"Handmaid's Tale" Is The ELF's QAnon

Just Sillier And More Pretentious

In driving past a protest Saturday in Kansas City I spied these two ELFs fleeing the scene dressed as “handmaids.” How do I know they’re ELFs—as in Educated Liberal Females? Well, only an educated female would have read Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and only a liberal would be foolish enough to let the world know.

The one ELF holds a sign reading “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” This is a translation from the pidgin Latin rallying cry used by the rebels in the book, Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. Nolite and te are, in fact, Latin words, meaning don’t and you, but bastardes is a concocted word and carborundorum refers to an abrasive substance used in coal mining. ELFs may be educated—Michelle O, Dr. Jill, AOC—but they are not well educated.

The first thing one needs to know about the 85-year Atwood is that she’s a Canadian. She apparently has made major contributions to the “theorizing of Canadian identity.” That theorizing conceives victimhood as the national posture, no better example of which is Handmaid’s Tale which Atwood vengefully sets in the United States.

This is one of those books that you don’t have to read to sense its silliness. In brief, a radical political group called the "Sons of Jacob" kills the president and most members of Congress, launches a “theonomic” revolution, suspends the Constitution, and turns the US into a military dictatorship known as the Republic of Gilead.

The dominant males of Gilead use the Old Testament as a guiding document to oppress white women—Blacks apparently are all sent to North Dakota. In Gilead, women are not allowed to own money or property, or to even read and write. Although women in Gilead are actually deprived of “reproductive rights”—the way ELFs in America fantasize they are—Atwood was writing before lesbianism became cool and a romantic relationship with a male was still a good thing.

The TV series premiered in 2017, and all I can tell you about it is that it starred Peggy from Madmen, still suffering PTSD from her treatment by Don Draper. I won’t tell you whether Peggy prevails against the powers that be in Gilead because I don’t know and don’t care. The show ran for a bunch of seasons and, given its politics, won lots of awards. However absurd, the book remains popular. The Kansas City Public Library recently paid Atwood $65,000 to speak.

What has made the book popular is that it allows ELFs to imagine themselves living the kind of life Muslim women do today without having to lift a finger for those women. Indeed, Gilead seems very much the mirror image of any number of Islamic republics and its guiding principles are Sharia law in all but name.

Writing in 1985, Atwood probably did not anticipate that American feminists would find common cause with Islamic regimes. Indeed, the KC Handmaids were protesting arm-in-arm with their intersectional BFFs, the Palestinians, real and wannabe. Riddle me that, Batman?

Then too, in 1985 Handmaid’s Tale might have made some vague sense given the rise of the so-called religious right, but the thrice-married Donald Trump is hardly Jerry Falwell. Like the sundry other protestors in Kansas City and elsewhere, the ELFs in Handmaid dress-up have no real idea what they are protesting. God help us if they ever get back in power.

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