6 Degrees and Separated
Today, in my continuing obsession with podcasts, I shall attempt to weave together a coherent line of thought that threads through "Six Degrees" on Undiscovered, ("a podcast about the backstories of science"), the "Lea in Trumpland" series on Strangers, and the new iteration of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that is currently playing out as a dramatic series on Hulu. That last one isn't a podcast, but work with me here.
First, I have to say, sitting on the couch watching the Hulu series with my girlfriend, who is an immigrant woman of color, is a somewhat harrowing experience. It is not, at the very least, a "Netflix and chill" kind of situation. It is not sweet, light, romantic comedy. It makes for terrible date night fodder. For her, as a woman for whom reproductive health and other basic human rights are already dictated and legislated by a mostly male governmental power structure, it's much more terrifying in a visceral way than it is for me, the white, heterosexual male who is safest in the world we're trepidatiously immersing ourselves in.
Second, who was so prescient as to begin production on this series well over a year ago, when the concept of an actual and not metaphorical fascist regime coming to power in this country seemed like a far-fetched premise? When we were all still laughing about a Trump candidacy? When the idea of police opening fire on unarmed protesters seemed at least somewhat unlikely because surely we've learned our lesson on that front by now? When dissolving Congress and enacting laws that make ownership of property by women illegal would have been, at least for me, a thought experiment along the lines of "What if there really were a Hogwart's?" Now, though, in the mad, mad world where a presidential candidate can declare publicly that he could shoot someone in Times Square and not lose any votes and then have that declaration be demonstrated as not really that much of an exaggeration, even the worst outrages of the fictional regime's crimes against its people seem at least plausible.
Which brings me to Strangers. The concept of this podcast is right up my alley. Their website says, "Each episode is an empathy shot in your arm, featuring true stories about the people we meet, the connections we make, the heartbreaks we suffer, the kindnesses we encounter, and those frightful moments when we discover that WE aren’t even who we thought we were." I mean, come on. I want to subscribe all over again just reading that.
Unfortunately, I started listening to it just as the first episode of her "Trumpland" series hit, and it's a struggle. I didn't make it all the way through the second episode, and I'm the kind of guy who finishes a book he hates just because completion feels good. I couldn't do it, though. The idea is solid: to find the humanity and the common ground with people we tend to dehumanize at least a little for holding and acting on political beliefs that are anathema to us. To realize that it's possible for good people to vote for a Trump administration for considered reasons that include doing the right and best thing for all Americans, even if we disagree on what the right and best thing actually is.
However, listening to two people on opposite ends of the spectrum struggle to communicate their own perspectives to each other, and knowing that neither is making the tiniest dent in the other's beliefs, is torture. It's like spectating while two people who speak entirely different languages yell passionately at each other, neither understanding nor being understood. Every point made on one side is valued on a completely different scale by the listener than by the speaker, so nothing like understanding, common ground, or change in perspective ever occurs. So what's the point?
Which leads me to Undiscovered. They talked about Stanley Milgram's experiment to explore how connected we really are, the famous six degrees of separation, long before Will Smith and Stockard Channing ever got involved, not to mention Kevin Bacon. They also discuss the work of Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz on small-world networks 6 years before the advent of Facebook, and how that estimate of 6 degrees is actually mathematically reasonable.
But the real question is not, are we connected? It's, so what if we are? What is the value of the small-world network and all of its connections around the globe if it's virtually impossible to transmit across it things of value, like change and understanding, sympathy and empathy, camaraderie and cooperation? As Ouisa Kittredge says, "I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture, that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection." Because that's the real truth: in some of those connections, things of value can be transmitted. But only in some.
And that's how we come back around again to The Handmaid's Tale. It's terrifying because it's believable. It's believable because we see every day instances of human beings actively dehumanizing each other, choosing to believe in the worst motivations in the largest number of people based on our own interpretations and misinterpretations drawn from barely observed and poorly understood actions. Why does Alicia in "Lea in Trumpland #1" choose to believe that all recipients of government-funded assistance resort to fraud in order to receive or maximize it, or close enough to all as to matter more than those who use it appropriately, in circumstances of dire need, and who actively work as hard as they can to arrive at a situation in which they no longer need it? Why does the fraud and waste in welfare programs upset her so much more than the fraud and waste in military programs, when the budgetary outlay of the one doesn't begin to approach that of the other?
The world through which Offred moves can be imagined as not so very different from our own. There are people who would be willing to torture and kill to root out and destroy the abomination to God that they see in homosexuality and other genderqueer configurations. In their minds, they are not connected, through even a million degrees of separation, to such wrong-thinking and wrong-living non-people. There are people who would be willing to be Aunt Lydia in the name of righteousness, and never acknowledge to themselves that Aunt Lydia is a slave overseer. There are people who would be willing to be Aunt Lydia because it is a measure of power and worth in a system in which Aunt Lydia is herself, as a woman, powerless and undervalued. Who among us would be willing to serve as an Eye? Or a Commander? Who among us would stand up for the rights of the Handmaids or the Marthas from our own position of relative privilege as a Commander's wife, though the wife, too, is trapped within the system? And that's the frightening thing: who among us would NOT go along to get along, participate in the oppressive system once it was in place just to keep the eye of the oppressor moving past us instead of locking the crushing weight of its gaze upon us? Who among us would stand up for the Muslim teenager on a Portland train if we knew without doubt that we would be stabbed to death for doing so? Or hung from the wall along the river? Or genitally mutilated?
Despite all this, I hold on to hope that Trump's grip, and that of his administration and supporters and fundraisers and coat-tail riders, that his grip on the American culture will pass quickly. Those who revile him will be motivated to work hard for his defeat, and those who supported him will see that his agenda is a cynical self-centeredness that is no more committed to the causes for which they chose him than he was to the "very pro-choice" stance he took in 1999. I hold on to the hope that he will pass from the public eye as an oddity, a carnival barker who rose to power through a bizarre and unrepeatable perfect storm of circumstances that all came together at a very particular moment in time, a set of circumstances and a time that will forever be completely impossible to replicate. And that he is not the herald of a new era of theocratic totalitarianism.
