A Book of American Martyrs, by Joyce Carol Oates

Double standards are the result of a mental capacity to unfold reality to suit the consumer. In other words, living in a huge contradiction or a gigantic lack of scruples. The United States is a country representative of double standards, established among its population as the greatest of sophisms. An American loves his fiercely capitalist social system for his eagerness to prosper in it, but he also detests it and curses its foundations with equal intensity when each night he discovers that he has failed to climb one iota.

It is only an example, but it is essential to understand what an American is capable of regarding his conscience and his opportunistic perception of reality. Of course, not everyone moves under this dynamic. Naturally, a large part of the population of a country, deep down must be intelligent enough, critical and consistent to discover this nefarious contradiction, at least in its harshest interpretations.

The issue of abortion facing the death penalty is a clear paradigm, although not so common, if prolific as soon as a new case transcends. The conscience capable of harboring the idea of ​​abortion as murder and which in turn accepts the death penalty as a sentence of the judicial system, has succumbed to the most extreme of contradictions.

Luther Dunphy murders an abortion doctor: Augustus Voorhees. Luther paid with death whoever he understood was infringing death. Homegrown justice brought about by this double standard.

However, this story moves more on the terrain of the collateral consequences of the devastating double standards. Because right away we get closer to the lives of the daughters of Luther and Augustus. Dawn Dunphy becomes a renowned boxer while Naomi Voorhees seeks her space as a film director. They both act with the heavy burden of their parents' emotional inheritances.

The ideal would be to think of a reconciliation, a kind of expiatory and reconciling encounter. But from the outset, both women continue to appear very far apart, despite the fact that life insists on planting them face to face.

From such an encounter the most unsuspected scenario can arise. Internal conflicts, assumption of guilt, desire for revenge ..., and a possible transformation of all that amalgam of sensations and feelings into a wisp of hope that could illuminate the social conflict, perhaps only surmountable in that area of ​​shared life experience.

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