Book Review: "The Handmaid's Tale"

Margaret Atwood didn’t make up anything in this book. All of the things that take place in the Republic of Gilead have happened at some point in history (which now includes 1985, the year the book was published). She also arrived at the society depicted in the book by taking certain attitudes, both feminist & conservative, prevalent at the time, and taking them to extreme conclusions. So the place and the culture she depicts are believable. What comes across as far-fetched is the rapidity with which it occurs. In a little over a decade, America becomes so louche and licentious that the morally aggrieved have overthrown the government and set up a totalitarian theocracy totally at odds with the history of American governance. In a scant 10-15 years? I don’t really see that happening. Recently, I saw "the final cut" of Blade Runner. It takes place 11 years from now, but the world depicted looks like it should be 150-200 years from now. Things rarely change as quickly as novelists imagine. Architecturally, Manhattan in 1988 looked pretty close to how it does in 2008. Watch a film from the 90's, and you’ll see people dressed in much the same clothes you see today.

Margaret Atwood had a clear idea of what sort of shape the story would take: it is a diary. The curtain is pulled back slowly, and we only know as much as our narrator knows, and she doesn’t know much. Even the "Historical Notes" section at the end doesn’t really answer that many questions. It definitely swings the open ending in one direction, but it doesn’t really give you a lot of extra information on the society of Gilead or how it came about. We never find out that much, and that’s kind of frustrating. I blame this largely on the narrator’s passivity. Passivity is a trait that rarely endears me to protagonists (or to real people, for that matter). She says she wants to know, but then she doesn’t make that much effort to find out. There is an echo of Nineteen-Eighty-Four when, much like Winston Smith, she is broken down. "They can do what they like with me. I am abject," she says. This is in marked contrast to Ivie, the heroine of V For Vendetta. Ivie is active and engaged. It’s an interesting comparison as V For Vendetta and The Handmaid’s Tale have many similarities. Both were written in the early eighties. Both appear to take place in the late nineties. Both imagine a radical change in society coming after a perceived moral decline occurs in concert with ecological or nuclear disaster. Both feature secret police organizations called the Eyes. The biggest difference is that the government in The Handmaid’s Tale is explicitly theocratic, whereas the government of England in V For Vendetta is of the fascist and nationalist stripe. But the government of Gilead appears to have racist policies too, and the government in V For Vendetta certainly uses religion to legitimize its actions.

This book is heavy (in the figurative sense). There is no comic relief whatsoever. It is a near-total chronicle of misery, from start to finish. And it is depressing, in a way. It is depressing to think about how easy it can be for a small group of fanatics (whether they be communists, fascists or religious zealots) to take over a country. All they need is for the silent majority to look the other way, to keep quiet, to believe their promises of security & virtue and let them get away with it. That’s the easy thing to do. The hard thing to do is to stand up and voice dissent. There is always a minority that choose that path. But the bigger the majority you have looking the other way, the easier it is to deal with the dissenters and malcontents (preferably quietly).

The Python & The Postman

Sometimes, you find yourself watching a film, let’s say, The Postman, for example, and something strikes you as so ridiculous that a thought begins to form in your mind: “this is a joke.  It is not meant to be taken seriously.  The writer(s) are taking the piss.  They are in on the joke.  In The Postman, it occurs about the time we are introduced to a character named Ford Lincoln Mercury (played by Larenz Tate).

Recently, I heard a theory that the The Postman is not just bad, it is intentionally bad.  That it was a prank played on Kevin Costner.  The man who wrote it, Brian Helgeland, is a Hollywood fixture.  He’s one of those cats who will get paid $250,000 to spend a couple of weeks doctoring a script that’s already been written.  He won a Razzie for The Postman.  (In fact, The Postman swept the Golden Raspberry Awards that year, with other "wins" for worst picture, worst score, and worst director AND worst actor for Costner.)  But the same year, he won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for L.A. Confidential, which is an awesome movie with an awesome script.  He wrote and directed the underrated A Knight's Tale.  Obviously, Brian Helgeland is very good at writing screenplays.  Thus, it simply doesn’t make sense that he would write something as bad as The Postman unless he had done it on purpose.

The Postman is Costner at his most bloated and bombastic.  The irredeemably unjustified Best Picture Oscar and Best Director he won for Dances With Wolves led him to embark on the “turgid & ponderous pseudo-epic” phase of his career.  Do you realize that he cast himself as the savior of mankind in Waterworld?  Let me repeat that just in case you missed it: the savior of mankind.  What sort of a man does that?  

As CSI: Miami has entered its sixth season, it seems that the fine technicians of the Miami-Dade Police Department are more and more finding themselves in situations so absurd that the bounds of credulity are stretching near to the breaking point.  To wit: on a recent episode, the body of a young woman was found in a cabana poolside at a posh South Beach hotel.  Her body was covered in goo.  The CSIs subsequently deduced that she was covered in goo because she had been swallowed, and thence regurgitated, by a giant python.  That’s right.  This is the point at which I said (aloud) to the television, “Come on.  This can’t be for real.  They don’t actually expect us to take this seriously.  Do they?”  But it gets better.  The snake was in the hotel because he was actually a drug mule.  Okay, sure.  Why not?  A crooked herpetologist who has a customs inspection exemption, for reptiles of course, was smuggling drugs from South America.  Inside the snakes.  When this particular snake was being exchanged at the hotel, he got out, swallowed that chick, and then the vials of narcotics inside the snake burst and the python died of a massive drug overdose.  The snake O.D.ed.  Of course.  Then he threw up the girl.  Seriously, they actually expect us to believe this?  Come on.

I must say, Horatio had a great one-liner at the beginning of the episode.  When Horatio’s Texan sidekick informed him, in his own laconic Texan way, that the young woman was “Tanya Thurman, 23, from Chicago.  Her friends say she came down here to drink some mojitos and catch some sun,” Horatio responds, right before putting his sunglasses back on, “Well it looks like [pause for dramatic effect] something caught her.”

Git up, a-git git down, the Bowl Championship Series is a joke in your town

After a topsy-turvy season, with many crazy upsets, and many surprise contenders, this year’s college football bowl games have been announced. And I couldn’t be more disappointed. Ohio State versus LSU? For real? Was the cabal that decides who gets to play intentionally trying to go for the least original, least interesting match-up possible? In the past five years, each of those teams has won a national championship, and Ohio State was the runner-up once as well. I don’t wish to rain on the parade of those of my friends who support these universities’ football teams, but this is so anticlimactic.

The star chamber that runs the Bowl Championship Series is inscrutable and opaque in their deliberations. Ohio State gets to play for a national championship despite the fact that they lost to the unranked Fighting Illini. This could have been so much more interesting. There were so many teams that made surprise appearances in the top 25 (like U-Conn, Cincinnati, South Florida, Rutgers), to say nothing of all the surprise teams that were in the top 5. If you had told me in August that the universities of Kansas, Missouri, Oregon would make appearances in the top two spots, I would have called you a lying scumbag.

Granted, LSU and Ohio State did stay atop the various polls for large portions of the season. But that doesn’t really mean anything to me since I place so little faith in the legitimacy of all those polls. This whole system merely makes it all the more clear what a hypocritical farce college football has become. Who gets to play in the national championship should be determined by young men on the field. Instead, those same young men have to sit around a room watching a large television screen waiting to see which teams a group of mostly middle-aged, mostly male sportswriters and whatnot have decided they think are the best. It is a slap in the face to the notions of competition and sport.

There has to be a playoff. It is the only fair, reasonable way to pick a champion. Every argument that has been put forward explaining why that’s not possible is unconvincing. The NCAA does it for Division III and the erstwhile Division I-AA. What’s so different about D-I football that they can’t do it with those teams? I can answer that question: it’s all about the benjamins. The Bowl Championship Series is nothing more than a scam to ensure that the schools that are already on top stay on top. A few conferences shut out everyone else, so they can get the bowl money and continue to sink it into their football programs, thus ensuring their continued dominance. The University of Hawai’i is the only undefeated team in Division I, but they don’t get to contend because they happen to play in a "secondary" conference. Without playoffs, you can expect to see the same five or six teams in the championship game every year. I don’t have any attachment to any of the big D-I teams, and thus I’ve never been that into college football. But with the attachment of corporate sponsors to bowl games, the absurd methods of selecting a champion, and the overall divorce of college football from actual colleges, I find myself increasingly disgusted by the whole spectacle. What a joke.

St. Bernard Parish, Day Four

The siding on the house we’ve been working on is almost complete. The house looks so much better than it did at the beginning of the week. Doors were delivered, and perhaps we’ll be able to hang those tomorrow. This was our third day at the same sight, with the same crew, so there is some bonding going on, the shier among us are starting to loosen up, and we’re getting huge amounts of work done. Last night, someone told me that if all of the siding is nailed into all of the studs, it will be able to withstand 140 mile per hour winds. (And I’m willing to treat her statement with credulity, as she is one of the long-term Habitat volunteers who has been here for a while.)

This leads me to today’s topic, which is the environmental aspect. Today I spoke to a volunteer who told me that when he was considering this trip, part of him wondered if there was really a point in building houses if another hurricane, or another flood, is going to come along. And there will be another hurricane. This is something that a lot of people don’t really want to talk about. Understandably.

One thing you will hear repeatedly from the locals is this: "this was a manmade disaster." The other day, someone who works for the parish government echoed that statement more specifically: "The river didn’t flood. The canals are what flooded." In St. Bernard Parish, the flooding came from the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet Canal (MR-GO), a navigation channel that was built to shorten the route from New Orleans’ harbor to the Gulf of Mexico. The 25 foot storm surge that swamped the parish came when the levees on the sides of the MR-GO were overwhelmed.

There are two aspects to this "man-made disaster." The first relates to engineering and the environment. It has been argued that the wetlands of southern Louisiana, in their natural state, could absorb a storm surge, or a flood, without most of that excess water making it on to land. But of course those wetlands haven’t been in their natural state for a long time. People have been building channels, draining marshes, and diverting water around here for centuries. And when you build a canal, and line it with levees, the water doesn’t flow the way it does naturally. It flows through the channels that have been constructed, and it can overwhelm them if it’s more water than they are designed for. All the construction of levees and canals throughout the Mississippi Delta has greatly increased the erosion of coastal vegetation, as much as 34 square miles a year by some estimates. The more it declines, the closer the ocean gets to New Orleans. Hurricanes get weaker when they make landfall, and they lose power rapidly as they move inland. The closer New Orleans is to the ocean, the stronger the hurricanes will be when they arrive.

The second aspect is political. Louisiana and New Orleans have a long and colorful history of corruption. Think Huey Long and Leander Perez. Many of the levees and the canals were not constructed the way they were supposed to be. Why spend all the money necessary to build something the right way, when it’s cheaper to bribe a public official to look the other way while you cut corners? I’ll use an example from another country to illustrate how tragic the results can be from this sort of collusion. Jesus Gil y Gil was a shady Spanish businessman who later became mayor of Marbella and president of the Atletico Madrid Football Club. Gil initially made his money in construction. In 1967, an apartment building his company had constructed collapsed during an earthquake. 58 people died. Had he built the apartment building according to safety codes, this probably wouldn’t have happened. But he didn’t, because it was cheaper to pay off public officials. His greed was more important than people’s safety. He was sent to jail at the time, but he was only there for a few months before Generalissimo Francisco Franco gave him a pardon and he was released (allegedly after yet another payoff). Corrupt politicians and shady businessmen get rich, and when the shit hits the fan, people die because of their malfeasance.

We can’t prevent another monster hurricane from coming through, so we try to build structures that can withstand them. But I haven’t even mentioned global warming yet. The ocean might be getting closer to New Orleans due to a loss of coastal wetland vegetation, but rising sea levels will bring it even closer together. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon one of America’s great cities, and its equally fascinating environs, to the vagaries of fate. I can’t answer the question of whether all this rebuilding is ultimately worth it, if we’re just going to keep doing it again and again. But I’m an optimist. If my family had lived someplace for hundreds of years, if I had a deep, spiritual connection to the land and the water and the culture I grew up with it, I’d keep rebuilding my house every time it got knocked down. I wouldn’t leave until there really was no other choice. I wouldn’t leave until it was completely underwater for good.

The Difference Between Being Bossy & Being The Boss

Supposedly, the written exam portion of the foreign service exam is really difficult. Approximately 17% of the people who take it pass. If you do pass it, you move on to the oral exam section, which takes the better part of a day (scheduled at a distant date in the future at the pleasure of the State Department’s employees), and which really is difficult. The most difficult part of the oral examination is a group exercise, in which the successful applicant will display leadership and initiative whilst simultaneously not forcing her opinion on everyone else, and, at least as far as appearances go, work with the other members of the group to form a consensus. As they are asking the prospective candidate to do two things which are just about contradictory, it’s pretty damned hard. Both of the times I’ve taken the "oral assessment" this is the section I’ve had the most trouble with.

Last week, before my departure for New Orleans, my mother told me that my experience here could provide excellent practice in that area. And she’s right. Because when a bunch of volunteers are building a house, nobody really knows what they’re doing, and no one is really in charge. Some people will take charge because they’re natural leaders, and some people will take charge because they’re anxious and feel the need to tell everyone what to do.

When I was little kid, I saw a movie called Space Camp at the Springfield Mall. Had this movie not made such an impression, I might not have ended up going to Space Camp myself. (Unlike the characters in the film, I was not accidentally launched into space by a friendly robot.) One of the things I remember about the film, besides the fact that Lea Thompson and Kelly Preston, especially, looked totally foxy, is the following quote: "there’s a difference between being the boss and being bossy." Word. When you’re bossy, people might do what you say, and if they do, it’s because they don’t feel that strongly, or perhaps because they’re non-confrontational, or perhaps they agree with your course of action but don’t much care for your delivery, but are willing to let that slide. (Or maybe when it’s a volunteer thing, and all of us gave up our time and money to travel to Louisiana and help others, so it’s petty to argue with someone because they want to be in charge.) But when you’re the boss, ideally, people will do what you say because you have the best ideas, or perhaps because you have the best oratorical skills and you can form a consensus, and you can convince everyone that you have the best vision and then unite all of them in support of executing that vision. This is an important thing to remember the next time you’re at an event where no one is really in charge.

St. Bernard Parish, Day Two

Today I learned how to put up siding. In fact, I spent the better part of the day putting up siding. This was in addition to learning how to use a tool that contains a string covered in red chalk which twangs against a wall indicating where the studs are. Our foreman was a mysterious individual who goes by the unlikely sobriquet of Bob-Rob. Bob-Rob cultivates an air of mystery about him. He doesn’t like having his picture taken, and when asked questions about himself or his background, he gives vague answers. But he is amusing. And he appears to know what he is doing.

My theme for today’s blog is the history of St. Bernard Parish. (Full disclosure: much of this information is gleaned from Wikipedia, so if you are one of those cats who doubt the veracity of Wikipedia, I warned you.) It’s named after the saintly namesake of Bernardo de Galvez y Madrid, Conde de Galvez, who was the governor of Spanish Louisiana during the American Revolution. Galvez himself is the namesake of Galvez, Louisiana, which is located ten miles southeast of Baton Rouge. The area was largely settled (by white people, anyway) by Canary Islanders in the 1780s when Louisiana was a Spanish possession. You’ll see a lot of Spanish surnames around here. Today is election day, and the parish clerk of the court, Lena Torres, was reelected, while parish president Henry "Junior" Rodriguez, Jr. is headed for a run-off. Among the less-successful candidates were Randy Nunez and Troy Saavedra. The Canary Islanders are referred to as Isleños, and there is an Isleños Museum here as well as an Isleños Fiesta every march.

Maybe the Spanish influence explains the funky accent people have here. The locals couldn't be friendlier, and they can be so appreciative it's almost embarrasing. Even though New Orleans is less than 20 miles from here, the local accent is distinct. Hard would come out more like "hahd" in New Orleans, but in "Da Parish" it's more like "haud." And if here in New Orleans is "hyah," in St. Bernard it sounds like "heeyuh." If I knew more about linguistics I could explain this in terms of schwas and elongated dipthongs and whatnot, but then almost nobody would understand would I was talking about.

One of the most famous local Isleños is the late Leander Perez, Sr. This dude was a real son-of-a-bitch. During the first half of the 20th century, he was the local boss of the political machine that ran St. Bernard and neighboring Plaquemines Parish as well. He was the sort of cat who defined the corrupt political machine. Voters were physically intimidated, all sorts of fake names were included on voter rolls, and Perez’s candidates routinely one more than 90% of the vote. Then he decided to become a militant segregationist. "Don’t wait for your daughters to be raped by these Congolese" is a typical example of his vile rhetoric. To give you an idea of the depth of his corruption, after his death the parish government sued his heirs for $82 million dollars. One of the main roads in St. Bernard Parish is named Judge Perez Drive. The locals realized that this is not really the sort of person you want associated with your community, and today the road is named after a local judge named Melvyn Perez. Still, when people around here refer to "Judge Perez," the person, rather than the street, they are usually talking about Leander Perez, Sr.
Camp Hope, the spot where I’m staying, is housed in a once and future middle school named after P.G.T. Beauregard, the greatest of the Deep South generals. Beauregard was actually born on a plantation here in St. Bernard Parish. People in the South love naming stuff after Confederate figures. In my hometown there’s a street named after Jefferson Davis. Despite the fact that many people think my hometown is not terribly Southern (which of course is not really a town at all, but America’s smallest county), it’s named after Robert E. Lee’s house. You know, the one the Yankees turned into a graveyard purely out of spite. One of the main thoroughfares in Arlington is Lee Highway. In neighboring Fairfax County, you’ll find the Lee-Jackson Memorial Highway and J.E.B. Stuart High School. There are also a lot of spots named after the Confederate officer most associated with Northern Virginia, Colonel John Singleton Mosby. For those of you who object to naming stuff after Confederate officers, I’d like to point out that he graduated from West Point without a single demerit. While you can blame him for picking the wrong side, you can't call into question either his honor or his character.

St. Bernard Parish, Day One

I’ll start this post with a little bit of background on St. Bernard Parish, where I am staying this week. In the wake of the catastrophes caused by Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding, New Orleans got most of the press. This is perfectly understandable, given its position as one of America’s iconic cities. But communities like Meraux and Violet, Louisiana (where I’m staying) or Ocean Springs, Missisippi, were harder hit. The entire parish was covered in between 2 and 28 feet of water. There are a grand total, at most, of three structures in the entire parish that were not flooded. The eye of the hurricane passed over the eastern part of the parish, but meanwhile a black wall of clouds was pushing a 25 foot storm surge in which broke the parish levees. The water rose quickly. Some witnesses said it was less than fifteen minutes. Over two years later, much has been rebuilt, but there are still whole strip malls sitting there empty, the windows boarded up and the parking lots choked with weeds.

Habitat for Humanity’s weekly programs in St. Bernard Parish run Tuesday to Saturday, so on Mondays the volunteers here at Camp Hope do projects for the parish government. Today, I ended up at the spot that is going to be transformed into a park and playing fields. About 15 of us removed dead trees, whacked some weeds, and cleaned up a lot of garbage. The school itself was an odd sight. One whole wing had all of it’s walls gone. Inside, the seats were gone from the auditorium, so there was merely a stage with an incline in front of it. The windows were boarded up, or gone completely. There was graffiti on the walls, but much of it was along the lines of "I [heart] St. B," or "Archbishop Hannon was one of the best times of my life." The thing I found most unsettling was on the second floor. Whole rooms were strewn with the detritus of choir and band practice, but what got me was the proofs from yearbook photos strewn on the floor. These really conveyed the sense that the school had been abandoned suddenly, and the students had yet to return. Where are they now? Some have moved, no doubt, some managed to graduate from some other high school and have matriculated. Once this space was filled with the vibrant sounds of young people, chatting with their friends, discussing plans and crushes. Today it is cold and empty. The Diocese of New Orleans plans to reopen Archbishop Hannon High School elsewhere. But this spot, which is now owned by the parish government, will one day be a park.

We got to spend some time today with Roy and Perry, two employees of the parish government. Talk to the locals here, and you might hear some seriously f’ed up stories. During the flooding in 2005, people said that if you found a corpse, you should tie it to a post or a tree. Some people didn’t use a long enough rope, so when the waters receded, and the residents returned, they were confronted with the site of dead bodies hanging there. One of the bodies was only recognizable because he was still wearing his parish government uniform. Houses, beautiful houses, with lots of insulation were lifted clean off their foundations and came back down hundreds of feet away.

As depressing and macabre as all of that might be, there is definitely plenty of optimism here. Two years after the deluge, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done. But I understand it looks considerably better than it did last year. Local businesses have "now hiring" signs in front. Even if we didn’t do that much in tangible terms, merely showing up to help lets the locals know that they haven’t been forgotten. That just because it’s not in the news anymore, people in the rest of the country, in the rest of the world, still care about them. Today a woman at a grocery store hugged six of us. "Stay positive," I said to Roy as we departed. "You got to," he replied, "otherwise you’ll go crazy."