[ad_1]
Margaret Atwood at all times brushes apart ideas that her dystopian novels are prescient. However lately, it has turn into tough to see them as something however that.
She appeared because the visitor on Friday’s episode of “The Ezra Klein Present,” a New York Instances Opinion podcast.
I encourage you to hearken to the full of life, and sometimes humorous, dialog between Ms. Atwood and Ezra. However to present you a style of it, listed here are some excerpts, together with her ideas concerning the current blockades that paralyzed Ottawa for weeks and shut down border crossings elsewhere.
[Listen: Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible]
On the variations between the tales Individuals inform about the USA and those Canadians inform about Canada:
These tales are in flux, as you in all probability have seen. There was once a type of shared mythology in the USA, and Canadians used to lament that they didn’t have such a factor. And it could, in actual fact, be fairly tough to have a completely shared mythology in Canada as a result of it was already made up of some numerous teams of individuals. However Individuals had a type of unifying story and unifying ceremonies that concerned a variety of marching round on the 4th of July.
The French even have been fairly conflicted about their tales, however they managed to make it stick for some time. So was Bastille Day good or dangerous? I believe they’re nonetheless pondering it’s good. However there was a variety of adjustment earlier than that turned the accepted story.
With a view to maintain any type of nation state collectively, there must be a narrative that the general public agree on. And each on occasion, these tales crumble. And in the event that they’re not changed with one other one, fragmentation is the consequence. So one of many issues that tales do is they offer members of a bunch a type of unifying, imaginary factor that they’ll imagine in. Once I say imaginary, I’m not saying it’s essentially false. I’m saying it’s the factor of the creativeness.
On how the 2 nations’ tales have advanced:
What you’re seeing now could be a wrestling match for what’s the actual America, what’s the genuine America. And also you see folks wrapping themselves within the flag each methods and saying that they’re the actual America.
And also you simply noticed that in Canada. So these folks on the blockades, wrapping themselves within the Canadian flag, had been standing up for the actual Canada. Fairly fuzzy about what that’s, however that’s what they had been doing. And their position mannequin was what had been occurring within the States, the place we’re overthrowing the federal government within the identify of the actual America.
On her time in Berlin throughout the Eighties:
We had experiences of three Iron Curtain nations on the time, they usually had been considerably completely different. The East Germans, I believe, had been sewed up the tightest of anyone. And we now know from the Stasi recordsdata that, certainly, there have been a variety of informants, and other people had been fairly cautious about what they might say.
In Czechoslovakia, we may speak to folks however solely in open areas. So that you couldn’t have a frank dialog in a constructing or a automobile as a result of folks simply assumed it was bugged.
In Poland, it was already fairly huge open in 1984.
I believe among the stuff that’s been occurring lately is that the folks doing these stuff are too younger to recollect any of that. They don’t know what an actual totalitarianism is like. They usually’re not listening to the sorts of steps that result in it, the way you get certainly one of these items going, the way you get buy-in, what kind of propaganda is more likely to be put on the market.
And also you by no means start by saying: “I’m going to be a tyrannous dictator, and I’m going to smash your life.” You don’t begin out that method. You begin out by saying: “I’m going to make issues so significantly better.”
On the origins of “The Handmaid’s Story”:
I began writing it then in reply to the query: If America had been to have a totalitarian authorities, what form would it not be? And underneath what flag, because it had been, would it not fly? And my reply to that was return to the founders, specifically the seventeenth century Puritan theocrats who by no means went away.
In case you join it with the faith, then it turns into heresy to oppose it. It turns into a really highly effective software. You’re not simply towards some prime minister or different. You’re towards God.
On why folks can embrace authoritarianism:
There’s one thing that we at all times miss of those sorts of conversations, which is: It’s enjoyable. It’s enjoyable to sit down on the guillotine and watch these folks that you just resent getting their heads chopped off. There have been wild avenue dances.
So it’s a avenue celebration, not directly, banding along with like-minded folks and feeling you’ve completed one thing, particularly if folks let you know that this factor that you just’re doing is principally good. It’s very potent. And if it weren’t enjoyable on some stage, folks wouldn’t do it. Isn’t {that a} horrible factor: to say that it’s enjoyable?
Trans Canada
-
I closed out winter (nicely a minimum of official winter) with a have a look at Ottawa’s present mania for leisure skating by means of the woods. Aaron Vincent Elkaim captured the motion with distinctive images.
-
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau entered an settlement with Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats that can, except it falls aside, enable the Liberals to control with out the potential of an election till 2025.
-
Cade Metz, my colleague who covers synthetic intelligence and different rising applied sciences, got here to Toronto to look at the newest growth in tech corporations shifting to town or increasing operations there. His discovering: “It’s dwelling to extra tech employees than Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C., trailing solely New York and Silicon Valley.”
-
In a significant shift for Canada’s auto trade, Stellantis, the maker of Chryslers and Jeeps, has joined with LG of South Korea to construct a $4.1 billion battery plant in Windsor, Ontario. The manufacturing unit will create about 2,500 jobs.
-
Already a workforce on the rise, the Toronto Blue Jays have added Matt Chapman to create what James Wagner, my colleague on the Sports activities desk, says could also be “the perfect infield in baseball.”
-
A Dutch writer has stated that it’s eradicating the best-selling guide, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” by Rosemary Sullivan, a Canadian writer, from shops. A report by historians discovered that the guide’s declare of getting recognized the informant who alerted the Nazi police to the Frank household’s hiding place was primarily based on “defective assumptions” and “careless use of sources.”
A local of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Instances for the previous 16 years. Comply with him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
How are we doing?
We’re desperate to have your ideas about this text and occasions in Canada on the whole. Please ship them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.
Like this e-mail?
Ahead it to your folks, and allow them to know they’ll join right here.
[ad_2]
Source link