Category: Fiction

Game of Thrones was somewhat interesting for the bit of socio-political scope and heft that it sometimes explored. All in all it’s more an example of how very weak is political fiction in the culture industries (not to mention how very racist, sexist, white supremacist it remains). The imagination and analysis and normative emphasis utterly lacking. Implications of the white walkers of climate collapse and the dragon of nuclear war barely explored. 

Popular issues, human needs worldwide, or anywhere, were almost entirely invisible. The production was in the vein of William Shakespeare of the court intrigues rather than Victor Hugo of Les Miserables, or say Octavia Butler of Parable of the Sower. The identity politics, so-called, often butchered. The latter episodes were one nostalgic set-piece after another. 

The only way to salvage something of import from the show in the end would have been for a mix of purposeful and accidental death of all the remaining royal/elite characters in the city, with the dragon accidentally torching Dany also, as the last of these – obvious connection to nuclear war. And then the final scenes of the so-called common survivors attempting to pick of the pieces amid the ashes. Instead, we were left with the descent into nostalgic farce.   

There was one more-or-less subliminally funny moment in Tarly suggesting democracy and being met with wholesale if understated contempt, ridicule, and hilarity for being such an idiot. That moment could have been played up to a Monty Python height, seemed to be aching to go there, and was the poorer for not. That would have been fantastic, and could have added to what amounts to Game of Thrones prestige in ending in Tarly’s immediate demise and dismal from thought and any lasting impact on the scene. 

The genuinely farcical and incidental slaying of Tarly and Democracy would have been more notable than anything that happened in the final episode, or much before. Lack of democracy in the creation of Game of Thrones itself entirely doomed the basic and central quality of the production.  

what they don’t tell you growing up in america

No one but Glinda and Abel remember where they were when John Doe Dimslow first climbed the decorative rock in the middle of the town triangle – the hollow being too narrow to afford a town square, and the mountain rising too steeply at the base of the triangle to have any construction other than steep lawn and flower beds. Upon the town rock John Doe Dimslow preached to the mountain.

Dimslow preached to the empty rising lawn and flowers, he preached to the forest blooming above and the blue sky dappled white beyond, he preached to Swift Run Creek on his left and Cold Run Creek on his right. He preached to the empty picnic tables around the rock.

He preached to the fat spring robins and the flickety chicka-dee-dee-dees. And late that morning old lady Glinda Harrison trooped out of her pancake restaurant and strolled off to the side of old man Dimslow talking to the mountains, and she pronounced what has gone to history in the time intervening and all at once, she said most clearly for old man Abel Forthwright to hear as he stepped out from the barbershop and his late morning shave, “Done Dimslow done lost his mind.”

“You’re raped, America. You’re raped and torn and murdered and slaughtered.”

“Done Dimslow done gone lost his daggone mind, his goddog mental capacity.” Glinda Harrison reserved her approval and disapproval, both ways, and nodded to confirm it. Continue reading Done Dimslow Done Lost His Mind