Rant of the Exiles

[Spoiler alert - no major plot twists revealed but I quote from the book. I haven’t seen the show] My wife cautioned me when I picked it up. “It’s really feminist.” She told me a couple times. I hadn’t read a Margaret Atwood book yet but heard she was an amazing writer and the TV show was getting press.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a great novel. It accomplishes exactly what dystopian fiction is meant to do - to imagine contemporary culture, twisted in one particular way so that its corresponding ripple effect reverberates throughout every aspect of society. The prose is brilliant, the images evocative, but most of all, it’s haunting. There’s a sense of dread that accompanies the main character, Offred, throughout the story. The narrative is told solely from Offred’s perspective, as if you’re reading her diary. There are moments when the storm clouds of dread momentarily clear and rays of light peek through. The tension keeps ratcheting up, with brief episodes of dissipation. Al...

Sometimes ideas linger in the back of one’s mind like dirt at the bottom of a swimming pool - dormant, unnoticed yet hiding in plain sight. They are left lying at the edge of one’s consciousness for years because they’re too unsettling and difficult to articulate. Only when a cleaning implement rustles them that one becomes aware of how filthy the environment really is.  For decades, I had suspected an affair might exist but the fact of it eluded me until a recent disruption. The problem with this tryst  is that it ’ s hidden from one of the partners. The relationship functions at the subconscious level. The rustling started with conversations some friends and I had about race, ethnicity, and culture. This dialogue birthed a desire to read a book or study a curriculum together on the topic. One friend recommended Daniel Hill’s White Awake , a book about diagnosing the hidden cancer of white supremacy in American evangelicalism. Earlier this week some members o...