Margaret Atwood

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143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

They understand that there's a plot and that there are actors in the plot like their teddy bear. So it's really built in. And I think what kids do before the age of two is pretty indicative of what comes with the toolkit. They already are doing little dances, they have a sense of rhythm, they're very interested in music, and they're very interested in words and facial expressions.

But they're not interested in nine times nine at that age, if ever.

I mean, there's a lot of sex, death, blood, and violence in there, which is one of the reasons it's remained such a popular book. These are dramatic stories. When you get into the begets and the begats, maybe not so much, but what we would call these sort of key stories are very dramatic. And they often feature something that we really like, which is underdogs making good.

So a number of the key stories are like that. And some of them are about really cataclysmic events. And some of them that we didn't get in high school are about very bad behavior. So the one that I put into the Testaments, which is the concubine cut into 12 pieces, for some reason they didn't parade that in front of the eight-year-olds. I don't know why. So what's a concubine, Mom?

One kid writing a Sunday school essay said, King Solomon had 12 wives and 82 porcupines. It made me just... No. So yeah, it's very interesting to see what kind of bad behavior is actually condoned and permitted, but there isn't a lot of papering over in the Bible. If people are bad, they're bad, like it's right out there on the page. And even people who are favored quite frequently behave badly.

and get called on it.

Well, these stories are in flux, as you probably have noticed. There used to be a kind of shared mythology in the United States, and Canadians used to lament that they didn't have such a thing. And it would, in fact, be quite difficult to have a totally shared mythology in Canada because it was already made up of some diverse groups of people.

But Americans had a kind of unifying story and unifying ceremonies that involved a lot of marching around on the 4th of July. The French also have been quite conflicted about their stories, but they managed to make it stick for a while. So it was Bastille Day, good or bad. I think they're still thinking it's good. But there was a lot of adjustment before that became the accepted stories.

They had the revolution, then they had Napoleon, then they had the restoration of the monarchy, and then they had another republic, and then they had another monarchy, and then they had another republic. In order to hold any sort of nation state together, there has to be a story that most of the people agree on. And every once in a while, those stories fall apart.

And if they're not replaced with another one, fragmentation is the result. So one of the things that stories do is they give members of a group a kind of unifying imaginary thing that they can believe in. When I say imaginary, I'm not saying it's necessarily false. I'm saying it is a thing of the imagination, like money. It's also a thing of the imagination.

It's a human thing that we make up because it works and it's convenient for us. But if we suddenly stop believing in a currency, that's it. You have to revert to the black market and bartering. So yeah, so the American story used to be liberty, democracy, freedom, equality, land of light. And it was that way all during the Cold War.

Okay, because the Cold War was the Iron Curtain, Land of Darkness. Don't know whether you remember that pop song, They Don't Have a God Behind the Iron Curtain.

No?

Oh, they don't have God behind the iron curtain. To Satan they have given something crown.

It's catchy. Catchy, yeah. So the story about America was that's where you wanted to be. That's where you didn't have all the things that were going on behind the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain then comes down in 1989. That story loses some of its grip. So if you're going to be Land of Virtuous Light, who is the foil to that? You know, who gets to play the Penguin to your Batman?

Or even worse, the Joker to your Batman. And that was a problem. I remember the 90s, which is probably when you were born.

No, no, no, you can't possibly be. It was going to be the end of history. Capitalism had triumphed. Shopping was the future. It was just all going to be great. That ended in 9-11. That was the end of that particular phase. And there was another potential penguin joker to America's Batman, but it was kind of hard to coalesce that, especially if you were really rather dependent on Saudi Arabia.

So we're now shaping up to another one, which appears to be Putin about to invade Ukraine. And who knows what is going to happen there. But America, meanwhile, has been examining the underside of the myth, if you like. So equality for whom exactly was the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Were those going to be for everybody? Apparently not.

Not at the beginning, but once you've started with that idea, it's kind of hard to stop it. And despite the setbacks, I think you have seen the franchise extending further and further. What you're seeing right now is an attempt to roll some of that back with the discouraging of voting for certain groups and a certain amount of historical revisionism. Well, we never actually meant equality.

We meant... Something more like the Roman Republic in which it was only men and not slaves, women, or children that were supposed to be citizens.

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