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Essay on The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale by the Canadian poet and writer Margaret Atwood (1986) is a frightening look at a not too distant future. It tells a horrifying story of a government fully in control of each person's life and totally out of control. The book is Atwood's cautionary future myth of the United States (aka the Republic of Gilead) having fallen under the total domination of the Religious Right. Congress and the President were gunned down, and the catastrophe was blamed on Islamic fanatics. The Constitution was temporarily suspended, Newspapers were censored, and roadblocks began to appear requiring "identipasses." A significant circumstance that helped the coup was that all money was electronic--down to people using credit cards to buy groceries.
A much milder, but still similar, version of this has happened in real life. The real version of the catastrophe (9/11) really was committed by Islamic fanatics (unless you subscribe to conspiracy theories), and this is where the similarity is the weakest. However, many civil liberties have been temporarily suspended by the PATRIOT Act, border security has been tightened, identification is becoming increasingly necessary, nearly all money is now electronic (not as a result of 9/11; neither was the electronic money of The Handmaid's Tale), and while newspapers have not been censored by any means, there does seem to be an attitude among some that the news media is less trustworthy than the government. Incidents such as Newsweek's Guantanamo-Quran-flushing gaffe, or specifically the reaction to said gaffe, demonstrate this plainly.
It has been claimed that the US Military would never support a theocracy such as Gilead. That is quite debatable. The U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs is under the leadership of a born again commandant and a group of like-minded chaplains. At supposedly nondenominational services, the academy's head chaplain has urged cadets to pray for those who did not attend.....
