“We’ve Done It, Or We’re Doing It, Or We Could Start Doing It Tomorrow”

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

(From upper-left to lower-right) Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (credit), Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter (credit), Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders (credit), and Kellyanne Conway (credit).

Some often muse whether life imitates art or if art imitates life.

For Margaret Atwood, the debate is more nuanced and about genre: “The Handmaid’s Tale…is set in the future,” Atwood explains in “Writing Utopia.” “This conned some people into believing it is science fiction, which, to my mind, it is not.”

What may seem like a trivial distinction—something merely academic—is incredibly important to Atwood, and to anyone reading this novel (or more recently, viewing the Hulu series):

But in The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some point in the past, or that it is not already doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology. We’ve done it, or we’re doing it, or we could start doing it tomorrow. Nothing inconceivable takes place, and the projected trends on which my future society is based are already in motion. So I think of The Handmaid’s Tale not as science fiction but as speculative fiction; and, more particularly, as that negative form of Utopian fiction that has come to be known as the Dystopia….

Dystopias are often more like dire warnings than satires, dark shadows cast by the present into the future. They are what will happen to us if we don’t pull up our socks. (pp. 93, 94)

What might these dire warnings entail in 2018 Trumplandia? At least two come to mind: The manipulation of women to control women and the threat of theocracy to a democracy.

“Puritan New England was a theocracy, not a democracy;” Atwood explains, “and the future society proposed in The Handmaid’s Tale has the form of a theocracy, too, on the principle that no society ever strays completely far from its roots” (p. 97).

These words should be echoing in the background each time we hear or read “Make America Great Again” since Atwood warns, “But true dictatorships do not come in in good times. They come in in bad times, when people are ready to give up some of their freedoms to someone—anyone—who can take control and promise them better times” (p. 98).

Two aspects of Atwood’s speculative Republic of Gilead should give us pause in fact: “biblical justification” and:

Woman’s place, in the Republic of Gilead—so named for the mountain where Jacob promised to his father-in-law, Laban, that he would protect his two daughters—woman’s place is strictly in the home….How do you get women back in the home, now that they are running around outside the home, having jobs and generally flinging themselves around? Simple. You just close your eyes and take several giant steps back, into the not-so-very-distant past—the nineteenth century, to be exact—deprive them of the right to vote, own property, or hold jobs, and prohibit public prostitution in the bargain, to keep them from hanging out on the street corners, and presto, there they are, back in the home. (p. 99)

And, as Atwood’s dystopia dramatizes, create a hierarchy of women so that they become consumed with controlling and resisting each other—while failing to see the higher hands of men controlling the entire puppet show.

Dire warning?

Like the legitimate and illegitimate women of Gilead, enter the women of Trumplandia: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Kellyanne Conway—quoting scripture, invoking the sacred nature of Law, and routinely lying with well-manicured hair and the sort of make up rendered illegal in Atwood’s dystopia.

•

“At the front of The Handmaid’s Tale there are two dedications,” Atwood notes, detailing:

[T]he American Puritans did not come to North America in search of religious toleration, or not what we mean by it. They wanted the freedom to practice their religion, but they were not particularly keen on anyone else practice his or hers. Among their noteworthy achievements were the banishing of so-called heretics, the hanging of Quakers, and the well-known witchcraft trials. I get to say these bad things about them because they are my ancestors—in a way, The Handmaid’s Tale is my book about my ancestors—and the second dedication, to Mary Webster, is indeed to one of these very same ancestors. (pp. 96, 97)

“Half-Hanged Mary” is Atwood’s poetic recreation of Webster’s monologue throughout her being hanged as a witch, an act that, remarkable, ended with her surviving: “Under the law of double jeopardy,” Atwood adds, “you couldn’t execute a person twice for the same crime, so she lived for another fourteen years” (p. 97).

In the poem, Webster narrates:

I was hanged for living alone,
for having blue eyes and a sunburned skin,
tattered skirts, few buttons,
a weedy farm in my own name,
and a sure-fire cure for warts;

Oh yes, and breasts,
and a sweet pear hidden in my body.
Whenever there’s talk of demons
these come in handy.

And then about her hanging:

The men of the town stalk homeward,
excited by their show of hate,
their own evil turning inside out like a glove,
and me wearing it.

The men shouting the authority of God attempt to execute Webster—a woman, and poor—while “The bonnets come to stare,/ the dark skirts also.”

Yet Webster implores:

Help me down? You don’t dare.
I might rub off on you,
like soot or gossip. Birds
of a feather burn together,
though as a rule ravens are singular.

In a gathering like this one
the safe place is the background,
pretending you can’t dance,
the safe stance pointing a finger.

•

Does life imitate art, or art, life? And as Atwood suggests, when art is drawn from life, why do we resist the dire warnings?

Biblical justification and the sacred rule of law by a people shouting “Make America Great Again” over the cries of children behind chain-linked fences after being pulled from their parents’ arms.

Dire warnings we either cannot see or will not see: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity” (William Butler Yeats).

My Life in Trumplandia Began in 1961

My first jobs were at the country club where my mother worked and on the golf course where we lived—a working-class family of rednecks who saw building a house there as making it, achieving the American Dream.

On rainy and cold days, all the pro shop and greens-keeping workers mulled around the club house. I vividly recall one of those days when a member of the grounds crew explained to me in careful detail that black people (he preferred the racial slur) were the consequence of Cain being banished for murdering Abel and then mating with apes.

It’s biblical, he proclaimed.

This experience, I must emphasize, was not an outlier. This was normal for my life, having been born in 1961 in Woodruff, South Carolina.

Such blatant and casual racism was pervasive among my white family, friends, and community.

So Roseanne Barr’s recent racist Twitter rant and the entire rise of Trumplandia—these are not in any way shocking while they are incredibly burdensome, a heaviness that will never approach the weight carried by those who are the targets of racism and bigotry but that certainly drags me closer and closer to fatalism.

I also know fatalism quite well.

In my late teens and throughout college and young adulthood, my relationship grew increasingly antagonistic with my father, often punctuated with heated arguments spurred by his racism.

Over years of arguing, I simply gave up, became a quiet and passive visitor to my parents’ house. Increasingly, I called fewer and fewer times; I visited almost exclusively on required holidays.

The ennui was the tension between the natural love felt for parents—and the incredible debt I felt to the many sacrifices they made for me—and the inexcusable ideologies my parents espoused, often relentlessly.

My parents were Nixon apologists, faithful Republican voters their entire lives.

They also were increasingly strapped for money, and their last decades were characterized by heart disease and just surviving the consequences of being working-class children of the 1940s-1950s (smoking and eating as many Southerners did).

My parents were the poster-couple for self-defeating politics, decades before the mainstream media became obsessed with understanding the disenfranchised white voter. And finally, my parents paid the ultimate cost for grounding their political and economic lives in racism.

At the very least, a healthcare system connected to universal insurance and a robust social safety net would have extended my parents’ lives, lives that ended very badly and with their life’s earnings nearly exhausted.

The house that represented their achieving the American Dream is the very last thing remaining—a depressing monument to their stubborn self-defeating ideologies, their racism.

Our last decade together is the most depressing. My daughter dated, married, and then had a daughter with a black man.

I am now the grandfather of two biracial grandchildren.

It wasn’t a hard decision, but it was hard—to give up on your parents as you recognized this family of yours deserved your complete devotion. Passive and silent were none the less complicit.

Everyone in my immediate family, except me, became entirely estranged from my parents as I attempted to meet some extreme minimum obligations as my father’s health deteriorated dramatically, and then my mother had a stroke.

The last six months of my parents’ lives thrust them once again into the center of my life, the fatalism to which I had resigned myself set aside as their reduced circumstances demanded we all recognize their essential humanity despite their own role in having come to these unnecessary and desperate ends.

No one wants to admit their parents are flawed or even horrible people—just as most white people do not want to admit they are complicit in white privilege and racism.

My parents’ deaths during the beginning of the Trump administration carry an awful symbolism in the same way my parents’ house does now as we rummage through all my parents’ stuff—throwing away most of it—in preparation to sell this crumbling statue dwarfed by the desert of their tarnished beliefs.

I carry in my 57 years another layer of exhaustion at the mainstream media trying to understand Trump voters—white angst grounded in the racism that social norms refuse to acknowledge—and the current wrestling with Barr, including some who are calling for explaining her rant as somehow connected to her mental health.

That layer of exhaustion has the face of the grounds crew member explaining to me that black people came from Cain mating with an ape; it has the face of hundreds of white people in my family, my community.

I do not need anyone to explain this to me. It is my life.

A life already well acquainted with fatalism resting against love and deep appreciation, a life rendered heavy, nearly too heavy to carry, certainly too heavy to move.

Yes, I gave up on changing my parents’ minds, shaking their souls in the name of human dignity as I looked into the eyes of my grandchildren.

How, then, to make strangers see the inhumanity in their racism, see their hatred and bigotry as self-defeating as well as entirely unwarranted?

Fatalism is a powerful narcotic.

Who Me?

Jordan Peterson’s Ignorance of Postmodern Philosophy

Liars and Racists

If Thomas Jefferson impregnated his slave, Sally Hemings, as historians claim, Jefferson was a rapist. No slave had the power of sexual consent or rejection; at best, slaves functioned within a repressive culture of “reduced circumstances.” [1]

About Andrew Jackson, Tim Morris explains:

Jackson was an unrepentant slaveholder and the power behind the legislation that forced five peaceful American Indian tribes from their homelands and triggered the Trail of Tears, a 1,000-mile death march that would leave 4,000 of 16,000 Cherokees dead along the way.

Jackson was an virulent racist.

South Carolina’s shame, as Will Moredock writes, Ben Tillman was a racist, terrorist, and murderer:

The then 29-year-old Tillman led the members of the Sweetwater Sabre Club, a.k.a. the Edgefield Redshits, against a local militia group, all black. Several African-American militia men were killed in a pitched battle with red-shirt-wearing white terrorists. After the militia surrendered, five of them were called out by name and executed. A few weeks later, when vigilantes captured a black state senator named Simon Coker, Tillman was present when two of his men executed the prisoner while he was on his knees praying.

In more recent history, Bill Clinton was an adulterer and a liar. His life as a sexual predator is undeniable.

Today, Donald Trump leads the U.S. as a serial liar and a racist. He has a history as a sexual predator and has bragged about sexual assault.

When I was a child and teenager, I was routinely hit and punished for my attitude, my tone—even when what I argued was, in fact, true, valid.

Of the failures by my father I still struggle against, this is one of the worst lessons he taught me: The credibility of what you claim is always secondary to how you make your claims, and you should always defer to authority even when authority is wrong and you are right.

That is the sort of tone policing bullshit that is the refuge of those in authority who realize they have no real right to that authority.

So I now witness the U.S. drift increasingly into the sort of environment I have rejected my whole life.

To call a liar, a liar, especially in jest, is somehow the offensive thing—not the lies and the liar.

To call a racist, a racist, is somehow the source of racial discord—not the racism or the racist.

Those in authority who know they have no real right to that authority are encouraging tone policing as a distraction.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a liar; that is the offensive thing.

Trump is a racist and a liar; that is the offensive thing.

Trump’s support is significantly driven by racism; that is a fact, and the offensive thing.

Let us by vigilant about naming liars and racists.

Let us not be derailed or dissuaded by tone policing.

The offensive thing is the thing itself—never the ones brave enough to name it.

[1] See from Beware the Bastards: On Freedom and Choice:

In Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred (June), the eponymous handmaid of the tale, reveals that “[t]he circumstances have been reduced” (p. 8) for the younger women of Gilead, a post-apocalyptic theocracy of sorts. These seemingly fertile women have become extremely precious for the survival of the white race and paradoxically the embodiment of a perverse slavery for procreation.

Atwood has written at length about being indebted to George Orwell—those who control language control everything and everyone—and that her speculative novel includes a quilting of human actions drawn directly from history, not fabricated by Atwood.

How have humans kept other humans in literal and economic bondage? Often by exploiting token members of the group being exploited.

Thus, in The Handmaid’s Tale, a few women are manipulated to control other women. The handmaid’s are trained by Aunts, who instill the propaganda:

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it….

We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. (pp. 24, 25)

Throughout the novel, readers must navigate how Offred (June) weaves the overlap of her own original ideas and vocabulary as that intersects with the propaganda of Gilead:

Will I ever be in a hotel room again? How I wasted them, those rooms, that freedom from being seen.

Rented license. (p. 50)

“Freedom” and “license” are exposed as bound words, the meanings contextual.

As Offred (June) continues to investigate rooms, she discovers a powerful but foreign phrase:

I knelt to examine the floor, and there it was, in tiny writing, quite fresh it seemed, scratched with a pin or maybe just a fingernail, in the corner where the darkest shadow fell: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.

I didn’t know what it meant, or even what language it was in. I thought it might be Latin, but I didn’t know any Latin. Still it was a message, and it was in writing, forbidden by that very fact, and it hadn’t been discovered. Except by me, for whom it was intended. It was intended for whoever came next. (p. 52)

The power to control language includes defining words, but also denying access to language—forbidding reading and writing, literacy, to those in bondage.

And then, Offred (June) explains about her life before Gilead:

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.

Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you’d be boiled to death before you knew it….The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.

We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of the print. It gave us more freedom.

We lived in the gaps between the stories. (pp. 56-57)

And from that previous life of “ignoring” the other since it wasn’t about them, Offred (June) finds herself the procreation slave of a Commander, in “reduced circumstances” where she realizes: “There wasn’t a lot of choice but there was some, and this is what I chose” (p. 94).

Her previous life of “ignoring” has been replaced by something seemingly more awful, but nearly exactly the same as she explains about the Ceremony: “One detaches oneself” (p. 95).

Even in Gilead, Offred (June) again becomes the other woman, lured into an infidelity characterized by playing Scrabble with the Commander, who reveals to her that Nolite te bastardes carborundorum is slang Latin for “Don’t let the bastards grind you down” (p. 187).

Adolescent language as rebellion has become a life-or-death slogan for Offred (June).

As her relationship with the Commander becomes increasingly trite and complex, Offred (June) declares, “Freedom, like everything else, is relative” (p. 231).

American Emperor: The Harrison Bergeron Presidency

When The New Yorker published a cover presenting Donald Trump nude in front of reporters, some mainstream and social media commentary accused the publication of body shaming:

I had two different responses. First, the cover reminded me of Trump’s own repeated body shaming of Alicia Machado, Miss Universe, and then doubling down on that shaming when the issue was raised during the presidential debates. And second, my literary mind assumed the image was an allusion to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes.

In the first case, the rush to defend Trump against behavior he himself has demonstrated fits into a disturbing pattern concerning Trump and the women he abuses. Every time Stormy Daniels is mentioned in the press related to Trump, she is slut shamed, while his many and varied transgression remain unmentioned—accusations of sexually violating his first wife (initially framed as “rape”), on-the-record boasting about being a sexual predator, and a series of marriages that ended after adultery (including Daniels and Karen McDougal admitting to affairs with Trump in the early years of his current marriage).

Trump has taken the Ronald Reagan Teflon presidency to an entirely new level.

The allusion to Anderson’s tale that has spawned “the emperor has no clothes” is particularly important in the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting and the rise of teens protesting for gun control.

Yes, Anderson’s parable points a finger at the delusional emperor—no stretch seeing how this speaks volumes today about Trump—but also key is that the only person in the empire willing to say the truth is a child: “‘But he hasn’t got anything on,’ a little child said.”

As I have discussed before, the rise of Trump can be seen in Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” a story often misread but that captures perfectly how a people’s irrational fear of totalitarianism, a militarized state, can lead to idealizing an equally dangerous option, the megalomaniac rugged individual.

In Vonnegut’s dark satire, the latter is Bergeron:

“Clanking, clownish, and huge” as well as “wear[ing] at all times a red rubber ball for a nose,” Harrison bursts into the story with “‘I am the Emperor!’”

In the U.S. currently, the latter is Trump, our American emperor.

However, as my premise for Trumplandia argues, Trump himself, the bombastic and hollow clown, is not the problem; all those so willing to defend and support him, that is the ultimate problem, possibly one that is unsurmountable.

Like those defending guns who are immune to facts, clutching their weapons almost entirely out of irrational fear and for symbolic effect, Trump supporters simply revel in lies.

Parkland, Florida student David Hogg, like the child in Anderson’s parable, has been one of many teens to speak truth to power, notably the NRA and Trump, since the most recent mass shooting at his school. As a result, these teens have been attacked, almost always through fake news and baseless slurs.

Hogg was, for example, accused of not being on campus during the shooting, a fake news story that someone posted on Facebook. I immediately posted a link explaining that not only was the story fake news, but also that the original post had already admitted such.

The response I received was a blunt “I don’t care” this is false, and then the poster called Hogg a series of slurs, none of which have any foundation in facts. Anyone viewed as a partisan political, ideology enemy is fair game to savage; anyone viewed as a partisan political, ideological ally is above any criticism.

This pattern, again witnessed in the gun control debate, occurs daily, fed by right-wing media, not just trolls. Laura Ingraham also attacked Hogg, and Meghan McCain launched into the Parkland protesters for profanity, although her Twitter feed has been exposed for the same language (her Twitter bio includes, for example, #FuckCancer).

And not inconsequential is the occasional hand wringing in the media about why Evangelical Christians, typically identified without the key element of “white,” continue to support Trump, pathological liar and serial adulterer.

In this time of the American emperor, it may be relevant to note that Easter in a few days falls on April Fool’s Day.

Delusion is a powerful thing, deluding others as well as self-delusion.

Religious dogma in the service of power, and not in the service of Good, has a long history, and therefore, when Easter and April Fool’s Day overlap on 1 April 2018, we may have come to the real national holiday of Trumplandia.

Trumplandia is a people who love their lies even when they know they are lies.

Even a child can see that.

Teachable Moment: Fake News and Critical Media Literacy

The great and urgent paradox of twenty-first century America is trying to discover the truth about fake news, a phenomenon spurred by the 2016 presidential election.

Fortunately, Andrew Guess, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler have analyzed how often people viewed fake news to help us understand that elusive truth:

[W]e find that approximately one in four Americans visited a fake news website, but that consumption was disproportionately observed among Trump supporters for whom its largely pro-Trump content was attitude-consistent. However, this pattern of selective exposure was heavily concentrated among a small subset of people — almost six in ten visits to fake news websites came from the 10% of Americans with the most conservative information diets. Finally, we specifically identify Facebook as the most important mechanism facilitating the spread of fake news and show that fact-checking largely failed to selectively reach consumers of fake news.

Since these researchers identified that about 65 million Americans consumed fake news during the study period and that fake news constituted about “2.6% of all the articles Americans read on sites focusing on hard news topics during this period,” everyone interested in facts and truth are justified in considering ways in which we all can combat the negative impact of fake news, not only on our democracy but also on all ways of life in a free society.

This urgency is especially relevant to educators, andGuess, Nyhan, and Reifler’s study speaks directly to the need for teachers at every grade level to incorporate critical media literacy into the education of all students.

To meet that need, co-editor Christian Z. Goering (University of Arkansas) and I have collected a series of essays in Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America because critical media literacy, we argue, may well be the only thing between a free people and their freedom.

CML Goering Thomas cover

In Chapter 1: An Introduction, Chris and I explain:

Turning … to Kellner and Share (2007), we define critical media literacy for the purposes of this volume as “an educational response that expands the notion of media literacy to include different forms of mass communication, popular culture, and new technologies” (p. 59) and “focuses on the ideology critique and analyzing the politics of representation of crucial dimensions of gender, race, class, and sexuality” (p. 60). It is the goal of this volume to build the aptitude and skill set of students and their teachers for critical media literacy in hopes for a better tomorrow. (p. 3)

And then, in Chapter 2: An Educator’s Primer, I offer some foundational concepts as well (excerpted next).

Being an educator at any level—K-12 through undergraduate and graduate education—has always been a challenge in the U.S. since formal education in theory is linked to preserving our democracy. Being a critical educator at any level in the U.S. has always been and remains nearly impossible because formal education in practice is more about enculturation and maintaining the status quo than seeking the social equity that remains elusive despite our claimed ideals as a people.

With the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, the media punditry has become obsessed, as has Trump, with fake news and post-truth public discourse. In this volume committed to investigating and interrogating fake news and post-truth discourse in the context of curriculum and instruction grounded in critical media literacy goals, we offer the foundational opportunity for educators to consider and reconsider the nature of truth/Truth, knowledge, and facts both in the teaching/learning dynamic and throughout mainstream media and all sorts of public discourse, notably by and about political discourse.

First, let’s establish the terms and contexts essential to understanding and then teaching critical media literacy:

“Fake news” is a technical term (although most public discourse fails to adhere to this technical distinction) that identifies mostly on-line information that is intentionally false and provocative, designed to be click-bait and drive internet traffic and thus revenue.
“Satire” is purposefully distorted information that assumes readers/viewers recognize the information is not factual, but intended to make larger points. The Onion, Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, The Daily Show, and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight are examples of satire packaged in seemingly credible formats, parodies of traditional news media.
“Post-truth” is a relatively newer term for the popular and often right-wing embracing of (and misunderstanding) post-modernism’s challenge to the objective nature of truth/Truth. Not to oversimplify, but post-modernism argues that truth/Truth is defined by whoever is in power (not an objective reality), while the contemporary popular and right-leaning political embracing of “post-truth” is more akin to “the truth is whatever I say it is regardless of any evidence or the credibility of evidence.”
Mainstream journalism functions under two important and corrupting norms: (1) journalists (just as educators are implored to be) maintain a stance of objectivity and neutrality, an apolitical pose, and thus (2) most mainstream examinations of topics, debates, and events are framed as “both sides” journalism, rendering all positions as equally credible and valid. For example, the mainstream media, as John Oliver has exposed, gives the general public the false notion that climate change has as many scientists for as against the “theory,” a term read by the public as “hypothesis.”

As noted parenthetically above, to embrace teaching critical media literacy (in conjunction with critical pedagogy and critical literacy) is disrupting the traditional norm that educators remain apolitical. This volume’s authors recognize that educators face tremendous hurdles for teaching critical media literacy: eroding job security with the dismantling of unions (and absence historically of unions in many regions of the U.S.), increasing accountability for student test scores on exams that are reductive and demand of students far less in their literacy than critical media literacy (in other words, our efforts to teach critical media literacy can be disregarded with “that isn’t on the test”), and deteriorating teaching and learning conditions such as overcrowded classrooms and more teachers inadequately prepared to teach (such as Teach For America candidates).

None the less, if we genuinely believe in universal public education as a key mechanism for democracy and individual liberty then we educators must be well versed in critical media literacy, and then we must make that central to our classrooms. Throughout this chapter, the intersections of media and education are examined in order to highlight the power and dangers inherent in fake news, post-truth discourse, and traditional calls for educators and journalists to be objective, apolitical.

Reference

Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2007). Critical media literacy is not an option. Learning Inquiry, 1(1), 59-69.

Paul Thomas Reading from Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America

Join Hub City Bookshop 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 21 for a reading and signing with local professor and Furman professor Paul Thomas to promote his latest book Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America.