is someone that that no fewer than three major GOP candidates (also Huckabee and Jindal) would gladly share a stage with without apology. This is not a pleasant thought. And it is one that has gotten too little airplay, probably because the front runner is even worse.  

(In addition to these three, I’ll also note that the “moderate” former candidate, Marco Rubio, has an affiliated PAC headed by none other than Russell Moore, one of the founders of the Counsel for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which calls for women to submit to men in the home, church, and society. I’ve written about them and their failure to condemn domestic violence here.  Also note that Moore has complained that too many marriages are “functionally egalitarian” and called for a return to Patriarchy, complete with hostility to contraception and a belief that all of society needs to reflect “male headship.” This includes the idea that men earn and control money, women stay at home and make babies. Again, he would be perfectly at home in the Republic of Gilead.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your 21st Century GOP: the party of the Republic of Gilead. Things have changed since I was a kid in the Reagan years...

*** 

Just a reminder from a wise man: