I forced myself to rewatch the Handmaid’s Tale in its entirety to refresh my memory and get up to speed in time to watch the new season in real time.
I generally prefer my entertainment lighthearted and funny but the show really makes me think, the cinematography is unreal, and even though the script in the last two seasons leaves a lot to be desired, I think it’s all around incredibly done.
What I love about the show is that if you have any real critical thinking skills and are intellectually honest, you can see beyond the surface of expected left leaning propaganda, you understand that the show drags both the left and right.
Bird brained blue checks get on Twitter every Wednesday and tweet something along the lines of “I’m so glad Trump is out of office so I don’t have to worry about this becoming a reality!!!!1 🤪”
And it just goes to show you how obtuse these people are. Sure, the right is more religious and socially conservative. The right cares more about traditional values, and can have a habit of treating women like they’re only on earth to have babies and die.
But in Gilead, children belong to the state, kind of like the Equality Act potentially taking custody from parents if they don’t let them transition from one gender to another at an age when children aren’t supposed to be making any life-altering decisions for themselves.
In Gilead, you aren’t allowed to question your government, kind of like we haven’t been able to ask anything about COVID or the election without being censored or accused of terrorism — no matter how much evidence comes to light suggesting we’ve been misled.
In Gilead, leaders rule their people with an iron fist for “the greater good” only to turn around and violate those laws themselves, kind of like the politicians that told us to stay indoors for a year away from our loved ones, threatening us with fines, jail time and cutting off our utilities while they jetted off to their vacation homes and partied maskless with friends.
In Gilead, monuments and landmarks are torn down if they don’t pass contemporary ideological purity tests, kind of like the statues and buildings being taken down and renamed because they commemorate people born before 1975 that held the same attitudes as everyone else at the time.
In Gilead, only the government is armed, and what better way to make that happen than nominating a gun control lobbyist to head ATF?
In Gilead, what you want doesn’t matter — you have an assigned role in society and you’ll play it until you die, and America isn’t quite there yet, but China is — and we’re quickly following their footsteps.
Sure, Margaret Atwood is a liberal nut job (or has to pretend to be one) just like everyone else in Hollywood. But I hate when people try to use an artist’s politics in an attempt to stifle discussion around their work, because the truth is that no matter what or who Atwood intended to criticize, she authored an allegory that can be used to understand political extremes in both directions. And while no one will want to talk about it, she actually drew a great deal of her inspiration for the novel from the Iranian revolution.
The truth is, Gilead isn’t just what happens when religious fanatics bastardize God’s word and think they’re answering some higher calling no matter how many must suffer and die in the meantime — it’s what happens when the government becomes “God.” It’s what happens when people have no agency, no freedom, and no voice. It’s what happens when checks and balances are thrown to the wind, and when the individual must sacrifice everything for the sake of the collective. And it’s just as much a cautionary tale for the left as it is the right.
what do you think?