Tag Archives: Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones – Realpolitik

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This post may not sit well with the folks who think the final episodes of Game of Thrones were a matter of great public importance, enough to warrant a million-signature petition for a final season redo. If you are one of those people, you probably should stop reading now.

For a brief recap, the show ends with:

… the Queen’s Hand has committed a blatant act of treason out of some familial loyalty to his brother who has been sleeping with his sister and has been imprisoned, pending his inevitable execution …

… the putative heroine has turned into a mass murderer, destroyer of all she surveys, women and children included;

… the Hand, assessing his difficult situation, importunes the Queen’s incestuous lover, and the true heir to the Iron Throne, to undo the Queen because, well, you know, she’s not who we thought she was …

… the Queen’s newly discovered relative, rote repeater of “she’s my Queen, she’s my Queen” right up to the point where he drives some Valerian steel into her heart, is so now “not my Queen;”

… a “council” of somebodies sits down in the shade to decide who will replace the dearly departed and one of them suggests, to much amusement, a plebiscite of “everyone” to decide who should rule the Seven Kingdoms, to which one “nobleman” in best form, suggests they let his horse vote, ahhahahaha, but …

… when it’s clear Sansa isn’t going to be chosen, she reduces the “Seven Kingdoms” to six by simply saying “not the North” and please sit down, Samwell Tarly, you idiot … and he does; thus does democracy die in the Six Kingdoms …

… and so they pick Bran whose leadership skills are … not self-evident … but perhaps he means well, though one must wonder about his first big decision to make the Queen’s former Hand his Hand so the Hand can “correct his many mistakes” in the future, a fate apparently deemed worse than death in those parts …

… and that’s a wrap … except

… the murderer of the Queen is banished back to the Black Watch and the Wall, which no longer has a purpose now that the White Walkers have been destroyed, and accepts his fate without so much as a quarrel about the inequity of it all, and …

… the one person who could upend the entire scheme is the brown-skinned guy, the slaughter-in-chief, Grey Worm, leader of the Unsullied and recently decorated as head of the Queen’s Army or something like that, due to his valor and fantastic killing skills, except there’s no Queen now and the “council” is letting the murderer off easy…

… and so Grey Worm effectively dictates the punishment, short of death, of the Queen’s murderer…

There are probably more “morals of the story” in Game of Thrones than in the typical fairy tale but for me the two principal lessons are clear:

  • power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and
  • the absence of checks and balances in a government will inevitably lead to dangerous outcomes.

The first is too obvious to need much elaboration. Daenerys Targaryen still has one full-grown dragon near the end, plus the loyalty of the miraculously surviving and bloodthirsty Dothraki and Unsullied armies. It’s hard to load more power in one person than that and Daenerys obviously relishes her position – total victory — and, as she “explains” to no one’s great surprise, there are many more battles yet to be fought as she reconstructs the “world” in the image she has in her mind. Daenerys Targaryen thus ends up as the comic book heroine and villain.

The second moral point is more important because less obvious. This principle is what makes Game of Thrones relevant to the world we live in now. In the end, with the “city” of Kings Landing in ruins, the Queen is unbounded. She is defeated only by a final act of hubris, in which she believes that Jon Snow (whom she loves at least as long as he doesn’t challenge her “right” to the Iron Throne) will not harm her, misapprehending completely the mental state of a man who has already been dead once and to all outward appearances seems dazed and uncomprehending of how things have devolved to this sorry state. Love is blind, as the saying goes.

Now the fate of the “world,” as defined by the Seven Kingdoms, is left in the hands of the “council.” The only real power in the scene is Grey Worm who, with a nod of his head, could bring the “military” to terminate the council in a heartbeat. Yet, he resists the direct and deadly use of his power, insisting, however, that Jon Snow be properly punished for his crime against the Queen.

So, ultimately, peace seems to prevail, only because the parties have inadvertently stumbled into a place where the most powerful player, the commander of force, turns out to be sensible and not interested in leveraging his position beyond seeing some form of justice done as to Jon Snow. Grey Worm turns out, then, to be perhaps the best of the men in the entire story. He stays his hand in the interest of peace when he could easily just take control.

There is no mistaking that Grey Worm is the key power player in the end. It was that “check and balance” that operated to “solve” the problem of Jon Snow and to give the “politicians” space in which to negotiate their peace with each other. As improbable as that final outcome may have been, and I’ll leave that to others to debate, the point in the end was that absent Grey Worm’s steady hand, there is no telling what could have happened as the others jockeyed for position. At the same time, we can see that if the only obstacle to the politicians dividing up the world, is the one with “force” at his command, the potential for continued instability is high. You upset Grey Worm at your peril.

That principle – checks and balances – was set up in a three-part scheme by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. The 3-way regime has served the country pretty well until 2016 when 2/3 of the checks fell into the hands of one party, and a criminal was placed in charge of the executive branch.  The balance was somewhat restored in 2018 but the Trump administration continues to undermine the Judicial Branch by nominating and approving, through its control of the Senate, judges who are ideologues and, in some cases, plainly lacking relevant experience and demonstrated judicial temperament.

We are, therefore, at a precipice, not unlike the one that the “council” in Game of Thrones faced. The sitting president has already begun to suggest that he may not respect the outcome of the 2020 election, so we may yet be looking to the leaders of the “force” component of government to decide whether we will continue to be democracy or something else. The result may turn on a Grey Worm yet again. Our fate will then depend on his being as sensible as the “real” Grey Worm.

Trump’s Presidency – the Real Game of Thrones

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I have just read that the Trump administration has refused to sign an international agreement involving New Zealand, France and the top social media companies headquartered in the United State that would combat online extremism. The cited objection: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. While mouthing its general agreement that online extremism is a serious problem, the Trump administration suddenly is concerned that policies designed to more aggressively strike at the use of online platforms to promote extremist and violent behavior will conflict with freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.

This comes from the same president who, in the wake of the white supremacist/neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville declared there were “good people on both sides.” The same president who has declined multiple opportunities to take aggressive positions against extremist right-wing activities. The same president who ignores the all-too-frequent episodes of white assassins slaughtering children in schools and Muslims in their churches while jumping at every chance to complain that an immigrant person of color was involved in some crime.

This from the same president who has, dozens, if not more, times described the media as the “enemy of the people.”

So much for Trump’s concerns about the First Amendment. The truth is that Donald Trump supports online extremism from the racist right-wing white male cohort that produces most of it and that supports him no matter what he says or does. Trump cares nothing about the First Amendment except for its utility as a whipping boy when members of the free press speak negatively about him.

In this, as in most other things, Trump is a lying traitor to the United States.

Think that’s too strong? I have also just read that Trump’s attorneys have argued in litigation challenging a subpoena from the House Oversight and Reform Committee for Trump financial records. Trump’s attorneys maintain that Congress may not investigate the president regarding violations of the law, but only about matters that have a “legitimate legislative purpose.” That position expressly bars Congress from looking into whether the president was personally financially involved in a conflict of interest arising out of a particular piece of legislation.

The ironies of these arguments are almost too glaring to comprehend. There is no question that Congress has the power to bring impeachment proceedings against a sitting president for “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The president’s lawyers seem to argue that, despite the wording, the impeachment clause refers to something other than “law enforcement.” That position is not only contrary to the Constitutional language, the principle of separation of powers and plain common sense, it also sets up the president as a person who can, with impunity, violate the law, violate his oath of office, and, generally, act like a king, above reproach, immune to sanction, free to act as he wants without restraint.

There is one irreducible fact about the U.S. Constitution that no amount of legal legerdemain can overcome: the Framers of the Constitution intended to preclude the assumption of kingly powers by the future chief executive of the government under Article II. Trump’s lawyers appear to have forgotten the reasons the War of Independence was fought. It is also commonly called the Revolutionary War — it was a revolution against the tyranny of the English crown, the claimed right of the King of England to treat American colonists however he wanted, above reproach, immune to sanction, free to act as he wanted without restraint.

Trump is now also hinting that he may not respect the outcome of the election that will consider his replacement in 2020. It is only a short step from that position to a claim that he doesn’t actually have to stand for re-election at all, that he can simply suspend the “rigged” election and remain in office as long as he wants.

If that is where Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party are headed, I then suggest, in all seriousness, that we will have a second American Revolution that will remove him from office one way or the other way. If it comes to that, his promoters like Senator Lindsey Graham will face a similar fate. This is the same Senator Lindsey Graham who, in February 2016, stated in public that Donald Trump was a “kook” and “crazy“ and not fit for office,” among many similar statements. It’s all on video: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomnamako/kook Now Graham is Trump’s most ardent supporter but he has nowhere to hide from his treachery. Nothing about Trump has changed for the better since Graham accurately described him in 2016. Graham, like Trump, is unprincipled and apparently willing to say and do anything to keep Trump, and himself, in power.

It is hard to imagine that the courts will sustain Trump’s argument that he is above the reach of law, but anything is possible. Everyone must pay close attention to what may seem like peripheral legal squabbling but is in truth laying the groundwork for a repudiation of the Constitution.