Since I was in middle school and first read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano I have been a huge fan of distopian futuristic novels. 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451 and the rest of this genre blew me away and really informed my view of government, business and the nature of power held in the hands of the few whether benevolent or malevolent.
I never thought I'd be living in one, though.
When I look at this Presidential election I see ourselves in a turning point that could be in one of these books. The difference between the Obama/Biden camp and the McCain/Palin camp is the difference between moving towards a sharing of power across the society and culture and moving towards a centralized morality-dictating power-structure.
The party base McCain courted by selecting Palin want to use the federal government to dictate our personal morality, and they want to do so by reducing our personal freedoms and security. They would legislate against homosexual acts, and spy on your bedroom to get it done. They would mandate that women could not take contraceptives, or get an abortion if their contraception-free body got pregnant through rape. If they could they would -- like the Southern Baptists suggest -- direct women to be subservient equals to their husbanding husbands.
Instead of offering people the information they need to make moral choices on their own -- such as sex education, medical advances, cultural and religious history classes beyond Christianity, books about kids with two mommies, Tinky Winky etc. -- they would clamp down on any information presented about life opportunities that doesn't have a mommy, daddy, 2.5 kids and a garage with two sedans. They don't want people to know what's possible; they want people to never imagine anything but the right wing vision of America.
In short, they would impose their moral vision of how individuals, spouses, families, industry, homes and all aspects of our personal and private lives through the power of the federal government. They would couch it all in New Speak, as Bush does with spying on Americans, as protecting freedoms by taking them away. It's already begun, an another four years of right wing executive power would bring us even closer to their vision.
I was reading Rebecca Traister's piece in Salon this morning and this all coalesced in my mind. She invoked Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, another book like Player Piano, where women become chattel and some are forced to be no more than vessels for rich men to make babies.
In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."
This is their vision, women who are happy watching the kids and laying in men's beds. And they've gotten their spokesperson in Sarah Palin, who would impose this vision on the rest of the world. Sure, there are exceptions like Palin that the right will raise up to positions of authority in order to show that women can get power. But the vast majority of women would simply be baby watching sleep-partners, and their lack of freedom excused by the "power" granted the Palin's of the world.
Not understanding, of course, the power wielded by Palin and her ilk is used to keep women down instead of raising them up.
In the distopian novels, there is always someone like Palin from the group to be subjugated who is raised up to high levels and excuses the excesses of the subjugators.
In Philip Roth's 2004 novel The Plot Against America, he imagines a world where Nazi sympathizer and NJ native Charles Lindbergh runs for President and beats FDR in 1940. Unknown to the nation, Lindbergh has made a pact with Hitler not to get into WWII, and runs as someone keeping us out of the war. He also begins to institute efforts to disenfranchise and "assimilate" Jews into the country.
Lindbergh is only able to do this because he has a Palin who excuses every anti-Semitic move as good for Jews, a New York rabbi named Lionel Bengelsdorf. Because Bengelsdorf leads the effort to assimilate Jews, it is given a legitimacy both within and without the Jewish community, and excuses the excesses that happen outside.
Families are split up, neighborhoods are torn apart as Jewish families are forced to move to rural areas of the country with no other Jews around, and violence and civil rights violations against Jews are never prosecuted. But it's OK because Bengelsdorf whitewashes the atrocities.
That's what we are looking at with Sarah Palin, a woman who is interested in ensuring that women lose their freedoms to make choices for themselves about their bodies, their role in families, their careers and their lives. When anyone will point to their policies as being anti-woman, the right wing will point to Palin and say, "That's impossible! The Vice President is a woman! You are sexist!"
It's already happened like that with Joe Biden, who suggested that people who want to support developmentally disabled children should also support stem cell research. The right wing went ballistic and accused Biden of attacking Palin, who has an infant with Downs Syndrome.
The slope to overly centralized power in the hands of an authoritarian few is a slow one, but it reaches a tipping point where it cannot be stopped by the ballot box. We are rapidly reaching that tipping point, and Sarah Palin is an accelerant.
I don't want to live in a distopian future. Palin must be stopped.