Peak OFFS

This week, the streaming network Hulu premieres its original adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s best-selling novel The Handmaid’s Tale. The novel, a dystopian near-future tale about an America that has descended into theocratic patriarchy, reflected fear (some would call it paranoia) of the rise of the Religious Right in the 1980s (think: Jerry Falwell et al). Not having read the book or seen the series, I’m not in a position to comment on the quality of either, but that’s not today’s matter.

What prompted the title of this essay (and for those who either aren’t aware or can’t be bothered googling, OFFS stands for “Oh, for f***’s sake!”) is the breathless correlation and conflation by the liberal press of the tale with the Donald Trump presidency and era.

And they’re serious.

In The Handmaid’s tale, women are essentially chattel, sorted into categories, and literally used by the men for various societal functions (including as breeder stock). Strict dress codes are maintained, gays are executed, blacks have been expunged, and any not of the correct faith (including Jews and Catholics) have been chased out.

Some on the Left seem to actually believe that people should view or read The Handmaid’s Tale as a caution against the direction the election of Trump over Clinton suggests the nation is taking, as if the nation is clamoring for theocracy, as if sixty-three million voters actually want women enslaved and gays executed. Or, as if sixty-three million voters were snookered into empowering someone who, all evidence to the contrary, is secretly a theocratic fundamentalist who’s infesting the government with a horde of secretly theocratic fundamentalist cohorts, all of whom want to turn women into chattel, expunge minorities and heretics from the nation, and execute gay people. We might think that they think Trump et al are secretly ISIS moles, based on such hysteria, but these cautioners are often too reticent to speak so negatively about ISIS and its barbarities.

We could try to deconstruct the absurdity of this assertion, but what are the odds that someone who’s deluded enough to believe it in the first place is clear-minded enough to understand how farcical it is if explained by someone from outside his echo chamber? Sometimes, the only rational response is mockery, and sometimes, it’s an OFFS declaration.

It seems there’s been a steady escalation of OFFS in recent months. Some posters in a political group in which I participate felt that the Left’s absurdities might have peaked with such over-the-top moments as Rachel Dolezal’s race self-identification, the “cry-in” at Cornell University, the safety pin thing, and the casual and ubiquitous Trump-Hitler analogies (even more casual and ubiquitous than BusHitler analogies, which seem quite quaint nowadays). In other words, they felt we had hit peak-OFFS, that absurdity could not be taken any further.

To quote the late, great John Pinnette, “I say nay nay.”

The degree of detachment from reality required to somehow see in Trump, a man who’s shown little if any actual religiosity, a man on his third marriage, living a secular life, born and raised in the hotbed of fundamentalism known as New York City is rivaled only by the sheer lack of self-awareness it takes to make such an assertion while simultaneously supporting the quashing of free speech and dissenting opinions on our college campuses.

These cautioners are purportedly the Best-and-Brightest, the people whose intelligence, wisdom, insight and morality warrant… nay, demand… that they be empowered to manage society for the rest of us. All the while, these selfsame folks are the ones leading the charge against liberty, against the market place of ideas, against free speech, freedom of belief, freedom to have different opinions, and freedom to disagree with them. On top of all this, they actually believe that it is the other side that’s the enemy of liberty, that wants to take away everyone’s freedoms, that wants to subjugate those in disfavor, and that wants to impose its oppressive will on the populace. OFFS.

In recent weeks, we have seen an ugly incident at Middlebury College that resulted in injury to an invited speaker. We have seen the canceling of speeches at Berkeley due to the threat of violence – a truly frightening and malevolent expansion of the heckler’s veto. We have seen only sporadic criticism of this heckler’s veto from the Left, and far more efforts at marginalization (i.e. these incidents are rare) and equivalence (i.e. the Right does it as well). Again, the appropriate response here is OFFS. Blogs and comment sections are full of liberals declaring that they have the right to shout down someone they disagree with, because they are simply exercising their own free speech rights. They ignore the basic reality that one’s rights end where they infringe upon another’s, but lets set that argument aside for another day.

The heckler’s veto on college campuses has been going on for some time now, as those institutions have become increasingly homogenized liberal echo chambers, so we can’t quite peg them as peak-OFFS. We might have thought that the self-identification rage’s increasing detachment from basic biological and genetic reality brought us to peak-OFFS, but the Handmaid’s Tale conflation with the Trump era has, pardon the pun, trumped even that.

But, lest you think that the absurdity that The Handmaid’s tale television series is a timely and chilling caution brought us to the top of the OFFS mountain, do consider that someone capable of coming up with this nonsense is not lacking in creativity or has a finite fount of outrage.

Consider the recent story out of Great Britain, where a student union informed the attendees of its national conference that cheering and clapping are exclusionary forms of self-expression, because they exclude deaf people. The organizers threaten “consequences” for transgressors, and suggest the equivalent of jazz hands instead. To which I reply – what of the blind people? Aren’t jazz hands and other silent forms of approval and appreciation discriminatory to the sightless? Or the hand-less, for that matter?

Is the denouement of the ever-escalating absurdity of the social justice movement ever to be witnessed? Will it be the secular equivalent of H. L. Mencken’s observation that Puritanism is “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy?” Can social justice be granularized to a state where every possible identity and grievance group is fully protected from any possible offense? Is there any cautionary comparison that’s too absurd to be swallowed whole-cloth by the movement’s faithful? Is it even possible to reach peak-OFFS? Can we even keep track of every OFFS moment, or figure out if one is so absurd as to be unsurpassable?

Perhaps, but recent examples suggest the summit still lies far above us. Turns out, even fast-food salads can be racist.

SMH.