Bill Moyers:People who read The Handmaids Tale think it could never happen here, but it already did

[babylonsister]

People who read The Handmaid’s Tale think it could never happen here — but it already did
Bill Moyers
17 Apr 2017 at 13:00 ET


The Handmaid’s Tale. When they greenlit the series, producers could not have predicted the election outcome that has given many readers reason to return to books like Atwood’s, Orwell’s and Huxley’s. In fact, both 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale have topped Amazon’s best-sellers list in recent months.

The Handmaid’s Tale arrived like an earthquake in the dialogue between faith and reason in 1985 — and since has become a curriculum staple in many women’s studies courses. In it, Atwood describes a woman’s fight to escape God-quoting oppressors who have turned America into a theocracy where women are stripped of their rights and torture is justified in the name of national security.

In this week’s New Yorker, Atwood tells writer Rebecca Mead that “she intended not just to pose the essential question of dystopian fiction — could it happen here? — but also to suggest ways that it had already happened, here or elsewhere.”

Growing up in Canada, Atwood knew members of the Polish resistance from World War II who had fled there during the war. She recalls, “I remember one person saying a very telling thing: ‘Pray you will never have occasion to be a hero.’”

Mead writes that “what does feel familiar” in rereading the book “is the blunt misogyny of the society Atwood portrays, and which Trump’s vocal repudiation of ‘political correctness’ has loosed into common parlance today.

Trump’s vilification of Hillary Clinton, Atwood believes, is more explicable when seen through the lens of the Puritan witch hunts. “You can find websites that say Hillary was actually a Satanist with demonic powers,” she said. “It is so 17th-century that you can hardly believe it. It’s right out of the subconscious — just lying there, waiting to be applied to people.”

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http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/people-who-read-the-handmaids-tale-think-it-could-never-happen-here-but-it-already-did/

[niyad]

1. sorry, bill, but many of us have been afraid of this for many years.