Sarah Palin, George W Bush, and a US Theocracy.

With the recent tragic death of Natasha Richardson, my partner, Mickey, recommended we honor her by watching one of her best films: "The Handmaid's Tale". Mickey knew it would inspire a blog post, and if you are not familiar with the story line (or the Margaret Atwood novel that inspired it), I highly recommend you take the time to link to the Wikipedia post that I have placed above.

Now, about Sarah Palin and how she plays into this theme. Two nights ago she was invited to speak to a "right to life" crowd in Evansville, IN. At 2 minutes and 22 seconds into the attached "Countdown with Keith Olberman" clip the commentator references how she admitted that "for just a fleeting moment" she considered having an abortion when she found out she was going to have a Down Syndrome baby.

It is in this way that Sarah Palin illustrates how close America came to realizing the type of government that allowed the fictional "Republic of Gilead" to be formed in the movie/book, "The Handmaid's Tale".

You see, what Sarah Palin took advantage of for herself was "choice". In her own words she said, "Just for a fleeting moment, I thought, 'No one knows me here. No one would ever know'"...if she had an abortion.

With that statement, she admitted that because of the current constitution in the United States, she had actually considered taking advantage of that "freedom to choose". If she, herself, had determined that she was not a good candidate to be a mother to a Down Syndrome child, she would have been able to ask her doctor for an abortion, but this is when the hypocrisy kicks in. If she had actually been elected to the office of vice-president, she was fully prepared to enact theocratic laws like those referenced in "The Handmaid's Tale"...laws that would put any doctor into jail who would have performed that abortion for her...for any reason.

In the movie, the destruction is horrible. The US government had been overthrown and the president and congress assassinated. The country was in the middle of a horrible civil war. The short news stories that are shown as a backdrop during the movie were very prescient and it was unnerving to hear audio clips that could have been cut verbatim from the Republican play book for their 2008 election campaign.

Margaret Atwood (the Canadian author of the original book) could already see what was in store for America when she wrote her 1985 novel. The fundamentalist revolutionaries portrayed in the novel had been successful in their campaign for a civil war because they had written their own revisionist history and worked the propaganda to the point that their sheep-like Christian followers had been convinced that the nuclear, biological, and chemical pollution that had rendered 99% of women infertile was actually God's judgement on the world for allowing abortions, stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, and for tolerating homosexuality, fornication, and adultery.

Hmmmm? Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah...Sunday School!

The most telling moment in the movie was not what had been achieved by having the uneducated follow their church leaders blindly into war, but what those "church men" actually did once they were in power.

They created a brothel where the "commanders" were able to engage in every forbidden act that they had denied the general population, and for which civilians were systematically put to death.

We've never seen that done before either, have we?