The Unclad Soul

The Hulu series, The Handmaid’s Tale, is a scalding, brutal, at times sickening portrayal of life in some future totalitarian and theocratic state in New England known as Gilead. The storylines are so reprehensible they leave one churning with rage and shattered with sorrow. They offer a glimpse into a horrifying future that may not be impossible to imagine. Gilead is growing childless. Those in charge have devised a way to repopulate the state. Women of childbearing age are simply taken off the streets or out of their homes and proclaimed handmaids for commanders, slick and morally compromised men who have wives unable to conceive. A handmaid is chosen for them, even if she is already married and has children of her own. They are permanently separated from her. She has no rights. Her only existence is to serve the elite couple she is assigned to. The lead character in this inhuman existence is June (Elizabeth Moss), whose name is changed to Offred. Once a month, in the mo...

What would a perfect world look like? I don’t know. Probably very sterile and boring. I don’t really want a perfect world. I’d be happy with just a humane one. Dictionary.com defines humane as, “characterized by tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for people and animals; especially for the suffering or distressed: acting in a manner that causes the least harm to people or animals.” When I was a boy I used to spend a few days with my paternal grandparents whom I called Nana and Granddad. They were both gentle souls, quiet, kind people. One afternoon after Nana had fixed me lunch in the kitchen and I had finished eating, I took my plate to the sink to wash it. I noticed a small spider on the window sill and asked Nana for the flyswatter so I could kill it. She said, “Oh honey, don’t hurt it. It’s not poisonous. It’s not bothering anyone. And it will eventually find its way outside.” I will never forget how at that moment I started feeling a deeper sense of compassion fo...

The country woke up this morning to more madness. A white, apparently deranged young man in South Carolina, killed 9 people at a Bible study in a historic Black church. Police are calling it a hate crime. More details will obviously come in but here is what is undeniable. Our country is out of control. We have lost our way and it is not by accident. We as a people have chosen to allow our nation to be violent, hateful, prejudiced, bigoted, unjust, and inhuman. When this young man is caught, if he does not end up shooting himself in some cowardly panic, let the psychiatrists do their analyses. Let law enforcement prescribe the punishment. Let those who want to coddle him because they’ll say he’s insane do so. Let the gun lovers make excuses for him as they always do. Let the whites clamor on about mixed messages and make their phony allowances for him as they will. But here is the reality. This guy is the product of an unapologetic racist society. He is the result of our primit...

I saw him while I was sitting at a traffic light. He was an older man shuffling along a parking lot of a 7 Eleven just across the street from me. He was bundled in clothes too heavy for the warm day but I’m sure it’s what he wears every day in this winter season. There are no closets full of choices for the poor and the indigent. He was pushing a shopping cart full of stuff I couldn’t recognize…sacks and plastic bags of things he had collected along whatever journey of despair he was on that day. His pant legs hung over old ruined boots and dragged the ground as he moved. There was something about those droopy cuffs scraping the pavement that overwhelmed me with sadness. He looked so weary in the slow pace of his efforts. People got in and out of their cars around him coming and going to the convenient store to pick up this or that oblivious to this man’s hunger or illness or just weariness. He was simply a part of the tacky landscape of that part of town. None of us ever...

The enigmatic and unconventional artist and filmmaker, Andy Warhol, once said that we all have our own America. He said it consists of “Pieces of a fantasy America” that we think exists but which we really don’t see. He said we created this America from scenes in movies, from music lyrics, and from novels and other books. The result, he said, is an America made up of “art and schmaltz and emotions.” I find a lot of truth in that. We have the recorded history of this country in thousands of books and speeches and other forms of documentation and they all tell stories of hardship and courage, genius and empty-headedness, brotherhood and bigotry, slavery and freedom, cruelty and compassion, stampeding greed and astonishing charity, gross decadence and simple living. We continue making American history and what we’re currently up to will not read well in future years. Today, we find our country crippled by a political system that has outlived itself and is so dysfunctional it ha...