Some Balloon!

Yeah yeah yeah, she gets a blog and she won't freakin' post in it. Whatever. (Disclaimer the second: I give away aspects of THE HANDMAID'S TALE in this post. If you haven't read it, you better go and read it right now, and then come back and read the post.)

Last summer, I actually went as far as downloading the Patriot Act at work and trying to get through it in my leisure time (for about half of my job, there was *tons* of leisure time). I couldn't really manage it; a lot of it is really just "Section X of Y legislation is officially amended to read 'p + q' . . ." where every letter represents approximately eighteen characters and a decimal point. Not exactly informative, though it might have been if I were a substantially more patient human being. But I think we can be pretty confident that the Patriot Act is around for a little while longer; however, I'm not quite as scared of it as I ought to be. The trouble with me is I have a truly ludicrous amount of faith in the U.S. Constitution, which I feel like screwing with for a little while.

As Mr. M, my astounding 12th-grade history teacher, said, "A balloon! Raised in 1798! That's still floating! That's some balloon! . . . And don't tell me it's hot air." The constitutional democratic republic that is the U.S. has held up for more than 200 years, and in the history of the nation, that's pretty fuckin' hardcore. Are the risks of it falling to disaster greater than they have been? I don't know . . . unfortunately, last year I reread THE HANDMAID'S TALE, one of my favorite books, and a lot of it has been resonationg for me. While I don't at all believe we're headed for a regime that demeans and destroys women as Atwood's Gilead does, when she finally outlines how the Gileadean government came into power, it did seem like something that could happen here, as it could have then ('83), I guess. It wouldn't even have to be quite as extreme. In HANDMAID, there were a lot of religious extremists in isolated patches all over the country, with a few of them in place in the government; they managed, then, to assassinate the President, machine-gun the Congress, and create an interim government which suspended the Constitution. The rest was history (if you don't know what I'm talking about, read the frickin' book).

First, n.b. that you'd have to suspend the Constitution to get any such overthrow done here. Some balloon, indeed; that's the only realistic dystopia that can be written of the U.S. On this particular front, as on most non-slavery-oriented fronts, rock on founding fathers. But think about it. Even now that Ashcroft's gone . . . an extremist group wouldn't even need to assassinate the President to make a plan like that work, a government based on radical right-wing Christianity. The purpose that the assassination served in HANDMAID was to create fear--even at that time, her writing in the '80s, they blamed it on Islamic terrorists--and it wouldn't have to happen to the President to serve that function; look how September 11 is being used already. Somebody with machine guns could probably get into the Capitol Building with relative ease, because all it would take is to have three or four right-wing extremists elected to seats in the House or Senate. Not such a stretch. These extremist senators/congressmen would be able to bypass security with relative ease, their psychotic affiliates with them, and really, if they passed the Patriot Act, think what *any* kind of interim government would allow to get past them out of fear, even if not all of them were flunkies of the masterminds. I know that plan's not completely thoroughly outlined--I kind of combined two conceptions of the end--but it seems plausible to me. Not that I actually think it would happen, because really I don't think I do. But I think fear makes a whole lot of things possible, especially when we're right to be afraid, and no one can deny that. I'm pretty much waiting for the next disaster in New York (though I know S-D and SK disagree with me), and while my paranoia that we'd start having an Israel level of small-scale suicide bombings after we invaded Iraq proved misplaced, I still don't think it impossible that that could start up. Either way, I feel sure we're living in an interim now (see HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX), and don't even really know what that means.

I also recall the day we came into the class of Ms. L, my tenth-grade American history teacher who was then only a year older than I am now, to find that a new set of rules had been instituted. The rules were: 1) No talking without permission; 2) No leaving the room; 3) No arguing with me; 4) No discussion of the rules inside or outside of class (she had, she said, requested that certain members of the class report back to her to let her know if any such discussion was taking place). Being the liberal students we were, we attempted to protest; each protest was met with "You're arguing with me." We all thought she had to be joking, but couldn't find any crack in her facade. Ms. L then selected three members of the class to serve as an editorial board, and the rest of us were divided into groups who were to write journalistic articles that portrayed these rules in a favorable light. We discussed the rules quietly amongst ourselves, in our small groups; my group's small gesture of rebellion was to attempt to write a neutral, journalistic article (look for a later post on journalism and objectivity later, especially you, M), but the editorial board had been instructed to select the article that came closest to portraying the rules in a favorable light. Finally, AM was sent to the office for arguing too much; she returned with B, an administrator, certain that she'd won. Ms. L said to B, "I've instituted some new rules, and we've been writing articles about them. Here's the one that the students picked as the best." We all began to protest that that was not how it had been at all, but were silenced by "you're arguing with me." B read the article and said, "AM, this doesn't sound that bad. It just sounds like she's having some trouble controlling you guys, which knowing this class is not impossible, and is doing her best to create a good disciplinary system." Half of us shot our hands up, and finally, after thirty-five minutes of not being able to speak our minds (torturous for my school's students, and to my tenth-grade self it felt much longer), we were allowed to make comments, which we still made carefully, about how this seemed against the principles of our school, so on, so forth. Finally, Ms. L, still stone-faced, says, "Well, a lot of you have been speaking about our 'principles.' Where do you think these 'principles' come from?" We were all silent, and as the bell rang, she cracked her first smile and said, "The Constitution."

It's a bloody amazing document, as that exercise only drove home for me (I still remember almost every detail of that class period, seven years later. I can tell you who was in my article group, who was on the editorial board, you name it). So sometimes when I think about it hard enough, I can still agree, to quote AVENUE Q, that "George Bush is only for now." I remember being a junior in high school, at Model Congresses, loving, as I still love, the graceful and exciting system that is the U.S. government, having such faith in it. That's something that HANDMAID'S TALE allows me, as well (***hardcore spoiler coming***)--the book does not end with Offred being taken by the Eyes, the secret police, but rather with a set of historical notes on the story we've just read, the transcript of a talk given at an academic conference sometime in the 2100s. Which, for an often paranoid woman obsessed with the dystopia as a literary genre like myself, is a pretty amazing thing to have in the canon. Dystopias other than HANDMAID tend to be based on the notion that something could happen to government, of a country or the world, that we as a society could never bounce back from. HANDMAID showed a horrible era, an era that, like any other era thus far, passed.

The only thing that seems truly different to me, that belies This Too Shall Pass, is nuclear proliferation (thank you Mr. Kerry). There are people who hate this world enough, and have enough faith in the existence of another world, that they'd be willing to completely destroy it, and it is entirely possible that destructive power of that scale could fall into their hands. 320 tons of unsecured explosives, hello.

I don't know, though . . . now I want to play with the word "faith." Sarah was the first person to separate faith from standard religious faith for me, and it's an important distinction. I have a ton of faith; I cannot bring myself to believe that the events outlined in the above paragraph or the one three before it will actually take place, even though I recognize it as entirely plausible that they could. I think I will die as an individual, rather than die at the same time as my world dies. It could be naivete on my part, in fact I know some of it is, but I'm not really interested in changing that. Yet it is the same conviction, or at the very least it is an emotion identified by the same word, that could allow Osama bin Laden or some affiliate or some isolated, desperate psychotic to destroy at least the city of my birth, and potentially the world. I have faith in something different than they have, but both of us, most of humanity, is governed by faith. Any recognition of reality and subsequent continuation of life is faith, isn't it?

Within the small scope of my life as an American woman, I have deep faith in the Constitution, in this balloon--the word, I'm sure, chosen by Mr. M to represent how delicate it is, in addition to the fact that it floats above us--that was raised in 1798 and is still floating against all odds. The four coming years may prove this faith misplaced; I'll see where I am in 2008. But somehow I believe I and most of the people I love will be in 2008, although there are a lot of reasons not to believe that. Although the Supreme Court, like anything else, is a fickle and changing thing (that's quoting the AENEID, by the way, and in the AENEID it's a woman that's a fickle and changing thing, to which T responded, "Damn straight, Mercury!"), it hasn't destroyed us so far, in spite of the horrific things it has managed to do over the years (look for a post on the Supreme Court soon). I do believe in people, fundamentally. Which is partially stupid.

And yes, L and M, I hear both of you yelling at me for not discussing the destruction of the environment in a post like this. But I think I've bloody well talked enough. I'll get to it at a later date.