Margaret Atwood: Precog

We’ve been finishing up our new book The Shift: Reports from The Mystical Underground. In one chapter we write about the kinds of precognition writers experience. Let’s take Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The novel was written in 1987. If you haven’t read it or seen it on TV, it’s any woman’s worst nightmare. Infertility is rampant. The totalitarian government rounds up the small minority of women who are fertile, then they are assigned to affluent families whose wives are infertile. These fertile women, handmaids, are kept in line by Aunts, older women as despicable as the government, and are forced to have sex with the man in the respective families to whom they’re assigned. The sexual act takes place with the wife at the handmaid’s head, her hands gripping the handmaid’s shoulders, her movements mimicking the thrusting motions of her husband. When the handmaid gets pregnant and gives birth, the infant belongs to the wife.

A handmaid doesn’t have a normal name. Instead, she’s called OfFred, OfJoe, OfRick…the name of the man who heads the family to which she has been assigned. In other words, the dude owns her.

The novel came to TV on Hulu in the early days of the Trump administration and, according to Rolling Stone, “was heralded as an allegory for our times.” As Atwood told Rolling Stone in the May 19, 2021 issue: “My ever-present question, since I was born in ’39, is: If there were to be a totalitarianism in the United States, what would it look like? What would be the slogan? What would be the excuse? Because they all come in with: “We’re going to make things so much better, but first, we have to get rid of those people.”

When she was asked how she viewed the rise of Trump, she noted that he followed the playbook. “The big propaganda lies, the replacement of people in pivotal positions in the judiciary — because every totalitarian regime controls the judiciary. The attempt to subvert the Constitution, the attempted coup.”

These motifs, she said, have happened repeatedly throughout history. “Totalitarian regimes also try to seize control of the media or at least to eradicate the idea that the media can’t be trusted as a source of information. Then they replace that with other sources that are telling you there are blood-drinking Democrats in the cellar of a pizza parlor that didn’t have a cellar.”

As the Trump administration put migrant children in camps at the border, as they separated children from their families, as they dismantled the government from the bottom up, Atwood undoubtedly cringed and lost sleep. “It was either Hitler or Goebbels who said if you tell the big lie often enough, people will believe it. Make the lie big and make it often. We saw that. And it’s not a question of left or right — so-called left regimes have done the same thing. It’s a question of totalitarianism or not totalitarianism.”
Tessa Stuart, who wrote the article for Rolling Stone, asked Atwood where we stood now as a country in the post-Trump era. Her response is depressing, that we’re in a moment of crisis in this country, where there are a number of possible political futures. “How people react to these things now is going to determine what kind of ‘the future’ we have in, say, two, three, four, or five years. It has never been any different. We’re in a moment, much like the Thirties, in which things [are] pretty polarized.”

And now, of course, the situation has gotten worse – the abortion ban in Texas, the laws that suppress voting, trump’s hold on the republican party of sycophants, cowards, and morally void individuals, most of them aging white men. The republican party has become, as one friend said, “A death cult.” And it looks as if they’re leaning toward autocracy with trump as their king, their dictator, their version of the world’s worst tyrants – Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Putin, Pinochdet, Chavez, Maduro…

In December, we’ve having Danish astrologer Adrian Ross Duncan on the podcast  to give us his overview of 2022. My list of questions is growing!