World-Build (& -Burn)
Seeing red
A new Handmaid’s Tale season, the sixth and last, is set for sometime Spring 2025—should we make it that far. Meanwhile, are we already inhabiting this perverted hellscape? Will it be too painful to bother watching a show when real life seems so unfathomable? It began, just as well-timed, at the Presidential launch of Trump in 2017 when we easily appropriated the red-robed rage as our own.
As I read Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian tale and then binged the aw(e)ful, riveting series with my daughters, the curious creator in me couldn’t help but admire the massive level of world-building required. What it takes for the author, artists, technicians, and actors to create all the systems, textures, and density of such a book and series—not to mention what it takes culturally and materially to construct an actual new nation. And before all that industry—what it takes to destroy everything that’s already there in order to get started. For, unlike with writing, world-building doesn’t begin on a blank page. If the show gives us any prequel, first they’d be busy burning it all down.
STRUCTURE
I love books complicated enough to require a map. Here we have the world of Gilead—rich with red—with a few sad pockets of “atomic wasteland” (including all of California and poor red-locked Missouri), and “rebel-occupied areas” noted with whiteness in the outlying fringes (recognizable to us as Texas, Washington, Florida, Bernie Sanders country).
The many-tiered structures of Handmaid’s Tale are well-catalogued on this Wiki site. Margaret Atwood concretized her vision with an intricate scaffolding of place, organizations, customs, social classes, and endless vocabulary words. The Republic of Gilead, roughly the United States, has a strict hierarchy crafted by the Sons of Jacob, atop which men, namely Commanders sit. Below them are Angels, frontline soldiers, then Guardians (personal soldiers, bodyguards, servants of commanders). Below this: Economen (standard class males), and Unpeople (inmates).
Women are color-coded by clothing and come in flavors of:
Wife (wears blue and is the highest rank among women);
Aunts (brown, disciplinary wing against their own gender);
Handmaids (red, breeders who step in for the Wives and are forced to hand off their babies);
Marthas (green, domestic servants);
Econowives (striped multicolor, married women of lower rank men);
and Unwomen (gray for the lowest, who can’t integrate and include journalists, activists, lesbians, “failed” Handmaids who couldn’t bear a child, etc.).
You have Unpeople, Unwomen, and also Unbabies. Also known as a “shredder” (an infant born dead or who will die later due to defects). The Handmaids lose their own identities when they trade their first name to become someone owned like “Offred” or “Of-” their assigned Commander.
This whack world order depends first on much self-policing (guilt, indoctrination, instilling fear) and then layers of policing from without: from the Aunts who punish women, to the Salvaging (or public executions) that remind everyone how close they can be to death if they misbehave. Particicution is a certain excruciating ceremony that requires the Handmaids to launch and kill a prisoner themselves, with their bare hands, in a bloodthirsty mob.
For all the spies (The Eyes) looking to report insurgents, there are the secret resistance members (Mayday) and the Underground Femaleroad, much like what some Americans did to escort and protect the escaped enslaved of a different, if equally relevant, era. “Under his eye,” these sad surrogate Handmaids use to greet each other and assert their faith and subordination.
Sex is just an awful means of making babies in this frantic world where mass infertility has made conception scarce and prized. Babies are the main currency of this whole machine built to groom them for the ultimate upkeep of the male power into which it all feeds.
UNSTRUCTURE
World-building depends on the equal opposite act to happen first—the tearing down of what pre-existed. It’s important to remember: there’s always something there first. I object to the fact our present day and fairly progressive Tarrytown, NY still has a prominent anachronistic monument erected in its Patriot’s Park that hails Christopher Columbus as the “discoverer of the Americas” (recently besmirched with red paint, I might add, but quickly restored). We know very well the Americas were already here, and populated of course. In order to forge our own white expat colonies, not only did we have to move and/or kill off the existing Native American tribes, but we had to ship in our abducted “slaves” from Africa who helped build our early wealth and estates. Places like our iconic Sleepy Hollow’s Old Dutch Church, among the oldest churches in the state, and bearing a plaque on its thick stone wall only honoring the master (Frederick Philipse) not his human property who built it.
In order for Gilead to exist, they slowly infiltrated the seats of power from within and then created a coup to overtake Congress one day, staging what looked like a terrorist attack so they could swoop in with martial law to “restore order.” No one makes much mention of that—how complicated and overwhelming the task must have been not only to build up but first to tear down. A handful of men with a plan? This not seat-of-your pants stuff but many pages, with chapters and footnotes, many puppeteers. It also must have involved innumerable satellite people (cultish minions) like our main character’s extramarital love interest Nick, who is mostly sympathetic but has a dark past as a willing soldier on the wrong side of history. I wonder if this last upcoming season will let us peer back to this instigating moment more, the terrible inciting incidents.
Trump’s administration is operating under the same scorched earth approach with what may only appear to be messier tactics: confuse, deny, distract, destroy, blame. Act fast to wipe out all the hard-won Western norms as we know them, quickly create this clean slate, the ground zero upon which they might better drill-baby-drill. Is that also phallic—and sexual?—sure. They want traditional hetero families and their alpha hero husbands and the future glossy billionaire babies that come from them, not these motley odd-sexuals. Infant human life is sacred above all else, at least only in utero, in ideology. Halt all Federal funding (oh wait, rescind, sort of), encourage almost two million workers to resign, erase any smidge of anything “woke,” trans, DEI, or…the new regime’s least favorite color besides blue: green. From the Federal budget memo that had our town development department scrambling this week, in the midst of applying for a safe-streets grant connecting bike lanes to trails and untangle some roads, now so uncertain:
“Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
All according to script from the massive Project 2025, page 4-5:
The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.
[…]
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children, who are being taught on the one hand to affirm that the color of their skin fundamentally determines their identity and even their moral status while on the other they are taught to deny the very creatureliness that inheres in being human and consists in accepting the givenness of our nature as men or women.
Coinciding with the unwokification of America, enter the goon squad (mostly scraped from Fox news) who don’t know anything about leading these agencies because what would it matter if the goal is gutting the agencies. Remove, disassemble, hire burnt-bacon RFK Jr. to disembowel and throw in blender. Stifle “legacy” media so all we have is chum-churning propaganda. Never forget that this President said out loud: we won’t have to vote like this again. Mark these days and watch carefully. Comb through the flurry of Executive Orders in this comprehensive review by writer Freya Zank. You have the establishment vs. the disestablishment. The very man who encouraged his minions to dismantle democracy when he lost, and the angry mob who would have died for him if given the chance on that fateful January 6th four years ago, instead only soiling Congress with a few poor souls killed with many injured, while their leader asked for the lynching of his own VP for not stopping the finalization of his Presidential defeat. Pardons for all those blinded traitors, a golden pass for the Felon in the Chief.
What kind of world will they build? We don’t have to wonder when they do have the equivalent of a Wiki page with their outline, the aforementioned Project 2025, weighing in around 900 pages. Make a new map: Gather Greenland, Canada, the Gulf, the Canal. Color it all red and call it the Reddening perhaps. Maybe in this perverse plan Greenland could become Redland? A wonky homemade animation might help us visualize. But the admin doesn’t like liberal blue, the color of melted snowflakes, so perhaps they also have to get rid of, or at least dye, all that water? (Trump did actually respond with a snotty teenager-tone in response to a reporter asking if he would visit the plane crash site in DC, “you want me to swim?”). It feels elemental, biblical, this fire and flood. Planes falling from the sky due to…diversity.
Grab what you can before the world burns, like a flash sale at a big box store going out of business. Dehumanize people so it’s easier to stage the reality show of herding and transporting. Act Preside-mental like nothing matters except the hate and fear. In talking with my mom, a Trump voter, she said of the LA fires and my related rant about global warming, that no, this is part of the natural cycle since the beginning of the earth/time, and, not to worry, “It’s in God’s hands.” Who is she referring to? And what’s “it.” I hung up. Language is foundational.
As shocking as it may feel, there aren’t really any surprises in this series we’re living now, this second season, under his eye. How many more might there be? I’m pretty sure this show doesn’t just peacefully wrap with a tour of a new bookless Presidential Library in four years. He said he’s not sure if he can have a third term. Not sure. We’d call this sci-fi, but we’re talking about people who don’t believe in science. More of a choose-your-own-adventure tale yet woozy since we readers are just the crash-test-dummies strapped in, scrolling. We must somehow find our agency in this; unbuckle and run. As Margie said in the Notes (where we really need to spend less time),
“Staying in a constant state of anxiety and alarm is not activism.”
Pay attention—to a point. But then it’s time to go do something, anything, no matter how tiny. Maybe just talk to your scared neighbor.