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the show draws some amount of energy from equating trumpism with fascism. but trump isn't a fascist. he's a bumbling imbecile. some of his supporters are potentially fascists. but the problem with simplistically depicting (or allegorizing) them as fascists is that this risks falling into the same reductive 'us' vs 'them' logic of fascism: those (by whatever criteria) who fundamentally belong to the nation and those who fundamentally belong outside of it. a free liberal society starts from the premise that everyone belongs to the nation on the basis of contractual citizenship and that a framework of consensus and disagreements can be sustained by a more fundamental commitment to conversation. it may be that the liberal (essentially enlightenment) dream of reaching shared truths through conversation was a flawed premise however. because if a liberal society has to be internally protected through preponderant use of force, or if it splits into fundamentally irreconcilable factions, then the liberal project of self-government has essentially failed. the citizens have 'failed themselves.' Zane fucked around with this message at 21:19 on May 27, 2018 |
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May 27, 2018 21:00
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:00 |
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fascism (we can say totalitarianism in a more generic sense) is a deliberate attempt to collapse society and the state into an indivisible, ideologically-driven, monolithic, whole. trump doesn't have an ideology. he just has random chauvinistic gestures. he attacks the press and then gives them exclusive scoops. he race baits and then fails, perhaps even deliberately fails, to build the wall. he uses the justice department to attack sanctuary cities but then systematically sabotages and undermines the guy (jeff sessions) supposed to do it because of his own earlier incompetence. anyway the tv show is ok. but i'm growing sick of the underlying fever swamp of political ideological brinksmanship that these and other kinds of media apparently flourish on. Zane fucked around with this message at 19:00 on May 28, 2018 |
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May 28, 2018 18:57
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if you use an allegory to inform your political orientation, but it is a flawed, or over-determined allegory, then you won't make good political judgments.
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May 28, 2018 19:14
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children of men is my favorite and i think most plausible recent piece of dystopian fiction. the suffering underclass of the future will be millions of stateless immigrants/refugees with no work (because there will be no jobs) and no future. not nice new england wasp women who used to work in publishing but are now breeding chattel. 52% of white women voted for trump if you will remember. and that phenomenon is part of what now seems to be a broader populist/ethno-nationalist movement--sprouting up spontaneously throughout the developed world--to preserve the decaying welfare state and the decaying employment market for 'people like us' and not 'filthy outsiders.' edit: children of men also weirdly uses a 'declining fertility' motif. but i think the motif works there as a metaphor for a society that has lost its collective sense of purpose and collective hope for the future. Zane fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Jun 27, 2018 |
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Jun 27, 2018 20:15
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the whole historical experience of protestantism is based on 'protesting' against a single centralized and hierarchical imposition of meaning upon the bible (catholicism). also: on expecting people to read and interpret the bible for themselves in order to truly take christ's message to heart. that doctrine was an important basis for the spread of popular literacy (including to women) in the early modern world (seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth centuries). it is also why there are a million zillion protestant denominations. so the whole protestant historical analogy doesn't work very well. the better historical analogy if anything would be to the old testament abrahamic religion of the jews. so giliad is actually a jewish state is what i'm saying.
Zane fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Jul 14, 2018 |
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Jul 14, 2018 17:09
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if there was a real fertility crisis (it's difficult to imagine how?) to the point of endangering the basic reproductive survival of the human race it would definitely lead to a revolution. but it would be a revolution with a real moral dilemma behind it: 1) enforced reproduction (destruction of individual freedom); or 2) death/decline of humanity (preservation of individual freedom). i wouldn't watch a show that took the necessary dimensions of such a crisis seriously--because it would be miserable to watch--but it would present a far more challenging message than 'tyranny is bad.' 'revolutions,' in the most robust historical definition (a total transformation of society) only take place when an old society is 1) no longer (ideologically) persuasive; 2) no longer (materially) sustainable. there are only a few 'revolutions' that fully meet this definitional criteria: the french revolution, the russian revolution, the chinese revolution. the necessary disruption to american way of life would have to be titanic--more than a few nukes--for a 'gilead' revolution to take place. and if it did take place -- it wouldn't be possible for the 'old society' to return in any straightforward way. because that old society would have to have comprehensively and utterly failed in order for the new gilead society to become suddenly and explosively possible. the giliad we see i would probably not call a successful revolution because it will probably be toppled by the end of the series and american society will then inexplicably return to normal. Zane fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jul 17, 2018 |
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Jul 17, 2018 01:37
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it's not really specified
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Aug 1, 2018 20:46
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the so-called 'capitalist class' is responsive to the market -- and whatever values consumers/citizens choose to bring to the market. if a critical mass of consumers/citizens become fascists then capitalists will become fascists. the same situation obtain with any political ideology that works in a market economy. trump's manufacturing and economic advisory council collapsed in the wake of his behavior in charlottesville--musk being in fact the first person to resign from it--because there are enough non-racist americans voting with their dollars for big businessmen to not want their products to be explicitly associated with a racist crazy person.
Zane fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 03:47
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the book is creatively successful for its individual, psychological, portrait, rather than its comprehensive historico-social mapping, of a hypothetical totalitarian society. it is only successful--and only attempts to be successful--on this basis. the substance of the narrative drama turns upon the very limited information it provides to both the reader and the protagonist. this creates a deliberately claustrophobic psychological environment. offred has to contend with a world of constant and universal suspicion; she has to perceive, interpret, and utilize small events, and small pieces of information, in order to understand her situation and to survive. the relationship between offred and the commander--the mystery of the commander's intent, the opacity of certain gestures--is endlessly exploited and takes most of the book to unfold. it is never actually revealed why the commander gives offred special favours. the mystery of the characters to each other gets efficiently at one of the deeper psychological truths of a totalitarian society: which is that you never know if the person next to you could be your greatest friend or your greatest enemy in the world. in the hands of a skilled director and writing room the tv show could reproduce this very deliberate dramatic approach in a slow and very 'minimalist' way. it wouldn't have to invent a sketchily plausible totalitarian society because it wouldn't have to trouble itself with the larger picture. it could make a big deal out of small events and conversations. but the showrunners are not very skilled and have instead fallen into the style and plotting of a more or less bog standard television procedural. the plot and the characters have run quickly out of road; the themes are confused (should we feel sympathy for the commander's wife? is gilead a plausible, even justifiable, response to an apocalyptic situation?); and things will only get sloppier from here.
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Aug 7, 2018 05:50
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Propaganda Machine posted:But it isn't. Those things have happened throughout history. I actually thought it was a nice touch.
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Oct 26, 2018 16:19
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