Moral ambiguity is available on all channels, writes Diana Wichtel.
I know. Fox News. Just don't. But working from home, with only Trevor the scammer from "tech support" calling in for company, sometimes my blood pressure needs raising from semi-comatose.
So, in what must count as peak Fox News until next time, hosts Pete Hegseth and Will Cain had a jaunty chat about the decision by South Carolina lawmakers to add death by firing squad to the electric chair and lethal injection as modes of execution. A shortage of lethal injection drugs, apparently. An inmate on death row could be forced to choose between electrocution or being shot, an appalling reframing of the notion of personal choice.
Hegseth gleefully summed up: "Shoot 'em, stick 'em or fry 'em!" Cain clearly thought that comment crossed a line, even for this barking channel. "That's terrible!" Hegseth pulled out the evergreen "Just doing my job" defence: "Listen, they wrote it, I'm reading it." They proceeded to further dredge the bottom of the commentary barrel. Cain, on the bright side: "Firing squads are at least more honest about what you're doing."
This is where we are in what passes these days for real life. Just in time for the landing of the fourth season of The Handmaid's Tale, set in the theocratic Republic of Gilead, in what feels increasingly like the imminent future. In Gilead, methods for executions include drowning, throwing the accused from a tall building, hanging …
During "salvagings", the handmaids, child-bearing slaves in a dystopia dogged by infertility, are required to pull together on the rope hanging one of their own, forcing them to be complicit in their own destruction.