Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

My second child is the one I call the Macabre Daughter. She has always been fascinated with death and “gross” things. She asked me - at age three I believe - if animals liked being eaten. Her favorite animal was a mouse - starting at under a year old. Today, she has a large collection of stuffed Kangaroo Rats (and has been carefully checking at night wherever we camp to see the live ones.) She recently made a Dracula costume for one of them. She likes getting shots, and has an incredible tolerance for pain. So it was no surprise when we started seeing live theater with the kids that she took an immediate liking to the tragedies. After all, everyone dies. So it’s all good, right?

Of the four plays we saw at the Utah Shakespeare Festival, the only tragedy was Julius Caesar. She really, really wanted to see King Lear last year (she is named Cordelia…) but we couldn’t make it work, alas.

It was nice to catch a more serious play here, I must say. Julius Caesar can be a challenging play to produce, not least because Shakespeare assumes a certain familiarity with Plutarch and with Roman history and politics in general. In particular, the role of Caesar seems a bit sparse, and one must fill in the gaps to understand exactly what motivates Brutus.

The beauty of this particular production, then, was in the way that Julius Caesar was portrayed. Actor Paul Michael Sandberg is tall and imposing, with a shaved head, deep and powerful voice, and the ability to exude lofty arrogance in spades. He has the command of his rank, and a clear ability to marshall men to him. When he walked on stage, I could feel that certain vibe - it’s hard to explain it. He was both electric and yet dangerous. 

Paul Michael Sandburg (center) as Julius Caesar

Thus, it was much easier to understand the dilemma of Brutus, who once had a love for Caesar the man, but is struggling with the force of power he is becoming. And Cassius, as he should be, was ambiguously motivated. How much do his personal reasons influence his well-articulated political reasons for wanting Caesar dead? He makes for a perfect foil for the equally morally ambivalent Antony. (More about him later.) This all made the famous lines by Caesar so powerful in the context of this production:

CAESAR: Let me have men about me that are fat,

Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.

Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.

He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

…

Yet if my name were liable to fear,

I do not know the man I should avoid

So soon as that spare Cassius. He reads much.

He is a great observer, and he looks

Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,

As thou dost, Antony. He hears no music.

Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort

As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit

That could be moved to smile at anything.

Such men as he be never at heart’s ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,

And therefore are they very dangerous.

Another one of Paul Michael Sandberg. Because.

Caesar mocks the very idea of fear, and yet he is perceptive enough to sense the danger. Cassius is played by Rex Young, who does indeed seem smarmy enough and yet earnest. In some other productions I have seen, Cassius was too crafty, and it was hard to believe a truly conflicted Brutus would associate with him. But in this case, Cassius was compelling. I might have joined the conspiracy myself.

The sad part of this play is that, of historical necessity, Caesar is killed before the intermission. It really is sad to see him go. Even in this version, where Caesar is arrogant to the point of unpleasantness, it still is a shame that he has to die. What could have been…

And this is where a truly excellent Brutus is necessary. While Caesar gets the name of the play, if we are honest, it might better have been named “The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus.” In order for the play to work, Brutus must both be the hero of the play, and have a genuine moral conflict which overwhelms him. The circumstances he faces must, in order to make a proper tragedy, be too great for any man to navigate successfully. Jeffrey Cummings did a fine job in the role.

But the credit for the best performance has to go to Antony. My wife has attended the Shakespeare Festival with a friend for three years running. During that time, they have performed the histories in order - she joined the fun with Henry IV Part 1. They have kept the same actor for each character throughout, which means three years of Sam Ashdown as prince Hal, and later Henry V. Amanda has been telling me how good this guy was since she first saw him.

He plays Antony in this play.

Holy smokes. As my wife put it, he seems almost too big for the stage. And that is in a figurative sense. He’s actually a pretty small guy, about my size. But man does he fill that stage. He first appears with Caesar, who cuts a big enough space, but by the end of Act III Scene 1, he owns the play.

ANTONY: O! pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,

That I am meek and gentle with these butchers;  

Thou art the ruins of the noblest man

That ever lived in the tide of times.

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood;

Over thy wounds now do I prophesy,

Which like dumb mouths do ope their ruby lips,

To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue,

A curse shall light upon the limbs of men;

Domestic fury and fierce civil strife

Shall cumber all the parts of Italy;

Blood and destruction shall be so in use,     

And dreadful objects so familiar,

That mothers shall but smile when they behold

Their infants quarter’d with the hands of war;

All pity chok’d with custom of fell deeds:

And Cæsar’s spirit, ranging for revenge,   

With Ate by his side come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines with a monarch’s voice

Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war;

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial.

With that one line, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war,” which is one of Shakespeare’s most powerful, I was moved, I will admit. Full shivers down the spine, and a visceral reaction. Dang, what a great moment.

And that’s before one gets to Antony’s speech. (Did anyone else have to memorize this for High School? Julius Caesar was the first Shakespeare play I read then, and we memorized the speech.) Antony owned this moment. Not just with his “audience,” but with the real life audience. I have seen this play before live, but this different.

The second half of the play is, I’m afraid, a bit of a slow letdown. The hazards of using history as a source. It’s not Shakespeare’s strongest finish, to say the least. But there are some good moments. In this particular production, which is “set” in modernish (probably Cold War Era) costume, Strato, the soldier who assists Brutus in his final suicide, is played by the same actor as Caesar. But you don’t know this until he takes off his flak helmet and mask. And then Brutus, momentarily startled, says his final lines:

Caesar, now be still.

I killed not thee with half so good a will.

Nicely played, I would say.

Perhaps the most relevant theme of Julius Caesar, though, is that of the nature of crowds. Within the few hours of the play, the public has gone from wishing Caesar crowned as one of the gods to anger at his “ambition” and full support for Brutus to wild anger willing to sacrifice an innocent poet for having the wrong name. Then as now, the cult of personality and the forces of hate and anger are the true weapons of mass destruction. Within a few years, the old Republic of Rome, many of its most noble and gifted men, and the ideals of liberty were destroyed, and in their place rose one of the bloodiest and ruthless police states the world has ever known. The Dogs of War indeed.

I also want to mention a few things about the staging and production. The Utah Shakespeare Festival has the benefit of fairly high budgets, which means that sets, props, and costumes are all high quality. In this case, there is a larger-than-life statue of Pompey (which looks strikingly similar to Caesar...) which dominates one side of the stage.

Well, perhaps I need to describe the stage too. This was held in one of the new indoor theaters, the Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre, a smaller venue. It has two ranks of bleachers, with the stage in the middle. Kind of like a high school gym set up for Basketball. This means that there are no curtains, and only the two ends (which are small) fixed. The larger sides each have the audience there, and actors must essentially act so as to be seen and heard by people 180 degrees apart. This works pretty well, but must certainly require carefully planned choreography and outstanding awareness by the actors.

So, back to the statue. It dominated the one fixed wall, and was creepy in the “communist dictator statue” kind of way. The other wall had a two-story scaffolding erected - as if the site were a work in progress. There was little, therefore, in the way of a back stage, and there was nowhere to hide. Thus, scene changes needed carefully timed light and sound work in addition to perfect timing on entrances by the actors.

Another challenge in the small space was the quick cleanup needed for the copious stage blood that was shed. The macabre daughter loved all this, although my 8-year-old son had to reassure himself it was fake. (This is the one play my 5-year-old daughter did not attend.) The moment when the conspirators bathe their hands in Caesar’s blood was appropriately creepy.

On the other hand, the intimate venue (about 200 seats maximum) means the play is seen up close. Facial expressions translate beautifully, and soft voices can be heard without difficulty. (These are professional productions, so there is never any difficulty hearing the actors, but they can go to a lower level of whisper in this venue.)

This was an excellent production all around, with easily the best-developed Caesar I have seen.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

I have wanted to read this novella ever since I first heard about it. After all, it was touted as having an, um, unique approach to language. Having read it, I have to agree. Very creative, and well executed. The paperback version (which is what I read) gives this as the full title: Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel In Letters, but it is the hardback title that really captures the essence: Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable. Some fun words there. “Lipogrammatic” refers to a game in which one must write without using one or more of the letters of the alphabet. More broadly, it can refer to any game where the use of letters is the challenge. And, obviously, the title itself is a reference to letters.

Here is the basic idea. The fictional island of “Nollop” exists off the southeastern seaboard of the United States. (Kind of where Bermuda is, I suppose. Or Cuba, in the metaphorical sense.) The island is named after the fictional “Nevin Nollop,” who is worshiped as the creator of the world-famous pangram, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” We connoisseurs of typography will be familiar with this as a sentence containing all the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

The inhabitants of Nollop have constructed a highly literate society that venerates language and letters. A statue of Mr. Nollop is the centerpiece of the capitol square, and his holy pangram adorns the statue.

The problems start when the glue holding the letters loosen, and the letters start falling. Rather than replace or repair them, the political powers that be decide that this is a divine message from almighty Nollop that they should henceforth stop using those letters in conversation or writing. In essence, this means censorship of the spoken and written word. Severe penalties are imposed, from shaming, to public whipping or the stocks, to lifetime banishment from the island. The penalties apply to all children above the age of 8 as well as adults, so the consequences are horrifying. Soon, the fervor sets neighbor against neighbor in a witch hunt that becomes more ludicrous as more and more letters fall.

Eventually, Ella and her fellow resistance workers must figure out how to stop the madness and restore sanity. Given the adoration of Nollop and his pangram, they must figure out how to fit all the letters into an even shorter sentence.

One reason the book is fascinating to those who are literate and witty is that Dunn writes it as a correspondence between the various characters, primarily Ella and her cousin. As the letters fall, the writers must - by government order on pain of exile - figure out how to communicate using ever fewer letters. At first, the letters seem merely stuffy and erudite. The characters are well educated, and in good command of the English language. Thus, for a less used letter, it is easy to find synonyms. However, as time goes on, there is so little left that it is extremely difficult to say anything at all, even with the use of phonetic substitutes (which are permitted in writing only) and numbers in place of letters. It must have cost Dunn some significant quality time with a thesaurus - and a lot of careful editing to be sure that that the forbidden letters were not used. Kind of like how the residents of Nollop had to slave over every utterance to be sure not to offend the authorities.

The fable works at two levels. On the one hand, there is a definite metaphorical reference to totalitarianism of all stripes. The use of the location does in that sense suggest Cuba or another Communist society, where the words of a long-dead philosopher are parsed and re-parsed to determine what is and is not permissible. (I recommend Anne Applebaum’s excellent book, Iron Curtain for more on the thought policing necessary.)

On the other, there is a definite intention to reference fundamentalist religion. Nollop is worshipped. Not merely venerated, but treated as a god, which he probably never intended. And disagreement with the interpretation of supposed omens is treated as rank heresy.

The key point here is that when you declare certain ideas and communication off limits, you end up destroying knowledge, and sacrificing the most intelligent and thoughtful people in your society. I certainly recognized some things from my own experience within a cultic group, where books were banned - and burned - certain ideas were off limits for discussion and questioning, and language itself had to be rewritten to avoid awkward truths that didn’t fit with perceived theological necessities.

Just a few quotes on this. From the Council, upon an appeal that the falling tiles are accidental:

We believe, further, that that Nollop does indeed speak to us from his place of eternal rest, through his manipulation of the tiles on his hallowed cenotaph, and that the Council serves only as has collective interpreter.

…

Why do we follow, without misgiving, the will of Nollop? Simply because without him this island would be a shallow shell, an empty conch compared to what it has, in fact, become: a beautiful, shady-shored haven of enchantment and delishmerelle.

Later, a scientist from the United States determines that the tiles are falling instead because the glue is weakening by natural processes. Ella’s cousin is optimistic that a presentation of these facts will sway the Council:

Nollop is not God. Nollop is silent. We must respect that silence and make our decisions and judgments based upon science and fact and simple old-fashioned common sense - a commodity absent for too long from those in governmental elevatia, where its employ would do us all much good.

Alas, no dice. The Council rules that there is no room for alternative interpretations. Any disagreement is in fact heresy. In a chilling moment, the Council also says what so many of us have heard before, in another context: “Adhering to the commandments of Nollop leaves no room for fear of punishment or forfeiture. He who walks in the light has no fear of darkness.” And also that there is no such thing as an accidental slip: just failure - refusal actually - to obey. I’ve heard these. Many times.

One more appeal remains, and they make it. It is the appeal that the science of the situation is not in opposition to Nollop. “Might not Nollop be working through the science? The science, in point of fact, actually serving his specific purposes?”

I think this is a crucial point. There has been a lot of unnecessary assertion of a tension between faith and science, and it does come down to a battle, not between faith and science as such, as between religious dogma and perceived theological needs in opposition to scientific discoveries, requiring ever greater levels of denial. Furthermore, there is this idea that blind obedience to dogma is the requirement of faith, and that reevaluation and change are heresy, rather than necessary approaches to changing circumstances and increased understanding.

In fact, though, Ella and her companions have it right: there is a need to reevaluate theological interpretation (as we have so often done throughout history) in light of new facts. Particularly the common-sense observation that a particular dogma is causing destruction. We would never have abolished slavery or polygamy, for example, without a wholesale rejection of long standing dogma. I’ll leave it at that for now.

The Council, as one might expect, cannot do its enforcement without help. It relies on citizens to report each other, which happens at first, because people tend to take the selfish way out rather than risk themselves. Naturally, this breeds distrust and leads to a breakdown of society. Very much like in the real life totalitarian regimes of all sorts the world has experienced.

The search for an alternative pangram becomes the all-consuming goal of the characters, and many fun sentences are interspersed as they seek to whittle the number of letters down to 32. I won’t give away the final solution, but I will mention one: “Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz.” Fun stuff.

It’s a fairly light hearted book, with breezy language. But it has a sharp edge beneath. The suffering of the Nollopians is real, and the optimism of the characters cannot hide the brutality necessary to repress ideas and thought. Ultimately, once thinking and learning are forbidden, brutality must necessarily follow.

An interesting short modern work, and worth the while to read.

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: