Living ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ courtesy of the secular liberal elites of LA – Los Angeles Times

Ive lost count of the articles Ive read about Hulus adaptation of Margaret Atwoods 1985 novel The Handmaids Tale that used the word timely. Timely, that is, in the sense of the presidency of Donald Trump. Heres just a short list of print and online outlets where the T-word appears in connection with the re-creation of Atwoods fictional America turned into a grim theocracy called Gilead that treats women like breeding cattle: the Hollywood Reporter, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Mother Jones, Harpers Bazaar, the Daily Beast, Bustle, NPR, and CNN. The 77-year-old Atwood herself chimed in, telling the Los Angeles Times Patt Morrison: Were no longer making fiction were making a documentary.

The idea, in these mostly liberal media outlets, seems to be that under President Trump, America has become or will become terrifyingly soon a militant Bible-based patriarchy (hello Texas, hello Mike Pence) in which women have no rights, especially no reproductive rights, and are divided into rigidly stratified social classes whose very names give their status away: privileged, churchy Wives at the top, Econowives in the lower social orders, and cook-and-bottle-washer Marthas who do the housework for the Wives and their powerful husbands, the Commanders.

At the very bottom are Handmaids, political pariahs (wrong ideas, such as feminism) who become the literal property of the top-dog men and are forced to bear their children. (The Wives suffer from environmental pollution-related fertility problems.) As the New Republics Sarah Jones, one of the timely crowd, explains, Of course, we dont divide women into classes of Marthas, Handmaids, Econowives, and Wives; we call them the help, surrogates, the working class, and the one percent.

At first I scoffed. There couldnt be any more unlikely a theocrat than Trump, what with his misquotes from the Bible and speculation that he hasnt been in a church more than twice since the inauguration. But then I realized that the liberal paranoiacs were right. Except not in the way they think. Instead of seeing Atwoods fictional Gilead as a near-future militant fundamentalist Christian elite dystopia, we should see it as the mostly secularist elite dystopia we live in right now.

Take those elite-class Wives. Liberals typically assume the 1% consists of striped-pants tycoons off the Monopoly board who reliably vote Republican and want to cram retrograde religious ideas down peoples throats. In fact, as social scientists (Charles Murray in Coming Apart) and political analysts (Michael Barone, writing recently for the Capital Research Center) have observed, its the Democratic Party thats the party of the 1%: the tech and finance billionaires, the media and entertainment moguls who cluster in expensive ZIP Codes around metropolitan Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Washington.

Those folks arent known for their church-going, and they vote in favor of liberal social and economic causes from abortion and immigration rights to sustainable energy to higher taxes. They contribute heavily to political campaign, and with their upper-middle-class epigones they run the culture, deciding who gets banned on Twitter, which kinds of diversity are allowed on campuses, and what television programs well be allowed to see. Todays overclass Wives typically hold Ivy League degrees, lean in to high-status careers, and stand with Planned Parenthood.

We also have a rigidly defined caste of Marthas (and Marthos, their male counterparts), because the Wives and their high-earning husbands need them to mop their floors, care for their children, mow their lawns and trim their trees, all for bargain-basement wages. And so we have the irony of Malibu declaring itself a sanctuary city out of solidarity with its servant class, many of whom are in the country illegally, who cant afford to live anywhere near their wealthy and high-minded masters and mistresses.

Finally, the Handmaids. As in the fictional Gilead, real-life elite-class Wives have something of a fertility problem, although its related not to environmental degradation but delayed marriages and childbearing attempts of women who pursue high-power careers. Thanks to 30 years of advances in egg-transfer technology since Atwood published her novel, todays gestational surrogates dont have to get into embarrassing threesome sexual positions with the Commanders and their Wives in order to do their jobs. And they tend to be drawn not from the ranks of political dissidents, but from the financially strapped Econowife class (military bases are common surrogate-recruiting centers) who are willing to put up with a years worth of uncomfortable hormone treatments and possible pregnancy problems for the $40,000 or so that they receive.

Still, as in Gilead, there is definitely a class of female pariahs on whom the elites heap condescension, contempt and, when they can, punishment for holding views at variance with what the elites deem correct. Theyre not called Handmaids, of course. Theyre called Deplorables. Try telling the other people in your book club that you sent a check to the Donalds campaign. Or, if you need a misogyny fix, search for the phrase women who voted for Trump on Twitter. Read up on what theyre saying about Kellyanne Conway at Jezebel. Or Ann Coulter just about anywhere. Those ugly white bonnets the Handmaids of Gilead are required to wear in the Hulu miniseries look downright benign by comparison.

Yes, The Handmaids Tale is a documentary, all right. It just doesnt happen to be the documentary that the liberals think it is.

Washington-based Charlotte Allen writes about social and cultural issues.

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Living 'The Handmaid's Tale' courtesy of the secular liberal elites of LA - Los Angeles Times