"If America Fails?: The Coming Tyranny" ::: Examining "The Handmaid’s Tale". . .the fictional story that explores the real potential of the U.S. as a failed state.
“When care not competition rules the day, when gardens outnumber guns, when every child receives the love and protection they deserve, we will indeed be able to finally breathe freely.”
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @CulturedModesty interviewed @drvholden for @NewBooksAfroAm on her book “Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community.” Check it out!
The struggle to escape Gilead is something we see in “The Handmaid’s Tale” and we see some of the dangers involved when one chooses to fight for freedom and resist totalitarian rule. What we haven’t seen yet is a full-scale resistance where the captive handmaids rise up to kill the commanders and their wives – the ruling class.
At the end of Season 4, we saw June, the lead character, viciously take apart the man who had been her master – Commander Waterford. It was brutal, hard to watch, and hard to forget. It seems to even have left some of us wondering if her actions were justified – like her husband, Luke.
Brutality begets brutality, and I just want to say, “Don’t start no shit, won’t be no shit.” — LMO
“The local community around the Nat Turner rebellion The 1831 Southampton Rebellion led by Nat Turner involved an entire community. Vanessa M. Holden rediscovers the women and children, free and enslaved, who lived in Southampton County before, during, and after the revolt. Mapping the region’s multilayered human geography, Holden draws a fuller picture of the inhabitants, revealing not only their interactions with physical locations but also their social relationships in space and time.
“In Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community (U Illinois Press, 2021), Holden recasts the Southampton Rebellion as one event that reveals the continuum of practices that sustained resistance and survival among local Black people. Holden follows how African Americans continued those practices through the rebellion’s immediate aftermath and into the future, showing how Black women and communities raised children who remembered and heeded the lessons absorbed during the calamitous events of 1831. A bold challenge to traditional accounts, Surviving Southampton sheds new light on the places and people surrounding Americas most famous rebellion against slavery.” — New Books in African American Studies
LISTEN TO | Vanessa M. Holden, “Surviving Southampton: African American Women and Resistance in Nat Turner’s Community” (U Illinois Press, 2021) | New Books in African American Studies | 9/24/2021
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @ht_quotes @LeahRemini @MikeRinder Thanks for this episode of #FairGame with Capt. Yulanda Williams on her experience at #Jonestown. Illuminating!
Beliefs can be powerful motivators in moving people to do things they might otherwise not do. That’s why I think it’s important we stay alert to the religious extremism we see happening in the country today. Capt. Yulanda Williams shared her firsthand experience with Jim Jones and coming into the cult at a fairly young, impressionable age.
Finding something and someone to believe in, and making sense of our chaotic, and in many ways, frightening, world, strikes me as a very human need. Nevertheless, we have to remember there are people willing to take advantage of this need for their own evil, sick, and/or unexamined reasons – and avoid them at all costs. Adults have to play this sorting role – sorting the worthy from the unworthy – for the children in our lives who are dependent on our exercise of good judgment. Our failure to do so may have fatal consequences, as was the case for many followers of Jim Jones and the tragedy in Guyana. Thank goodness Yulanda Williams survived her experience with Jones and is alive and willing to shine a light on the dangers associated with cults and religious extremism.
Yes, I think we should find something to believe in – as long as our faith does not require we suspend our good judgment and common sense. — LMO
“Leah and Mike talk with Jonestown survivor and SFO PD Captain Yulanda Williams about her story, the parallels to scientology and how to better equip law enforcement to deal with cults.” — Fair Game
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG See the @inthesetimesmag #M4BL issue w/ @BarbaraRansby & other awesome Black women.
“We know our story has been told for us rather than by us, and it’s time to change that.”
— Guest Editorial Collective
“When In These Times reports on social movements, we strive to keep journalistic distance, believing that a progressive political movement needs its own independent media to inform and orient itself. But for one special issue, we’re making an exception. For the July issue, we invited a social movement to ‘take over’ editorial control…”
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG READ the sequel on the fictional dystopian world of the Republic of Gilead – “The Testaments,” by @MargaretAtwood.
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is the author’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale. Have you read it? Let’s chat it up!
“More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results…Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third: Aunt Lydia. Her complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways…With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.” —The Publisher
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @sandylocks Kimberlé Crenshaw and @soledadobrien on media’s role in democracy’s failure, as w/ #CRT, on @IMKC_podcast. Media is failing us. Thanks for helping us see what we are not getting from major media and the role it’s playing in America’s decline.
“Over the last year, the Right has ignited a widespread disinformation campaign around Critical Race Theory — and mainstream media is fueling the fire. Mentions of CRT in the news grew exponentially this past year, with journalists often framing the conversation around education censorship as an equal debate between supporters and opponents of anti-equality legislation. And despite CRT’s well-documented history of emerging in 1989 with a clear and fixed definition, the media have decided to play in the Right’s disinformation campaign by allowing a distortion of the concept’s meaning in exchange for views.
“On this episode, Kimberlé meets with veteran journalist Soledad O’Brien to unpack mass media’s decision to legitimize faux debate, outline the consequences of this debate on racial justice and democracy, and chart a path forward for journalists who aspire to do better… “SOLEDAD O’BRIEN – CEO of Soledad O’Brien Productions; Anchor and Producer, The Hearst Television political magazine program ‘Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien.’” — Intersectionality Matters
LISTEN TO | Episode 40. The Lies They Tell: Mass Media’s Complicity in the Age of Disinformation | Intersectionality Matters! with Kimberlé Crenshaw, a podcast | 9/21/2021
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @JYSexton @CanYouHearMeSMH #GeneralMarkMilley was ready to help humanity dodge a bullet – well, a nuclear holocaust. Let’s thank him.
This concept we’re exploring at “If America Fails?: The Coming Tyranny,” seems to assume that failure is a possibility, if not a probability – and the aftermath would be horrific for most people.
Yet it’s all a matter of perception, isn’t it…a matter of our particular point of view? A right-wing coup d’état, for example, conjures images of horror in my mind, but it seems, from their perspective, to not be so.
I agree with co-hosts Sexton and Hauselman, in the linked episode, that what General Milley did might well be described as a coup…but when a lunatic is running the show, right and wrong is not a clear cut matter. It’s a matter of perception, and degree, and I, for one, am glad the general showed leadership in the face of sheer lunacy, in this particular case. I do not want the U.S. military to control the government (any more than they already do), but when we elect an anti-American, Russian asset to the presidency, we should not have to learn the hard way, just how wrong that can go. General Milley, clearly, knows where such actions can lead – and perhaps at this point, we should just thank him for stepping in when no one else seemed poised to do so. — LMO
“Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the bombshell reporting from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s new book, detailing a mini-coup from JCOS Milley and Vice President Pence’s ol’ college try to overturn the election.”
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @lorraineali does a great job of summing of the state of things in Gilead at the end of Season 2 of @HandmaidsOnHulu in comparison to real events.
“‘You were there all the time,’ says June of Gilead, ‘but no one noticed you.’”
— Lorraine Ali
“…a large percentage of the electorate never even bothered to vote. But that apathy turned to concern once they saw their new government ripping children away from their mothers and sending them to parts unknown. Then there were the militarized borders, travel bans, a state-sponsored war against journalists, newsroom killings, men abolishing women’s reproductive rights and the rest of the free world’s dismay and outrage over the fall of a once-great democracy…
“Week after week ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ managed to mirror present-day headlines with a chilling accuracy, especially for a show that was written and shot months in advance. And it didn’t stop there. Since the drama is set in the police state of Gilead (formerly America), where gays, Muslims, willful women and anyone else deemed a threat to totalitarian rule are lynched in public, it showed what Zero Tolerance policy, alienating Canada or targeting the free press might look like post-resistance. Let’s just say as bad as things seem now, Season 2 was there to show us how bottomless the bottom really is…
“Like all great science fiction or futuristic thrillers, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ turns our worst fears into watercooler moments and binge-worthy stretches hunkered down at home. June’s subtle slide from working nine-to-five each day and tucking her daughter into bed at night — to becoming a prisoner in a country she no longer recognizes as her own — is a particularly powerful way to connect the far-fetched with the probable. And she had no idea it was coming….”
@ASoulAFire @JaniceOCG @Stephsavell, Costs of War Project, was guest on @today_explained with host @Rameswaram recently in an insightful interview that explores the hidden costs of war. Check it out!
War goes on in the background of the Hulu series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” almost silently, seeming to exert little effect on the day-to-day lives of the characters. Surely we will look at issues of war in our new webchat series, “If America Fails?: The Coming Tyranny,” but in the meantime, it’s intriguing to think about the way war impacts our daily lives as Americans.
For example, Afghanistan has been much in the news in recent weeks, and now American citizens must consider sharing space and other resources with its refugees – but how much did the war over two decades enter our consciousness? Not much, I’d bet.
The U.S. stays embroiled in warfare in various parts of the world…perpetually…but rarely are Americans forced to see the consequences, or the costs. War is “out of sight” and “out of mind.” Perhaps that is a part of the reason that those who seek to plunge this country into chaos and civil war, seem to not grasp the depth of horror they seek to visit upon this country. Anyway, the costs of war are staggering on many levels, with the financial aspect being only one of them. For a stimulating discussion on “the Costs of War,” I recommend you spend a few minutes with Stephanie Savell and Sean Rameswaram. Do it while you’re completing chores and it won’t even cost you time!
“The Department of Defense tracks how much US wars cost, but last week President Biden cited instead accounting from the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Its co-director, Stephanie Savell, explains why.”
If America Fails? 