“He in no way wishes harm towards our president”
Huh?!
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Christ, forgive these assholes, even though they deny they know what they do.
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#yawn
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So that’s what life under Cruz would be like. I don’t think Der Drumpf is religious enough for that.
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Margaret Atwood’s novel had very little to do with theocratic rule, and was more about the horrific fallout from the attempts to veer the country in that direction.
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Ah okay. I thought it was what life was like under a ‘Christian’ ruler. I haven’t read the book, just picked up things about it over the years. I will have to read it now
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Just had this conversation today with someone.
Praying and all that is like a crutch. Or a cop out.
Same as when people who are not ordinarily that religious will say something stupid like “everything happens for a reason”.
I have a friend on Facebook that posted this as part of a status per some good stuff that happened -
“I whole-heartedly believe God has his own timing”
If one can pray to God for assistance (at his convenience, of course) or for your favorite sports team to win, or for your favorite army to kill the other guys… then there is no such thing as free will.
And if everything good that happens and every time you get a flat tire is “for a reason” I guess we’re all part of some chess game.
It’s pretty childish, really. No, not really. A LOT.
Which brings me to another childish thing. When you question the specifics of the Christian religion (and really, those are the only people spouting off at the office) with someone and corner them, it always comes down to they don’t want to go to hell.
I mean, no one wants to be in the scary part of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, but put on your thinking cap.
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No, religion itself hardly factors into the plot at all, except as one of the powerful tools that eventually led to the complete decline of the country as we know it.
In Atwood’s nightmarish vision of the future, the Constitution has been dismantled, women and other “minorities” have been stripped of all rights and agency, many “traditional” marriages have been invalidated (only the first marriage counts), and massive, irreparable damage to the ecology has caused a good chuck of the country’s populace to become infertile.
In turn, the epidemic of sterility has led to the few remaining unmarried fertile women being turned into nothing more than captive broodmares, while females who cannot conceive are no longer even considered women at all.
It’s a really harrowing look at what could theoretically happen in the wake of all these anti-reproductive rights laws that are being put into place, and the real catcher is that the novel was written during Reagan’s time, not in our current political climate.
Just for fun, here’s a “thugged out” review of the book:
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What’s the point of inventing an omnipotent version of yourself if it won’t do your chores?
The trouble is that a handful of his target audience think their God will answers his prayers by asking them to be His hit man.
That novel gets more depressingly prescient every year. Now that Republicans have demonstrated a willingness to hold the government and now the Supreme Court itself hostage, I think we’re a lot closer to an actual Gileadean coup that most people realize.
Ah, the Search Gods smile on you.
He doesn’t have to be. A man ruled by his ambition is easily manipulated into pleasing sycophants who will make him think it’s his own idea. Drumpf isn’t a danger in-and-of-himself, but because he’s willing to open the door to fascism, and men even worse than Cruz are waiting to walk through.
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*sigh
All I can say is that should it ever come to that point, rest assured that I’ll ‘go down swinging’, and not at all “gently” into that not-so-good night.
They “might walk over, but they’ll be limping back.”
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People talk about revolution a lot. What they often don’t realize is that revolution begins when government is made weak by those wishing to subvert it from within, almost always under the guise of nostalgia for a gilded age that never truly existed. The one thing Atwood got wrong (or perhaps simplified to for dramatic purposes, and in fairness almost all fictional revolutions go the more dramatic route) is that it rarely happens all at once. A full suspension of the Constitution is unlikely. But when the Congress refuses to do their Constitutional duty by even holding hearings to fill the SCOTUS vacancy, they’ve already begun to suspend the Constitution piecemeal, though in fact it’s been going on for a while with warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition and indefinite detention, the executive branch conducting ongoing undeclared wars, civil asset forfeiture, ect…
ETA: I’d like to believe I’d stand and fight, but that might depend on whether I could make it to Canada. And that’s not something I say lightly. I love like living in America, warts and all, and that’s a responsibility before it’s a feeling. So if I did flee to Canada instead of ‘going down swinging’, I’d have to accept that I’m a moral coward, and I don’t know if I could live with myself. Some people hope their principles are tested in fire because they want to know if they’ll stand their ground. When I was young I wanted that. Now I’d rather not face that crucible because I know myself well enough to be less confident that I’d stick to my principles.
If we were going to emigrate, it would likely be to France, Japan or Germany (in that order of preference), but Canada will be an easier waypoint if we reach the point of refuseniks being denied exit visas.
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Trying to envision old wrinkly white guys in suits rocking out to death metal.
Segfault.
I don’t disagree with your points, but I also don’t think Atwood intended to imply that the downward spiral just “happened all at once.”
I got the sense that the regime that was in place when the audience is first introduced to Offred had already been in the works for a long time prior to the beginning of the novel.
Fighting isn’t always a physical battle.
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That’s a good point. And it’s hardly supposed to be a history of the revolution.
Very true. And we’re I to stay after things had gotten as bad as Gilead, I’d likely try to find a role in the underground railroad that would necessitate. But though Gandhi’s battles weren’t physical, they were still dangerous. Simply standing up against tyranny for what you believe in will be treated as being as violent or more so than taking up arms.
I meant more that I’m keenly aware that I’ve lived in a place and time that, for all it’s myriad faults, offered a very unusual level of security and liberty (and also aware that others paid for that security in blood and many of my liberties are privileges not fully extended to all my fellow Americans). I simply don’t know if I’m strong enough to live in the more frequent condition of peril and tyranny. I hope so, but I don’t know so, and I’m not eager to find out as I was in my youth.
One of my all-time favorite quotes…
“If you’re not ready to die for it, take the word “freedom” out of your vocabulary.” ~ Malcolm X
It’s been said you can take a free man’s life, but not his freedom. I don’t know if I want to know anymore if I’m really free. I might not like the answer. As long as I don’t have the answer, I can hope I am. Is it better to hope you’re free, or be certain you’re not?
Sorry, that got a little heavy there. Thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale does that to me. It’s one the most powerful books in Canadian/American literature.
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You’re right, he wasn’t praying. Petitioning a deity to do harm to someone is called a curse.
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Fundamentalist Christianity in the U.S. has been snidely referencing this verse since President Obama was inaugurated seven and a half years ago. Very wittingly praying death on President Obama the entire time.
They know what they’re about. And I know what they’re about because I’m related to some of them.
As @nimelennar notes, David Perdue is a bit late to the game. But David can hardly be ignorant of what he’s doing.
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Psalm 109:8 New King James Version (NKJV)
8 Let his days be few,
And let another take his office.
Psalm 109:9-10 New King James Version (NKJV)
9 Let his children be fatherless,
And his wife a widow.
10 Let his children continually be vagabonds, and beg;
Let them seek their bread also from their desolate places.
Perdue only used 109:8, arguably just to be a bit of an ass, and anyone who wants to call him on it should be aware of that fact. However, his audience would have known (or have had some remembrance of) the rest of the passage, so one might be able to argue that he had more in mind than simply wishing Obama out of office.
I’ve seen fundamentalist Christian extremists intentionally reference proximal verses (maybe 1-2 numbers off), in order to dog whistle the truly evil bits to and among themselves*. Because of that, I’m cautious about assuming it was all in harmless ‘good fun’, and that secular Americans are just scum for suggesting otherwise. I’d need to know more about Perdue’s history, but his spokesperson certainly said nothing to deny that intent. Her smarmy pettifogging response suggests he wanted to remain ambiguous, and generally, ambiguous = dog whistle in these matters.
*(Central Michigan, early 2000s; a customer of my husband’s company. No way to ever call him on it – which was of course, the idea).
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Better said than me. You posted while I was writing.
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Christ, why a Christian?
Forget the Christ what an asshole thing…you know what to expect from an asshole but these fuckin Christians are something else entirely
