Month: May 2019

Game Over

And now our watch has ended.

Game of Thrones ended May 19, in a fashion that most people expected: After Queen Daenerys destroyed Kings’ Landing and further demonstrated her danger to the world in a speech to her troops, Tyrion publicly quit as her advisor and, in prison, advised Jon Snow to kill her off. Which Jon did. And as a compromise to the Unsullied (who took Dany’s death personally for some reason) Jon was exiled and the new King became Bran Stark, which a few people did expect. I’m not sure how many people expected Drogon to respond to Dany’s death by melting the Iron Throne, but there was certainly a point to it, as with the destruction of the One Ring: Power corrupts, and for the world to be healthy, the object of that power should be destroyed.

In that regard, there’s a whole lot of meta-text in the final episode. With the kings’ throne gone, Samwell Tarly observes that the aristocracy has brought things to this point, and actually proposes that decisions which affect everyone should be made by “everyone.” And the other nobles just laugh him down. I guess democracy is above the Social axiom of this cosm.

Tyrion then says that if nations are to have leadership, people are most motivated by stories, and tells the noble council that to create a leader that people will follow, the most compelling story is that of Bran “the Broken.” And again, this is agreed to because he’s actually a better alternative than Jon Snow or war with the Unsullied. And then as more meta-text, Ser Brienne actually gets to write the final chronicle of Jaime Lannister’s life, and the whole set of accounts is presented to the royal council as “A Song of Ice and Fire,” establishing that in some imaginary universe, the whole thing actually was completed in print.

And when it was all said and done, most of us in the audience thought it was … Odd? Dull? Anticlimactic?

Well, of course. The story is over because the conflict is over. And the conflict is over because the thoughtful, responsible people, like Sansa and Davos, got together and hammered out a system where they could work together. Arya doesn’t want to be involved in Westeros anymore, so she left it. Jon was never really cut out to be king, he certainly can’t be now, so he’s back up North with Ghost and the wildlings, where he’s- well, I wouldn’t call Jon Snow “happy,” but at least at home. Sansa always wanted to keep the North free, and she, once the most useless character in the series, used her will and negotiation to make it truly independent. And Bran is content to be a symbolic monarch for Westeros while Tyrion does the hands-on work. If people like this had been in charge in the first place, you wouldn’t have had all these wars and death.

People get addicted to drama. And by “drama” I don’t just mean a fantasy of castles and dragons. I mean the spectacle of watching emotional, dysfunctional people act out their issues, screw up their lives, and make the world more complicated than it has to be while making everybody else suffer in the process. A spectacle sometimes known as politics.

I get the impression that if the real world’s current crop of drama queens, inbred aristocrats and religious cultists kills itself off with its own stupidity, some people just won’t know what to do with themselves.

Joe-mentum!

Given that over a dozen Democrats had announced a 2020 presidential campaign before January, former Vice President Joe Biden took his time before considering his own run. Given his age (he would be even older than Donald Trump if elected, and Bernie Sanders would be even older) and his many, many political gaffes, not to mention actual policy mistakes, there would be a lot of reasons for him not to run and a lot of reasons to suspect he could lose to Trump even if he won the Democratic nomination. Yet he has decided to run, and with his name recognition, he is looking like the candidate to beat.

The political-media complex is not impressed, because as much as anybody else in the race, Biden, in all his Old Whiteness, is everything they think the political system doesn’t need. Just this week, Vox had an article entitled “Why so many Democrats are running for president” – sub-headed, “The epidemic of random white men running for president, explained” – and splashed it with a montage photo showing at least 11 candidates, five of whom are women and only three of whom are white men.

According to a Friday poll in The Hill, Biden is supported by 35 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, followed by Bernie Sanders at 18 percent – the only other Democrat to reach double digits in preference. In another poll, Biden actually leads Sanders among younger (under 30) black voters, 35 to 30 percent.

Which shows that for all the “progressive” obsession over intersectionality and people “of color”, most black people who do vote vote for Democrats, and usually mainstream Democrats, the same way that union people vote for Democrats and anti-abortion people vote for Republicans: Because they can’t afford to divide their focus. Just as anti-abortion people don’t waste their time with a Democratic party that is broadly pro-choice and prefer a Republican Party that caters to their position, even if they don’t necessarily agree with all Republican policies. Likewise even black voters who might count as conservative on some issues and disagree with Democrats know not to waste their time on a Republican Party that has no time for them, when it isn’t deliberately catering to racists. And they want to vote on the candidate they think will win. Whether that candidate is this week’s hip new flavor is less important than whether people outside the hip circle know and like them.

This also leads to another implication: That not everybody who opposes Trumpism is a “progressive.” Both leftists and “conservatives” have a vested interest in overstating the progressive influence on the mainstream Democratic Party, because “progressives” claim to speak for everybody and Republicans think that they can tar their opponents by association. But, especially as the Republicans purge anybody who isn’t increasingly ideological (read: Trumpnik) the majority of the country is not conservative, but it isn’t necessarily leftist, either. And in the system that the two parties have created, Democrats have to balance their self image as the “progressive” party with the practical reality of being the designated NotRepublican party. And if they want to win, they need to emphasize the factors that everyone, not just leftists, can agree with.

In this respect, the fact that Biden is “problematic” by the standards of the professionally offended is kind of a plus. When the Left kills its own initiatives and knife-fights itself to death with purity tests, you don’t have anything to worry about with Uncle Joe, because you know he’ll never pass a purity test. In fact, I’ve seen several commentators say words to the effect that Joe Biden is the Democrats’ version of Trump. And frankly, I think that’s what he’s counting on. I mean, Trump DID win, didn’t he? And he beat not only Clinton but a whole host of stuffed-shirt establishment Republicans who were always concerned about doing things the right way and presenting the right image and not making any mistakes. If Biden’s biggest problem is his gaffes, well, Trump has pretty much erased the idea that there’s any such thing as “too mistake-prone” to be president.

I’m just saying, if we HAVE to have an old, white politically incorrect doofus as President, why not the one who isn’t a racist Russian tool?

And as I’ve already said: Any Democratic candidate (well, except DeBlasio) would not only be a better president than Trump, they would be better than Hillary Clinton. Any one of them would have a more genuinely progressive record than Clinton. And if Biden doesn’t win, or if he does but he turns out to be too old to serve his term, voters have an excellent range of alternatives and if Biden does win, he has an excellent farm team of potential running mates and successors.

But given all the reasons for why a Biden campaign (or Administration) would not be the nightmare that “progressives” fear, I do want to mention one area where I agree that Biden is problematic.

Since I am a right-winger, I do not oppose the Party of Trump for the same reasons that “progressives” do. I do not think that capitalism is inherently evil, or that taxes and government are inherently good. And if it can’t be the Libertarians, I want at least SOME other party in this country besides the Democrats, because I do not want political ideas to be limited to a conflict between Corrupt Hack Democrats and Social Justice Warrior Democrats. The reason I hate the Party of Trump is because they threaten to marginalize any political viewpoint to the right of MSNBC. And that’s one area where I agree with “progressives.” We realize that the Republican Party has turned into a Snidely Whiplash cartoon of itself, which, far from promoting a smaller government, demands a more encompassing, less accountable and more oppressive government so that they can impose their social agenda on the majority of the population that opposes them, including non-progressives.

And it needs to be emphasized that this is what Republicans WANT. Against the wishes of the “donor class” and the other conservative intellects who know better, the base has taken over the operation. Rather than accepting abortion as a rally-the-base campaign issue that is never going to be seriously dealt with after election year, they are now demanding outright abortion bans to directly challenge Roe v. Wade. Rather than simply using Iran as a rhetorical punching bag to bolster their patriotic credentials, they’re gearing up for war with a country that is far more organized (and far larger, and far more mountainous) than Iraq. Because after a generation of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, conservative intellect has taken a backseat to grievance media and “owning.”

It matters that someone like Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. However evil someone like Mitch McConnell may be, even he didn’t have the brass to outright destroy political norms the way Trump did. But the fact of the matter is, Trump could not have done that without the Party backing him up. Before Trump, this was the same party that primaried out anti-abortion conservative Senator Bob Bennett in Utah, in favor of “Tea Party” conservative Mike Lee. This was the party that frequently railed against anti-abortion conservative war hero John McCain as a “RINO.” Donald Trump did not run for President in 2000, and he did not support Pat Buchanan in 2000, because Buchanan was endorsed by David Duke. Because then both Trump and the Republican Party knew better. Even in 2016, Trump was at least capable of entertaining ideas that would have been Republican heresy (like healthcare reform and gay tolerance). But since inauguration, all those big ideas dissolved, along with the idea that Republicans had an alternative to the ACA, or an infrastructure plan, or even a plan for a Wall. The Trump Administration in practice has been the worst of all worlds: all of Trump’s stupid ideas (like a government shutdown that senior Republicans didn’t want, and tariffs that businesses don’t want) and various federal initiatives for the Paul Ryan wing of the party, not to mention priority shifts in Washington and state legislation to slake the fundamentalist/Mike Pence wing of the party.

Now, since Republicans are basically pack animals, they will follow the leader whether that leader is Trump or Mitt Romney. But it matters what standard that leader sets. And Trump’s standard is to act like laws, norms and reality itself simply don’t apply to him. And Republicans – including those who would otherwise not be Trumpniks – go along with this because this gets them the policies that they want, which would really not be possible under a Bush or a Romney or any other cloth-coat Republican who believes that reality is a thing that exists. And since their White Trash Savior seems to be invincible, any Republicans who would have moral qualms about this know that they’ll be curbstomped out of the primaries if they dare to sass the Leader, so they go along too.

But again, the sane people were getting purged even before Trump showed up. The idea that there is more than one legitimate party was getting purged at least as early as Newt Gingrich, and we are now seeing the full results of that attitude. As I and many others have said, many times and many ways, Trump is not the aberration in the Republican Party. He is the norm. He is just the first one who’s willing to admit it. And again, given his heterodoxy on a few issues, I could argue that the Party has influenced Trump more than the other way around.

And the problem with Joe Biden’s premise, as most recently expressed in his May 18 campaign announcement, is the idea that we can have unity and harmony when the Democrats have always campaigned on that concept, and the reason we don’t have unity is because Republicans don’t want it, because it doesn’t work for them. Unity and harmony requires keeping Republicans in power as though they believed in shared responsibility, when they shirk responsibility and only seek power for ulterior motives.

Just this week, black activist Bree Newsome Bass tweeted, “Please ask yourselves why Democratic leadership is committed to telling you how horrible Trump is as a way of raising money for themselves but aren’t committed to actually exercising their power to stop him.”

Why? Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats pitched a screaming fit over the Electoral College in 2000 but didn’t do anything on the state level in the 16 years between Bush’s election and Trump’s election, or do anything on the federal level when they had the White House and both houses of Congress. Maybe it’s the same reason that Democrats heard Mitch McConnell say he wanted Barack Obama to be a one-term president and then didn’t organize their party to keep Congress and go after McConnell’s seat. Maybe it’s the same reason that they told everyone how horrible Republicans would be for labor, and didn’t concentrate on the Rust Belt states in 2016.

Why do Democrats tell the rest of us that Republicans are horrible in order to raise money for themselves without actually trying to take the Republican majority down? Because that’s what Democrats DO.

You guys are just figuring this out?

It is not libertarians and “progressives” who need to be convinced that the two sides are not the same. IT’S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Because while they’ve been waving the bloody shirts to raise funds to support the lifestyle of the political class, telling voters that Republicans are an existential threat to the American way of life, Republicans DO think that Democrats are a threat to the American way of life, and that is why they are doing everything in their power to keep Democrats from having any influence on government ever again.

The strength of Joe Biden as a candidate is the implicit promise that once he’s elected president, things will get back to where they were before. But that is also his real weakness.

Endgame of Thrones

So… just as every other Game of Thrones this season has inspired a lot of bitching and gnashing of teeth from armchair critics and online pundits, “The Bells”, which aired May 12 – Mother’s Day – caused intense shock in people who saw Daenerys Targaryen, the last rightful heir of her dynasty (sorta) face the usurper queen Cersei Lannister in the capital city of Kings’ Landing, after Cersei captured and executed Dany’s oldest and dearest friend, Missandei. And while cooler heads conspired to negotiate the surrender of the city, Daenerys responded by having her dragon breathe fire at everyone in the city between her and Cersei, potentially around a million people. The shock was that Daenerys, who was up to a certain point being presented as an enlightened monarch and legitimate protagonist, was “suddenly” being made out to be horrible, even though most of the reason that her dynasty was overthrown was that her forebears were about as psycho. The surprise to me is that anyone else was surprised.

Especially given how many of the left-wing media types who loved Dany’s portrayal as a feminist survivor of trauma had also pointed out that she is also a “White Savior” archetype who presented herself as a liberator of dark-skinned slave peoples (‘Breaker of Chains’) and has swarthy-skinned warriors as her cannon fodder despite coming from a pale family line that is so purebred it often resorted to incest. (The ‘White Savior’ critique is of course a PC/Social Justice complaint, but that doesn’t automatically make it invalid.)

The fact is that Game of Thrones has a repeated pattern. Every time Cersei or another central character does something rotten, some other character (like Ramsay Bolton) comes along to make Cersei look tolerable.

What this demonstrates is that one consistent premise of Game of Thrones is that there are no good guys, or more precisely that the less dickishness one possesses the less competent one is to survive in that setting, arguably in any other setting. The best you can hope for in a government is a sort of Machiavellian pragmatism where the ruler is just foresighted enough to govern in the common interest, if only to stop public revolt, but also ruthless enough to survive all the power-gaming. The problem is that anybody who does know what it takes to survive the cutthroat environment, like Cersei, is the kind of person who risks public revolt, while the people who one would think have that pragmatic medium (like Tyrion and Daenerys) either become moral and ineffectual (like Jon Snow) or catastrophically sadistic (like Ramsay).

But given the grand fantasy elements, the real-world implications of such an outlook weren’t made obvious until 30 minutes after the episode, when HBO showed the season (and series) finale of Veep, the Julia-Louis Dreyfus vehicle in which she plays Vice-President briefly turned President Selina Meyer. The characters in Veep are if possible even more vicious and cynical than the ones on GoT, although the dialogue is brightened by lines such as “your proposal is as welcome as a Sriracha enema.” In this season, Meyer is trying to get elected president (after losing the last election from a tie-breaker vote in the Senate) against the popular female incumbent who succeeded her, going through a series of increasingly ugly deals to win primaries, until the show, like Game of Thrones, runs the clock on itself and crams all the craziness in before the deadline. In the finale, the primary race gets to the party convention, where once again everything is hopelessly deadlocked between competitors and everyone has to engage in old-style backroom deals to pledge voters. In less than 29 minutes real time, Selina maneuvers herself into getting the nomination through a set of compromises, up to drafting as her running mate Jonah Ryan, whom everyone hates (except possibly his wife) and who hates math because it was “invented by Muslims.” The show then forwards many years to Selina’s death “at the age of 77, 78, or possibly 79.” Her funeral coverage goes over her limited but substantial achievements, like permanently banning gay marriage (at the behest of a fundamentalist, homophobic Christian who’s ‘so gay, he’s like Sam Rayburn gay’) and temporarily securing independence for Tibet (reversed by China as a deal where they gave Meyer campaign support and election interference). As the coverage winds down, the news anchor has to end his planned eulogy for Selina to announce that Tom Hanks has also died.

This is simply a more absurd, prosaic restatement of the theme it took “The Bells” 80 minutes to get across. Veep deliberately avoids commenting on the real political parties of the United States (to the point that they never mention what Selina’s party is) but it’s made clear that one doesn’t have to be a male conservative to be a raging asshole. Nor is it necessary to have supernatural powers. Although I’m pretty fucking sure that if Selina Meyer had had her own pet dragon, the entire DC Beltway area would be a smoking mountain of rubble and ash, and it would deserve it a lot more than Kings’ Landing.

REVIEW: Avengers: Endgame

“I have often said that if knowing what happens actually spoils a movie, that movie probably sucks.”

-Robert Bridson

The only real spoiler I got from Avengers: Endgame before seeing it was a very minor but very telling one: There are no after-credits scenes.

Quite a few non-Marvel movies had scenes during or after the credits, including of course Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But it wasn’t until Nick Fury showed up at Tony Stark’s house at the very end of Iron Man to discuss “the Avengers Initiative” that the idea became a running premise, linking together the various movies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and teasing the next one in the series. The fact that such a scene doesn’t happen this time only emphasizes that while there will of course be other Marvel projects, for the Avengers story arc, this is it.

Finality is the main theme of this movie. More than once, Thanos says, “I am inevitable.” Thanos, of course, is taken from Thanatos, the Greek word for death. In the original Marvel Comics, Jim Starlin’s Thanos was romantically obsessed with Death (since Death is a personality in Marvel Comics). In the more “realistic” movies, this obsession was turned into a Malthusian sociology. In Infinity War, Thanos told everyone that the populations he decimated (or rather, bisected) before getting the Infinity Gauntlet were happier and better off for his work. That is clearly not the case after the “snap.” On Earth, world governments have collapsed and cities are hollowed out, with sullen, scattered survivors. The cosmic hero Captain Marvel has her hands full dealing with similar crises on other worlds. But then Scott Lang (Ant-Man) returns from the Quantum Realm and discusses a way to reverse the events, in what he calls a “time heist.” And while some deaths are unavoidable, there are a lot of appearances from almost every other Marvel movie up to this point (although in some cases these characters appear VERY briefly) and this leads to some happy reunions, demonstrating to Scott’s surprise, time travel doesn’t work like in Back To The Future, Bill & Ted, or any other examples of time travel, which, like in this movie, are entirely fictional and speculative, because time travel isn’t real.

After the movie, my best friend and I briefly discussed it and he said that the premise created plot holes big enough to drive a truck through. And I start to think about them more and more.

Like….

…..

…..

If Endgame was five years after Infinity War, and the Avengers brought back all the people who got ‘snapped’ without going backwards in time, why is Peter Parker still in high school with Ned?

And….

We all know who guards the Soul Stone, right? So what happened when Steve had to give it back?

But again, the result creates a true narrative finality- as with The Long Night at Winterfell, the casualty count of principal characters was very light, though the losses were a lot more substantial. But most characters had at least a satisfying ending, and one in particular had the happy ending that should have happened all along. And instead of an after-credits scene we got a big production ending with each of the original Avengers actors pictured with their autographs on the screen.

I can’t help but think that the producers were inspired by the final scene of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where the senior crew of the Enterprise have just returned to the ship after stopping a military conspiracy and saving the galaxy from a general war – only to be given orders to turn the Enterprise in to be decommissioned. And Captain Kirk- like Tony Stark, an example of Peter Pan masculinity if ever there was one- just said “second star to the right, and straight on til morning.” And the Enterprise sailed toward the nearest star and disappeared into the light. And the screen showed the autographs of the seven principals of the original cast, one by one.

And that was indeed the last time that all seven members of the original cast appeared in the same movie together.

RIP The Avengers

They Saved The World

A Lot