Margaret Atwood all the time brushes apart ideas that her dystopian novels are prescient. However in recent times, it has transform tricky to peer them as the rest however that.
She seemed because the visitor on Friday’s episode of “The Ezra Klein Display,” a New York Occasions Opinion podcast.
I urge you to hear the full of life, and continuously humorous, dialog between Ms. Atwood and Ezra. However to come up with a style of it, listed here are some excerpts, together with her ideas in regards to the contemporary blockades that paralyzed Ottawa for weeks and close down border crossings somewhere else.
[Listen: Margaret Atwood on Stories, Deception and the Bible]
At the variations between the tales American citizens inform about the US and those Canadians inform about Canada:
Those tales are in flux, as if in case you have spotted. There was a type of shared mythology in the US, and Canadians used to lament that they didn’t have any such factor. And it might, actually, be slightly tricky to have a unconditionally shared mythology in Canada as it was once already made up of a few various teams of other folks. However American citizens had a type of unifying tale and unifying ceremonies that concerned a large number of marching round at the 4th of July.
The French even have been slightly conflicted about their tales, however they controlled to make it stick for some time. So was once 14 July excellent or dangerous? I believe they’re nonetheless considering it’s excellent. However there was once a large number of adjustment earlier than that become the authorised tale.
With a purpose to dangle any form of country state in combination, there must be a tale that most people agree on. And each and every from time to time, the ones tales fall aside. And in the event that they’re now not changed with some other one, fragmentation is the end result. So one of the crucial issues that tales do is they provide contributors of a gaggle a type of unifying, imaginary factor that they may be able to imagine in. Once I say imaginary, I’m now not announcing it’s essentially false. I’m announcing it’s the factor of the creativeness.
On how the 2 countries’ tales have advanced:
What you’re seeing now’s a wrestling fit for what’s the actual The usa, what’s the original The usa. And you spot other folks wrapping themselves within the flag each techniques and announcing that they’re the actual The usa.
And also you simply noticed that during Canada. So those other folks on the blockades, wrapping themselves within the Canadian flag, had been status up for the actual Canada. Lovely fuzzy about what this is, however that’s what they had been doing. And their position type was once what have been happening within the States, the place we’re overthrowing the federal government within the title of the actual The usa.
On her time in Berlin all through the Eighties:
We had stories of 3 Iron Curtain international locations on the time, and so they had been moderately other. 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 large number of informants, and other folks had been lovely cautious about what they might say.
In Czechoslovakia, lets communicate to other folks however best in open areas. So that you couldn’t have a frank dialog in a construction or a automobile as a result of other folks simply assumed it was once bugged.
In Poland, it was once already lovely extensive open in 1984.
I believe one of the crucial stuff that’s been happening just lately is that the folk doing the ones stuff are too younger to bear in mind any of that. They don’t know what an actual totalitarianism is like. And so they’re now not taking note of the types of steps that result in it, the way you get any such issues going, the way you get buy-in, what kind of propaganda may be put in the market.
And also you by no means start by means of announcing: “I’m going to be a tyrannous dictator, and I’m going to smash your lifestyles.” You don’t get started out that approach. You get started out by means of announcing: “I’m going to make issues such a lot higher.”
At the origins of “The Handmaid’s Story”:
I began writing it then in solution to the query: If The usa had been to have a totalitarian govt, what type would it not be? And beneath what flag, because it had been, would it not fly? And my solution to that was once return to the founders, particularly the seventeenth century Puritan theocrats who by no means went away.
In the event you attach it with the faith, then it turns into heresy to oppose it. It turns into an important software. You’re now not simply in opposition to some high minister or different. You’re in opposition to God.
On why other folks can embody authoritarianism:
There’s one thing that we all the time pass over of some of these conversations, which is: It’s amusing. It’s amusing to sit down on the guillotine and watch those other folks that you simply resent getting their heads chopped off. There have been wild boulevard dances.
So this can be a boulevard birthday party, somehow, banding at the side of like-minded other folks and feeling you’ve achieved one thing, particularly if other folks inform you that this factor that you simply’re doing is principally excellent. It’s very potent. And if it weren’t amusing on some stage, other folks wouldn’t do it. Isn’t {that a} horrible factor: to mention that it’s amusing?
Trans Canada
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I closed out iciness (smartly no less than professional iciness) with a take a look at Ottawa’s present mania for leisure skating during the woods. Aaron Vincent Elkaim captured the motion with outstanding images.
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High Minister Justin Trudeau entered an settlement with Jagmeet Singh of the New Democrats that can, except it falls aside, permit the Liberals to manipulate with out the potential for an election till 2025.
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Cade Metz, my colleague who covers synthetic intelligence and different rising applied sciences, got here to Toronto to inspect the newest increase in tech corporations shifting to town or increasing operations there. His discovering: “It’s house to extra tech staff than Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington, D.C., trailing best New York and Silicon Valley.”
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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.
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Already a workforce on the upward thrust, the Toronto Blue Jays have added Matt Chapman to create what James Wagner, my colleague at the Sports activities table, says could also be “the finest infield in baseball.”
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A Dutch writer has mentioned that it’s taking out the best-selling guide, “The Betrayal of Anne Frank,” by means of Rosemary Sullivan, a Canadian creator, from shops. A document by means of historians discovered that the guide’s declare of getting recognized the informant who alerted the Nazi police to the Frank circle of relatives’s hiding position was once in line with “inaccurate assumptions” and “careless use of assets.”
A local of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was once skilled in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Occasions for the previous 16 years. Observe him on Twitter at @ianrausten.
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