NATALITY

Thank you to Professor Crescent Moon for that wonderful introduction. As it is, I'll keep my remarks short, because this evening's keynote address is what you've come for. But before I introduce Professor Hilde Arendt, I want to say a few things about how 'keynote' tonight's address actually is.

I mean, who else would bring Professor Knotly Wade out to a public lecture? -laughter- Knotly, please stand up and take a bow. -applause- Well earned recognition for your seminal work on Gilead studies in the past five years.

Ok, ok, you can sit down. -Wade still waving to the crowd- Knotly!? The sooner you sit, -laughter- the sooner we'll get to Professor Arendt. She is who this evening is about! -applause-

Ok, here we go. Hilde Arendt needs no introduction. Unlike her famous ancestor, Hannah Arendt, Hilde has accepted tenure -laughter- where she teaches at Harvard University. It is worth it to note - but you all know it - that these days 150 years later, that Harvard itself is newly constituted following the fall of Gilead. The place where Ms. Arendt does her research was at one time ground-zero of what we study. Gilead.

At Harvard, Hilde Arendt has expanded on her famous forebear's seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Leaving the parts about Nazi Germany as well as Stalinist Russia only slightly updated, Hilde Arendt has added insights about Gilead, about how Gilead added terror as a political tool to subjugate its population, not just its opponents.

Tonight, Professor Arendt will be addressing her forebear's most famous phrase, 'the banality of evil'.

She wishes it acknowledged that she is building on the historical text that we've been covering at this, the 13th Symposium, the text of the Guardian of Gilead. The man who diarizes, almost nonchalantly, about his work in 'the cages', those places into which women were herded, sorted, and dispatched if needed.

Everyone here asks, how could an ordinary man do that? Professor Arendt asks us to look past how any one individual regards their evil actions as 'banal', and to look at the larger context.

I will leave the presentation of her thesis to her own address. But I forewarn you, it is controversial within the academic, Gilead-studies community, her thesis that 'women' were only conveniently persecuted - that for Gilead's totalitarian purposes, any group would have actually sufficed.

And so without further ado, I call Professor Hilde Arendt to take the podium, and lead us in this lecture, 'Gilead and Natality'.

GILEAD AND NATALITY

-applause- Thank you, Professor Pieixoto, for that introduction. Also, thank you so much to Professor Maryanne Crescent Moon, as well as the Penobscot Nation elders here this evening. Thank you so much for the welcome to your land, and for your support for these Symposia.

Natality. What did my famous forebear mean by that? It's a simple concept, it is the relationship between the birth rate to the population as a whole. Natality can be studied as a world-wide concept, but as you're already guessing, it can be applied to smaller segments of humanity, namely a society or a nation-state.

I trust that you're now way ahead of me. You've already put 'natality' into the political context of Gilead, with the way its version of totalitarianism terrorized its population. Terror-totalitarianism always has a political goal, and the fertility crisis of the time was a welcome excuse. Women, were a convenient target for that.

But let me jump directly into what Professor Pieixoto has already identified as my most controversial thesis.

I've been accused of 'romanticizing' those who were low level, functionaries in Gilead. Those who had day-to-day jobs, implementing the evil that Gilead represented. As the phrase goes, they viewed their work as just as 'banal', as assembly-line work, repetitive actions in the assembly kitchen appliances, that sort of thing.

As such, I've been accused of making excuses for them. As did my forebear, Hannah Arendt, who looked at the Nazis like Adolf Eichmann who did atrocities, but went about their jobs with exactly the same banality as a lower level functionary in any other institution.

Making excuses for them? Nothing could be further from the truth. Me, I celebrate the anonymity of the 'Guardian Grunt' we've been reading. Why?

Because to fixate your anger on him is to miss the point. Even to ask, 'How could he participate in such atrocities', is to miss the point. Even to claim that he, himself, is as much a moral-victim as those he murdered, is to miss the point. To wonder how one minute he could be loyal to his own wife and child, but the next minute murder someone else's is to miss the point.

The point is the way that some totalitarianisms, like Gilead, succeed by terror, terrorizing the populous as a whole. Their program, becomes an individual's banality. That is my study. (To individualize it, then, is to miss the point.)

PROFESSOR ARENDT AND HISTORY

This Symposium has had as its primary study, the Ardua Hall Holographs, as well as how Witness Testimonies 369A and B intertwine with it. The importance of this primary work cannot be overstated. As Professor Pieixoto has indicated, the presence of the 'Becka Statue', particularly its inscription, speaks directly to the historicity of the people we study.

Indeed, on my way to work each morning, I walk past that statue. I see Becka every day, and periodically stop to recite the inscription, which I now know off by heart. Me, I love my work.

Which is a strange way, I suppose, of introducing you to one of the eddies of study that I am currently engaged, part of the larger eddies and currents of this fascinating field.

The 'Guardian Grunt', as he is being nicknamed. A name I have no problem with. Despite what I say about the intellectual dangers of 'individualizing' Gilead, 'individualizing' still has its place as an entry point. As a way to understand how individuals can make anything 'normal'. I just beg that you don't get too caught up in criticizing the individual, but see him as a product of a larger, totalitarian society.

That 'Grunt's' diaries are a gold-mine to followers of my ancestor's, who coined that phrase, the banality of evil. That phrase had come to her in her coverage of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, at his trial in the 1960s in Israel. She, like me, was criticized for seemingly 'normalizing' the atrocities that Eichmann had been involved in. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, the terrorizing of the population produced the Eichmanns, as well as the tens of thousands more minor functionaries who, by day, were carrying out the most horrendous of acts - but who, by night, lived out normal lives. Those 'normal' lives included domestic disputes with loved ones, worry about how to pay bills, professional advancement - as well as how the kids were doing at school.

Then the next day, back to work. Back to what our Guardian Grunt friend did at 'the cages' where women were slaughtered en masse. To him, it was his work, quite separate from his 'normal life', his family life back home. He perhaps insulated himself from the daily atrocity that he himself was complicit in, by reducing the murder of women to a set of management problems to be solved.

How does Natality fit into this? Well, the project of Gilead, the solutions to the fertility crisis they advertised themselves as combating - their actions against women actually exacerbated the Natality graph - skewing it towards, not away from unsustainability.

Let me say more about the Guardian Grunt, about his role in the evil. A role that was infinitely watered-down, because he was simply one of thousands. A role that played into the 'moral injury' that even he showed signs of having. His justification was perhaps that if he didn't do it, there were dozens waiting in line for his job, his paycheque.

But it had, obviously, rotted his own soul. It skewed his own understandable search for his own family. Perhaps psychologically, he knew he'd never find them.

RETURN TO BOSTON

The sergeant and I saw more of each other in Chicago, than we now did in Boston.

Because of his 'hero' status, he'd caught the eye of New Gilead High Commander Pryce. Had very immediately distinguished himself to Pryce, by taking down a powerful Commander of New Gilead, a guy who himself had been a 'hero of New York'. Yet once he was a Commander, this guy had been skimming profits from the transportation department he was running.

So even as a lowly driver, Blaine continued to make a name for himself. It was not exactly glamorous, him driving for Commander Waterford, but the one time we spoke of it, Blaine said that it had been part of High Commander Pryce's pledge to 'clean up Gilead'.

It sounded dangerous to me, much like Sergeant Blaine calling in a strike on to our own, badly overrun position in Chicago. You don't survive many of those.

THE LIFE OF A GRUNT

As unglamorous as his current life was, mine was just below meat and potatoes. I was an unassigned Guardian, meaning I spent down-time at the barracks, to be called out when some special ops was called for. I spent my off-time quizzing other grunts as to their contacts with captured women - hoping that one would describe my loved one or our child. No luck.

Ninety percent boredom, then ten percent havoc. Like a Handmaids particicution. Those involved usually just standing around, listening to some elderly Aunt drone on and on. Guardians involved rarely interfered with the Aunts because, well….. even though they be women, even Guardians didn't fuck with the Aunts.

Yesterday? There was a ring of Handmaids, standing in a circle readying themselves for a particicution. Me, I'd drawn the short straw - my commander motioned to me that I was to wait for the Aunt's cue, then take the wheelbarrow of stones and wheel them to the center of their circle.

Well, all hell broke loose when the Handmaids each picked up a rock, then one of their own number was taken to the center to be dispatched. A real pitiful Handmaid. One eye. Flaming red hair. Quite oblivious as to what was about to transpire.

To her. What a pitiful sight she gave.

I hate pitiful. I almost broke ranks and put one between her eyes right there. I would have, too, but this was an Aunts operation.

Yet the inexplicable happened, the Handmaids mutinied. As I live and breathe, one of them stepped forward and said, "Aunt Lydia, I'm not doing this," and she ceremoniously and defiantly dropped her rock to the ground.

I walked up to her and said, "Get back in line." When she refused, I let her have the butt of my rifle. I could hear her jaw crack. I would have shot her, but had to admit that that Handmaid had not been 'pitiful'. Insolent, yes, but she was someone to admire before her tongue got ripped out.

The Aunt, she was flummoxed. Ordered the Handmaids back to their billets.

Next thing we knew? We spent the rest of the day assembling a group gallows at Fenway Park. Right there at field level. But a gallows with a surprise. It was a little much, but - hey - I only worked there.

It was Sergeant Blaine hobnobbing with the movers and shakers. Me, I wasn't on anyone's radar. I had drawn the lot of mock executions.

It was a bit much.