Earth-Salter Apartheid
5th October 2021
David Cole is delightfully dyspeptic today.
Sometime in the early 1990s a friend suggested that I watch a movie called The Handmaid’s Tale. I was vaguely aware of the book…I knew it was authored by some ugly old bat from Canada, and honestly you couldn’t have paid me enough to read it. But I have a fondness for dystopian sci-fi, and my friend was like, “The movie’s really good! Give it a try.”
As it was on cable and didn’t cost me anything, I figured, sure.
I’m going on memory here, but this is what I recall. Most of the world’s women have been rendered infertile by the Evils of Man, a theme incredibly common in dystopian sci-fi but that withered old bag probably thought she was the first to think of it. And the movie starts with women being processed to sort the barren from the birthing.
Margaret Atwood is to writing what Maya Angelou is to poetry, i.e. a cheap Politically Correct substitute for the Real Thing.