No, it’s not what you think. This isn’t a tired overreaching Vox hit piece on the not even tenuous connection between the hit television series based on a book by Margaret Atwood and the Trump Presidency. It’s a hit among progressive academics, but seems to have sunk without a trace among the general populace. Why is it so? I have a theory about that, but also about why the general populace should watch it. At least the first episode. It isn’t terribly good.
The Handmaid’s Tale is to social justice warriors what Red Dawn is to your uncle who owns seventeen firearms and goes pig shooting. A quite incredulous rousing fantasy that they like to imagine has a high degree of probability of coming to pass exactly as dramatised.
Red Dawn is probably a favourite among CNN executives in 2017 as well. They probably take a shot every time Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, or CNN take a shot with an AK47 or an RPG. And cheer when a leaking informant gets his comeuppance with a coup de gras to the back of the head. But I digress.
The Handmaid’s Tale may have seemed relevant in the early eighties when the evangelical vote was strong, metal albums were being burned, and films were being banned in QLD. I’ll give you that. But as Jim Goad rightly points out, all of the pious and oppressive church ladies of 1984 somehow morphed into pious and oppressive Marxists in 2017. Suggesting that Christians have any ability to make the world of the Handmaid’s Tale come to pass in 2017 is as silly as an actual Neo-Nazi (if you can find one) suggesting that Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were controlling everything.
In 2017, the Handmaid’s Tale just further emphasises the war on Christianity. Until you watch for a few minutes and realise that Cultural Marxist Hollywood have subconsciously made a series about how things might look if they were in charge. If you subscribe to Goad’s church ladies analogy as I and many do, it makes for compelling viewing.
It’s all here. Demonising the nuclear family and replacing it with a bizarre mating ritual that is on the ‘right side of history’. Positing that only the intellectuals need procreate, while the low information plebs just need to hurry up and die. And that a zealous environmental doctrine seems to be to blame for all this.
But it isn’t just Cultural Marxism that the Handmaid’s Tale unwittingly warns us about. It’s their strange bedfellows. This dystopian tale is veiled in Christianity (just to lay in the boot to one of the most truly oppressed and ridiculed religions on the planet), but is clearly about Wahabiism. The original gangsters when it comes to Shariah Law.
It’s all here folks. The modest dresses, women as second class citizens, gays hanging from bridges, a disdain for technology and modern accoutrements except for the ones who are running the show. Setting the alarm back 700 years and hitting the snooze button until the end of time when it finally goes off. The producers of the Handmaid’s Tale have unwittingly made what would be the most Islamophobic series in living memory if the costume department had gone in a more flowing and modest direction.
With this in mind, the Handmaid’s Tale may well sow a few seeds of doubt in the minds of people who are drawn to it on the wave of Never Trump hysterica. Already it is sinking without a trace, which tends to suggest that it may contain the odd red pill that challenges long held beliefs. The Handmaid’s Tale may well be remembered as an unintentional Trojan Horse in the culture war.
It’s your XYZ.