Suzanne Harrington: The Handmaid's Tale is happening now, today
Suzanne Harrington at home in Brighton.
You know that crash warning to ‘brace, brace’ on a plane? Well, here we are, except we’re not on a plane.
The world is brace-bracing, as the cockpit of Western democracy is today (legally) hijacked by a satsuma-hued criminal and his Gilead tech bros.
The lead up has been like watching the trailer of a dystopian potboiler rejected for being too ridiculous.
Being sufficiently far from its epicentre, we European onlookers have the luxury of disgust about what is happening in the formerly united states of America, rather than the full-blown terror being experienced by so many of its residents.
August institutions like the New York Times are running pieces on what to do if ICE – Gilead’s stormtroopers – arrive at schools and workplaces to drag people out, drag them off. Brace, brace.
What sounds comedic from a distance – the new president, perhaps envious of his Russian role model’s brazen invasion of Ukraine, has set his sights on Greenland, Panama and Canada, as though the world were a giant Monopoly board, an Amazon wish list – is anything but funny. Anything could happen.
It already is. Like putting a chimp in charge of a bank, Donald the Deporter - as The Economist calls him - has appointed an ex Fox News presenter as defence secretary, in charge of three million employees, an $849 billion budget, and nuclear weapons.
This new appointee, Pete Hegseth, who has never run as much as a jumble sale, would like all combat soldiers to have penises (“This is no time for equity”), has been accused of rape and financial mismanagement (“I’m not a perfect person”), and reportedly has a drink problem.
He left the National Guard after his supervisor flagged a white supremacist tattoo on his inner bicep, was a boss at Guantanamo, and has described American soldiers who committed war crimes as “heroes”. Battling even his mother tongue, he declares his new job to involve “warfighting and lethality.”
Working on the assumption that what is happening in the former ‘US’ is a violent - but impermanent - reaction to decades of unchecked inequality, zero social safety nets, and the preposterous, unworkable ideology of every man for himself, this current era should, in years to come, provide a rich source of creative inspiration.
Imagine the films we’ll see, the novels we’ll read. This may be wild optimism - that the current brace-brace situation is temporary, the socio-political equivalent of a giant populist pimple popping, leaving everyone knee-deep in neo-fascist pus - but optimism is all we’ve got. It’s that or despair. And for Europeans, added relief that it’s not happening here.
But not complacency. Never complacency. Margaret Atwood, queen of dystopia-lit, knows this. “Having been born in 1939, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight,” she wrote in a 2017 introduction to her 1984 masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“It can’t happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.” It's happening now, today, in front of us. Under his eye.
