Trump's new Gilead pitch

He says we need more babies

This post is supposed to be the monthly roundup, but I’m too freaked out about Trump’s “women will never be lonely” speech to think about anything else.

Someone once told me that he didn’t like reading fiction because it isn’t “real.” He thought it was a waste of his time because there was nothing to learn.

But as any fiction reader knows, the wonderful thing about fiction is that, when it’s done very well, it tells you something true about being human. It gives us moments of feeling understood — and as George Orwell said, “Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.” But it also helps us to understand. Fiction provides a window into other kinds of lives, other places, other experiences. And I’m using “other” deliberately here, because the truly special thing about fiction is that it removes our Othered perception of other people, and makes them one of us.

So, let it be established that fiction plays an integral role in real life. What else can it teach us? It can teach us about human behavior — what motivates us and why.

Margaret Atwood famously said that she didn’t make up anything in her renowned novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. For those who need a brief refresher, it is set in the United States, which is controlled by a new government that created Gilead to return the country to good. Women had become too promiscuous, educated and career-oriented, all while fertility was dropping precipitously. Gilead returns women to the home, where they are wives and mothers, and have “freedom from” all the bad things that existed in the before times: cat-calling, the pressure to have it all, the inability to reproduce. But to achieve this return to the good old days, some “bad women” are relegated to being handmaids. Handmaids are routinely raped and impregnated by powerful men, and those powerful men’s wives (who haven’t been able to get pregnant) take and mother the children. And so Gilead moves to fix the falling fertility rate, make more babies, and put women back in their place. According to Atwood, everything that takes place in the book all actually happened somewhere in the world at some time.

This week Donald Trump said:

“Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago, much poorer, are less healthy than they were four years ago, are less safe on the streets than they were four years ago…are more stressed and depressed and unhappy than they were four years ago…I will make you safe…on the sidewalks of your now violent cities, in the suburbs where you are under migrant criminal siege, and with our military protecting you from foreign enemies…You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger…You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector.”

Once you stop dry-heaving, let’s return to the notion of “freedom from.”