Margaret Atwood is giving me nightmares.

I am watching The Handmaids Tale, and its beautifully filmed and acted, but its also eerily resonant with current events.   While I don’t see “the men” taking over… i do dream of the riot scenes of college campuses and urban centers superimposed with current events in Berkeley.

And it is timely.  Its the coalesced hatred and fury on the faces of the Proud Boys and Freedomworksers and OathKeepers cohort that brings it home like a sucker punch.  It is obvious to me that they would love to take over the city of Berkeley and the university and impose their own ideology by force…and possibly they see it as their right– to take back culture and academe now that Trump has captured the WH.  So I’m not dismayed by the anti-fa answering violence with violence…at least there wont be the creeping, boiling-the-frog-complacency displayed by the left in Handmaid, at least it wont happen in silence.  Violence is good copy so the press is sort of forced to pay attention.

But I think its going to get much worse going forward.  The man pictured, Nathan Damigo, is a Cal State student himself.  Students at Cal State have petitioned to have him suspended.  And in a double whammy of culture and academe, Captain America himself is out to get him.

I’m sympathetic to the disenfranchised and dispossessed of the american right.  Conservative ideology just isnt competitive in Hollywood or on college campuses.  And the jobs of the future all involve educational attainment and continuing education.

I just do not think talking is going to solve the problem.  The US is undergoing dis-equilibriation– a way of describing entropic decay of a particular kind.  I love the developing linkage of chaos, complexity and entropy, and social physics …and I think maybe social physics is the great hope of the future.  If we can understand human behavior and its causes, then maybe we can improve it.