Game of Thrones and the News

“Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.”—Paul Valéry

I am lying on a Greek beach. Well, not on the beach—on a chaise longue shaded by an umbrella—the lazy lap of the waves in my ears as I play with my iPad. A waitress hangs her cleavage in my face and sets down my champagne cocktail. I ignore her.

Google News. The usual carnage in Syria. The usual carnage in America. North Korea is being a nuisance. Turkey, just over the horizon, is being a nuisance. 

I scroll down to “Entertainment” to see what the rabblement are watching and am again annoyed by headlines about something called Game of Thrones. What the hell is Game of Thrones? Enough’s enough—I decide to find out for myself, click links and read up.

Gazing Out to Sea

Apparently it’s a television series. Remember television? It's a medium my snobbery prevents me from enjoying. I haven’t seen a TV commercial for decades, which does wonders for one's quality of life. I tap to YouTube and turn the tablet landscape-wise to watch some excerpts.

My waitress, barefoot and bikini-bottomed in deference to the heat, hovers. Her thighs, at eye-level, draw my glance, but now she leans over and peers at the little screen, imposing her upper chest into my personal space, her shoulders ignoring me, to shade the iPad with her hand.

It seems to be a fantasy about our murderous and warlike Nordic past (I’m glad that's over)—everybody’s white, and cold—aimed at post-pubescent girls. The only character who lasts longer than a season is a teenager with a rather dangerous, not entirely reliable dragon, which nevertheless rescues the kid when she’s about to be tortured or flayed. 

My waitress abandons all semblance of professional neutrality, gets on the cot with me and steadies the hand in which I hold the device. 

But fantasy on TV? Television, as Warhol said, is reality. Movies are fantasy. People in movies live in the present tense, as in dreams. People in reality live in the past and the future—we have no contact with the present, unless we're having sex, or dying.

Game of Thrones, however, does combine the classic TV genres of soap opera, game show—guess who survives this week!—and news report: coups, court intrigues, hostages, beheadings. There are lots of beheadings; it’s very topical—and a good way to teach the young. For what is TV but a babysitter? “The young,” as Salvador Dalí said, “are completely stupid.”

My waitress thumps on my sternum with her fist to apprise me that I am zipping too quickly past the zombie warriors. But I have now discovered that this spectacle is based on a series of books, and disoblige her by clicking to Amazon to read a little of the text:

“You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilously close to fear.” Of course the great Russians weren’t prose stylists either, and that didn’t vitiate their impact.

But here we have the supernatural—it goes with this kind of writing—sort of thing you get with J.K. Rowling and company. One senses what they’re trying for but the language closes it off. It’s because you don’t know what they’re talking about that there’s a feeling of comfort. Nothing can happen to you. Kind of a safe-space. Busloads of Brits ride around London with the book in their hands, condescending connoisseurs of the cute.

I actually read in the New York Times a public official’s opinion that the State Department should have a blueprint for “nation-building,” handy to superimpose on whatever country they happen to be destroying. You too can be an obese red-neck evangelist with Disney-World culture and a concealed weapon. Sign here.

My waitress, bored by my literary endeavors, gives up on back-seat tablet watching and, with an air of having been seduced into intimacy, caresses my chest. I suppose she'll expect a tip.

Returning to Google News I read about a guy in Argentina who shot his parents in the head, had sex with the corpses, cut them into pieces—I’m not making this up—and fed them to the dog. Which is more amusing than the dragon.

From this distraction I raise my head at the sound of shouts. A rubber raft full of refugees is approaching the beach! I wade in, drink in hand, to greet them but they file past, barely looking at me. “Where’s Germany?” they say. I can only wave vaguely toward it and watch them head off, craning as if to see it.

In such a light the phrase “game of thrones” acquires richer meaning, n’est-ce pas? As with the Chicanos in the US, so with the Arabs in Europe: they’ve been here before, and they’re back. 

I trudge ashore to my chaise and, as they disappear into the distance, recline next to my waitress, who has taken charge of the iPad. To forestall my interference she slips her hand under my waistband while she watches Game of Thrones.

Game of presidents

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

“There is no happiness that is not idleness and only what is useless is pleasurable.”—Anton Chekhov

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film review: Hillbilly Elegy

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

Germans

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”—Otto von Bismarck

The Germans.  Always a problem.

Under the Celts, Europe was one country.  Under the Romans, under the Church, under Napoleon, under Hitler, Europe was one country.  And now, under Merkel, Europe is, for the moment, one country.

When the Celts had it, it stretched from Ireland to what is now Turkey, and it’s still basically Celtic.  The Germans—Angles, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Goths, etc.—later settled on the Celts as ruling classes, and gene-testing is revealing that the “English,” for example, are mostly Celts, as the "French" have always believed themselves.   This is in addition to the pockets of more or less “pure” Celts that survive in the British Isles, Brittany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Venice, which is not an exhaustive list.

The Romans brought North Africa and the Middle East into the mix, as later did Napoleon and Hitler.  But the Romans excluded Ireland, the Picts—and Germany.  Stay on your side of the Rhine, they told the Germans, and when they raided into Gaul the Romans retaliated by raiding into Germania (with a hard “G”), which was as far as the Romans cared, or dared, to go.

Attila

The Germans were never Romanized.  That’s why they’re like that.  And when they (or rather we—see My Racial Profile) got the upper hand, it all fell apart.

Charlemagne almost put it back together, and he did push into Germania.  But to be legitimate he had to be crowned in Rome by Pope Leo, who used him like a rook on a chess board, and influenced politics from Britain to Constantinople.  That's where the power lay, and where it stayed: seven centuries later Vasari tells us that Michelangelo “spoke to the Pope as the King of France would not have dared to speak to the Pope.”

Germania became a collection of principalities, and it is remarkable, to me at least, that this brilliant people produced no literary masterpiece for so much of the modern period.  Martin Luther was a model of German prose (“Sin bravely,” he said; I have that on a T-shirt), but he died in 1546, and until Goethe nothing literary happened, at least nothing exportable.  There had been Winckelmann, but Goethe had to tell me about Winckelmann; I’d never have known. 

Meanwhile, of course, they were writing the world’s music, if I may take the liberty of including Austria in Germania, as Charlemagne did.  Austria had been Romanized; maybe that explains something.

They are a wonderfully clean people, Germans.  In Duck You Sucker, Sergio Leone introduces a German military advisor in Mexico by showing him in his seat on a train brushing his teeth.  Exactly.  In bed with a German you can, and do, go anywhere; in bed with a French or a British person you must proceed with caution.

They do not, however, queue up.  If you’re in line for the ski lift and one or more Germans come down the slope they’ll butt right in at the front and have to shouted at and waved away.  When, in Casablanca, Carl tells Rick that he gave the Germans the best table, “knowing they would take it anyway,” he’s not making rah-rah war talk, he's referring to this tendency of theirs to arrogate.

Here’s a better example: when the Nazis were advancing on Paris Clare Boothe Luce was staying at the Ritz, and as they approached, the hotel emptied out.  But she, intrepid reporter (she invented Life magazine), stayed on till she was the last one, and the concierge came up and told her to leave: “The Germans are coming!” he said.  She got out her notepad: “How do you know?”  “They have reservations!”

Ah, but now it gets heavy.  Now we must touch The Subject.  When I was a film professor a German colleague said, “Do you think the world will ever forgive the Germans?”

I didn’t have to ask for what.  I treated this as thinking out loud, and ignored it.  When he persisted I said, “No,” as curtly as I could. 

“Why not?”  

“For four reasons,” I said, trying to scare him off.

Didn’t work.  He wanted to suffer.  “What's the first?”

“Morality,” I said.  “So vague.  What we did to the Indians, what we did to Dresden, what we did to the Italian villages we bombed—Churchill said if we lose this war they’ll try us for war crimes.  But there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  You could discuss it.  The truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we were experimenting to see what the effects would be on human flesh.  Harry Truman said we did it to shorten the war and save lives, but we could have done that by blowing up Mount Fujiyama or giving them a show in Tokyo Bay.  Still, there was a case for it.  You could argue for it.  But with the camps you gave us clarity, a relief from the ambiguity we waffle around in, something black and white.  We're not likely to let that go.”

I trusted that would suffice.  But no.  “What’s the second reason?” he said.

“It was a terrible thing you did,” I shrugged.  “Why should we forgive you?”  (“You,” notice.  I knew he was standing in for his people.)

He nodded.  “The third?”

“You’ll never forgive yourselves.  Why should we forgive you?”

On the surface he was digesting all this.  “And the fourth?”

“Well, when you say the world, you don’t mean Asia or Africa.  They’re not interested—they’ve got their own histories.  You mean us—the Germanic peoples, including the blond Visigothic aristocracies lording it over the Indians in “Latin” America.  We’re Germans.  You embarrassed the family.  And in family life there’s no forgiving or forgetting.”

Now he was depressed.  I felt bad.  “On the other hand,” I said, “one of the great achievements of humankind was landing on the moon, and that was accomplished by a former SS man.”

Another German friend (I know a lot of Germans; they’re going to love this piece) is a painter, an Expressionist.  (Most German artists are Expressionists; it has something to do with horror.)  He was middle-aged before he went to his father and said, “How could you do that?”  I don’t know what the answer was.  Maybe there was none.  Maybe it was unrepeatable.  What could it be?  But the sense of a curse lingers, on the people and on the land.

And Angela Merkel works under that curse.  When France and Germany conceived the Euro-dream in 1951 it was to make sure Germany wouldn’t attack France again.  Simple as that.  The aim of the Union is to put an end to war in Europe, which a glance at history will show is continual here.  Simple as that.  But once again, Germany dominates. 

The trouble is, Europeans can’t do anything.  It's endemic.  British incompetence is as monumental as it is dignified, from the top down.  A Canadian woman who transferred to the London branch of her company confessed to me, “You just want to push them!”

A Frenchwoman, lounging topless by the Greek sea, said to me, “You Americans [for her I was willing to be an American], you act [inviting me, as it were, to action]; we French are dreamers.”  Quite right.  Don’t ever try to get anything done in France. 

When Portugal and Spain and France and England were young barbaric countries they conquered empires.  Those war lords Ferdinand and Isabella were burning down university towns in the suave Muslim civilization of the time, even as they were sending Columbus off to augment their holdings.  But that was then.  These days it takes a Napoleon or a Hitler to actually do something, and of course the results aren’t always ideal. 

A friend of mine—actually he’s not a friend of mine, I’m not even speaking to the son-of-a-bitch—anyway, he’s a yacht skipper.  You rent your yacht for a vacation and he brings the crew and sails it where you want to go, and when you’re out there and something goes wrong, he fixes it with tape and a coat hanger and gets on with it.  But the German clients are standing there with the manual in their hands.  “Yah, but zis iss not za right vay!  Ziss is not—”  They’re by-the-book people, Germans, and they’re trying to force their considerable will on the anarchic non-work-ethic Greeks.  The Greeks have never heard of the book.  (See Greece versus the Puritans.)

One of the problems with Merkel—one, I say, of the problems with Merkel— is that she grew up in East Germany, resisting Soviet thoughts, yes yes, I know, but the eastward look was her horizon.  The Euro-dream is a West-German dream, not a Merkel dream.  She has not explained to her voters that if they break the Mediterranean countries there’ll be no market for what they make, and the Greeks, as a matter of patriotism, are already refusing to buy anything made in Germany.  Nor has she mentioned that if they don’t pump their precious money into those countries their own euros won’t be worth much anymore.

M'ma!

The Greeks suspect the Germans, who, it must be conceded, rarely do anything without a plan, of forcing them to privatize their companies and sell them cheap so Germans can buy them; and to cut salaries so the new owners will have a low-rate labor force.

And the Greeks, rather than ruin themselves at German command, are playing for time—one of the things they do best.  “Wait,” they love to say.  “I don’t want to wait,” shouts the Nordic, and the German in me sympathizes.   “Wait,” they say. 

Now they will lean their chins in their hands and watch the German economy crumble.  Then we’ll see where we are.

Catholics and Puritans

“Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”—H. L. Mencken

A fault line runs across Western culture. On one side the Puritan work ethic rules the economy; on the other it's something else. In America the line is the Rio Grande; the exception is French Canada.  In Europe the line is roughly defined by the Alps; the exception is Ireland. 

France, by this reckoning, is at the center of the world, where it belongs. England is across a narrow channel from a Mediterranean country.

So we might say that Catholicism, Roman or Orthodox, is that "something else," though it seems to me that religions arise out of peoples, not the other way around—Nordic barbarians on the one hand, ancient civilizations on the other. South of the Alps people have been civilized—settled, living together, absorbing invaders—for four thousand years (the old polytheism peeks out from Catholicism), while our own ancestors were still roaming the Siberian steppes.

Shakespeare was a civilized man, yes, but his London was barbaric. The British as a people didn’t get there until Victoria, when Puritanism finally took hold. Civilization is middle-class; the aristocrat, Nietzsche tells us, is a barbarian. It’s fair to say that the British have been civilized for only a hundred and fifty years. Not long before that my people painted their faces before going into battle. (See My Racial Profile.)

We mustn’t confuse Puritanism with prudery. Jean-Luc Godard, William Burroughs, Paul Schrader and David Lynch are Puritans, but their work can be pornographic. Vladimir Nabokov on the other hand was prudish, but in no way puritanical.

The Puritan is a dualist: soul/body, good/evil. The world, for a Puritan, is a temptation to be got through. The Catholic is a monist who believes in the earthly paradise. A few adjustments will restore it. When the Pope disembarks from a plane he gets down on his belly and kisses the ground. You won’t find the Archbishop of Canterbury doing that.

Puritanism forbids images. An image is false. Truth is elsewhere. The sources of Puritanism in our culture are Moses and Plato. The second commandment forbids images. Plato banished image-makers from his Republic.

According to Freud’s theory Moses was a defeated Egyptian prince who led the Hebrew slaves away from image-saturated Egypt to establish a monotheism; but when he came down the mountain he found them backsliding, adoring an image, the bull calf—which by the way had also been worshipped in Minoan Crete, as it is today in India and Spain. (The bullfight, says Garcia Lorca, contra Hemingway, is “an authentic religious drama, where in the same manner as in the Mass, a God is adored and sacrificed.”)

To forbid images is to impose abstraction. All three puritan traditions, Judaism, Islam and Protestantism, emphasize reading and abstract thinking. The Muslims invented the zero, a huge feat of abstraction, and algebra, and gave us our numbers.

But the early Church, with illiterate peasants and slaves to reach, had to interpret the second commandment as not to worship “false gods.” Walk into a Catholic or an Orthodox church and there are images on the walls, in the windows, on the ceiling, on the floor. The first thing Puritans do is smash the statues and break the stained glass.

Without the Catholic tradition we wouldn’t have Giotto, Botticelli, Giorgione. There was no Jewish oil painter of note until Chagall. [Correction: until Velázquez.] In America, where abstraction is the rule, painting has been reduced to Jackson Pollock's bathroom tile.

Nor does physics permit images. The imagination is bound by Euclid’s laws: the shortest distance between two points, the three angles of a triangle. Newton built his universe in Euclid’s space. But when our telescopes became strong enough, and our cameras fast enough, to record the movements of galaxies, we saw that they did not obey those laws.

Imagine three equidistant objects: easy. Imagine four: a pyramid on a triangular base. Imagine five: can’t be done. And yet it is so. Five hundred, five thousand galaxies where they shouldn’t be: we cannot construct a model of our universe. We cannot imagine it.

The image induces orgasm. You imagine her even when you’re having her. You imagine her even when you’re not having her. Hence the veil.

Twenty years ago in Afghanistan, despite the world’s outrage, the Taliban dynamited giant Buddhas carved in the living rock; they were images and they had to go. Muslims on the other hand were outraged by the Danish cartoons of the Prophet—not so much that they mocked him as that he was portrayed in an image at all.

Jean-Luc Godard attacked images; it has been said that film was not his medium. William Burroughs did the same, and refused to be labeled an “entertainer,” though that is scarcely true. Still, these Puritans clear a space for the spirit. If there can be no adequate image of God, or of reality, then there can be none of you, which is comforting.

“I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think of things in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This—amateur Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.”—Jorge Luis Borges

The Puritan is a moralist; the Catholic, a mystic. Consider opera, that Catholic art, that rite that transubstantiates passion into music. What would Protestant opera sound like? It would sound like Wagner—moralistic, amelodic, German. (See Germans.)

The Puritan believes in “character” in the sense, not of what distinguishes you from others, but of moral strength. You stand alone. Monotheism breeds the mono-self. In how many Catholic works (by “Catholic” I do not mean “Christian”) of Rabelais, Joyce, Picasso, does one self melt into another.

And so, in the Hollywood movie, we have the all-important “character arc",  in which the lead Learns Something. Are you learning anything? You’re gathering skills, I know that, but how’s the penetration of mystery going?

An Irishman kills someone, and runs north. Burdened by his guilt he seeks out a clergyman and unloads. “You’ve done the right thing coming to me,” says the minister; “now you must give yourself up to the authorities.” “I’d rather not,” says the Irishman. “But you know that it’s my duty to tell them.” He runs. The police are behind him. He goes south and escapes. Still heavy with guilt he enters a church; the confessional light is on; he goes in and kneels in the dark. “Father, I’ve committed murder.” “How many times, my son?”

The Protestant public is outraged that the Church is not punishing more severely the pedophile priests. Character. “So that’s the kind of man you are!” But the Church believes in the forgiveness of sins, right here in the earthly paradise.

Let us not speak of Catholic and Protestant; let us speak of Nordic and Mediterranean. For the vulgarity north of the Alps is just as grotesque as it is in America.

Consider punching. Angry Mediterraneans shout at each other in the street in a manner that shocks Nordics, in that it never erupts into fighting. We barbarians love to punch.

Consider drunks. I live in Greece and so far I’ve met two drunks. Walk down the street in New York, Toronto or London and look around: we’re all drunks. In an Athens grocery store you can buy plain alcohol for disinfecting cuts and cleaning instruments; in those other cities you can get it in a drug store, but it has an obnoxious smell, so we won’t drink it.

Consider farting which, along with belching, is a mode of communication in the Anglo-Saxon world. In Mediterranean countries it’s simply not done.

Oddly, when you think of the disdain of which America is often the target (“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between,” said Oscar Wilde), civilization took root on the seaboard before it did in northern Europe, planted there by Puritan middle class intellectuals. The United States is unique in that it is a country springing from intellectual principles.

Norman Mailer said Puritanism was the muscular contraction that brought us to the moon. But it exacts its price in the impulse to legislate morality—the Mann Act, Prohibition, abortion laws, the world’s biggest prison population (proportionately and numerically); in the missionary zeal with which it brings democracy to people who have no use for it; and in its conviction, right down to the bone marrow, that the movement of money is the action of God in the world. Bankers in Protestant countries are priests, their calling invested with high authority, and holy secrecy.
 
That's the kind of morality a cold climate can produce. The New Age library includes a host of books that will help us adjust our attitudes and become more deserving. (Character again: it depends What Kind Of Person You Are.) And today’s Republicans will stop at nothing to reduce the national deficit and regain divine favor. (See Lorca's remarks on Wall Street.)

Do you see this going away? I don't. American fundamentalists are a political force strong enough to have kept their President in office for eight years and, astonishingly, to have fought Darwinian evolution for a century. No one understands America’s difficulty with this, and it appears to exercise the best of the journalistic minds there. There's no contradiction between creationism and Darwin’s Theory; the Church accepted it a century ago, and the impermeability on this issue is disturbing in such a powerful country. (See The Accidental Monkey.) 

Two fundamentalisms now confront each other, Islamic and American, degenerations, both, of once higher cultures. The incidence of suicide bombings on the one hand, and the gunning down of numbers of people at a time on the other, cannot but seem connected.

It was the Puritan poet John Milton who towered over English Romanticism, which was really a kind of secular Presbyterianism, and each of the poets (except the Shakespearean Keats), even Worsdworth in his quiet way, took Milton’s Satan as his psychological model, though Coleridge preferred wailing for him.

Thus was born the Byronic hero, the Puritan rebel our popular imagination inherits. Marlon Brando was its fiercest avatar, but the figure remains—that lonely Puritan renegade is still our dominant model.

Here in Greece, as the world now knows, there is a splendid insouciance about money. At the supermarket, even at such formal places as the bank and the post office, if you don’t have the right change, “Pay me next time.” Which means forget it. There is such an elegance about that, but it makes us positively stutter to confront it.

The characters in my books, like me, hang out south of the Alps, not only because they're paradisiacs but because here they're a little beyond Big Brother's reach.

Ah, but the barbarians are again at the gates.

Afterthoughts:

1) What T.S. Eliot calls the “dissociation of sensibility” set in with the Puritan revolution—a schizophrenic scissoring of the mind from the sense of self on the one hand, and from the world, including the body, on the other. The corresponding Catholic psychosis is manic-depression. Fellini cuts on laughter and tears, and 8½ resolves when Guido’s spirits simply lift.

2) "The romantic temper,” says Stephen Dedalus, “is an insecure, unsatisfied, impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals." Our own taste for parallel worlds, New Age projections and internet avatars is a case in point: life is elsewhere.

3) Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.
—W. H. Auden, “Lullaby”

4) Comedy is the Catholic form, as in Dante; tragedy is the other thing. Robert Graves’s Protestant mother and Catholic father fell in love with a house in Wales: “Oh,” she said, “I could die here.” “Let’s live here,” he said.

5) See also Catholic Converts.

Comments? Right here.

Robert MacLean is a bad poet and an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi, Scanbox, and YouTube, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a screamingly funny novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a reviewer of films, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

In Praise of Older Women

Jaws

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film reviews

Favorite song

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"