When the Checkpoints Come
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.” The first line of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is pregnant with the novella’s whole plot, wherein a military dictatorship turns fertile women into sex slaves. When authoritarian control descends in fiction, it often does so like this, through narrative retrospect. From the vantage point of the future, the past’s mundane trifles become newly absorbing. Atwood’s gymnasium is meaningful because sleeping there is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong.
Today, as COVID-19 tears across the globe, signs of authoritarian control are making the jump from fiction to reality. In China, which already operates a massive and very real security state, facial recognition, phone data, and helmet-mounted thermal cameras have helped authorities control the outbreak. These efforts are so widespread, they have already been propagandized, in wherein drones disperse groups of people playing newly dangerous sidewalk games of mah-jongg. But even democratic states are taking extremely invasive measures to control the virus. All of Italy is on : no school, university, theater, cinema, nightlife, sports, funerals, or weddings. When Italian police see people on the streets, they send them home. French citizens, also under lockdown, a signed travel pass when leaving home. “We are at war,” French President Emmanuel Macron said of the measure.
