Why is Mexican so hard?


A very inauthentic chili relleno

Other than those Americans who live close to the Mexican border, or in California, most Americans know very little about good Mexican cuisine. Readers in Europe: Do you have Mexican restaurants at all? I’m guessing not.

At the risk of being snobbish about restaurants in America, there is low Mexican cuisine, and there is high Mexican cuisine — just as there is a low and high Chinese cuisine, and a low and high Italian cuisine. Americans by the millions love Mexican, Chinese, and Italian restaurants. But what millions of Americans don’t know is that what they’re getting is a low cuisine. Most Americans wouldn’t be willing to pay for truly good cooking, nor do they necessarily like good cooking if they’re exposed to it. Most Americans just want low cuisines and big servings. When I was living in San Francisco, I’ve taken visitors to superb Italian restaurants in North Beach, and the visitors didn’t even recognize the food as Italian. It went way over their heads, because it wasn’t the usual spaghetti and lasagna.

At the grocery store a couple of days ago, I came across some beautiful, and perfectly fresh, poblano peppers. I bought some, and I resolved to go home and try to make chili rellenos. As I looked at recipes, I realize that there was no way that I was going to go to all that trouble. The peppers are supposed to be fried in a batter that includes whipped egg whites re-mixed with the yolk. There is just no way I was going to do so much work to add so many calories. I ended up grilling the pepper, doing my best to peel it. I stuffed the pepper with grated cheese and some leftover hummus. There was nothing authentic about my chili relleno other than a stolen concept. Then again, lots of cuisines stuff peppers.

I did not cheat on the salsa, though. I made it from a grilled tomato and onion, chopped in the blender, seasoned with garlic and cilantro, and heated just short of a simmer. Mexican cooking from scratch is hard. That’s why people buy it in kits. The low-end Mexican restaurants also buy things in kits from food services, which is why, if you’ve been to one low-Mexican restaurant, you’ve been to them all.

The best Mexican cuisine I’ve ever had was in San Diego. (It has been 40 years since I was in Mexico, and I don’t remember much other than the refrescas, which I believe have now been corporatized. When I was there, they were made fresh by the roadside.) San Diego is just across the Mexican border, and the San Diego population can support good restaurants. The San Francisco Bay Area had a reasonably good chain of middle-brow Mexican cuisine, Chevy’s Fresh Mex. But I ate at a Chevy’s once in provincial Sacramento and was shocked how different (and low-cuisine) it was compared with the same chain in San Francisco. What can I say. Provincial Americans love their low cuisine and actually don’t like what more demanding foodies like.

I know nothing about the history of Mexican cuisine. I wish I did. But my guess would be that it’s a fusion of a Mediterranean sensibility with an Indian sensibility, with lots of New World ingredients. How could you beat that?

Nancy Pelosi tips her hand


Twitter, Christine Pelosi

“I don’t want to see him impeached, I want to see him in prison.”

A lot of people who want justice for Donald Trump have been grumbling about Nancy Pelosi, because Pelosi seems to be dragging her feet on impeachment. However, I don’t see anything to grumble about. A lot of politics is tactical and scripted. My interpretation of Pelosi’s tactics is that she wants a widespread, bottom-up outcry for impeachment. The more she seems to be resisting impeachment, the harder she is pushed. That’s exactly what she wants. She wants history to record that, as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, she brought justice to the most dangerous and most criminal president in history.

This morning, in Politico, Pelosi revealed — and I believe she is serious — what she really has in mind for Trump: prison.

The Politico article is Pelosi tells Dems she wants to see Trump in prison.

Republicans just naturally assume that because Republicans try to inflict political damage on Democrats with endless witch-hunt investigations, that that’s what Democrats are doing. Republicans, as usual, are delusional. The difference is that Republicans never had anything on Hillary Clinton, and the investigators knew it, even if the ignorati didn’t. Lock-her-up Republicans are quick to gloat, but slow to learn. Whereas Trump is not just a criminal, he’s a crime lord who must be held responsible for a long list of state and federal crimes — financial crimes, tax crimes, obstruction, conspiracy, and, in my opinion, treason. His financial crimes aren’t just about real estate. Trump also is deeply and criminally involved in the financial crimes of the global billionaire oligarchy, to whom he clearly owes dirty money, and lots of it.

Nancy Pelosi, we should keep in mind, has access to more information about what’s going on behind the scenes than any Democrat in the country. Her strategy, I believe, is to first politically destroy Trump by exposing Trump’s criminality in televised House hearings. She has about nine months to do that, because Trump must be politically destroyed before next year’s presidential primaries, so that the Republican Party can pick another candidate. I continue to believe that the odds are close to zip that Trump will be around to run for a second term. Rather, I think Trump will resign once 60 percent or more of the American population see his criminality, and once the Republican Party sees that Trump is doomed and turns on him. Trump will try to cut a deal for his resignation. But even if Trump manages to evade prosecution for his federal crimes, New York State has enough on him to lock him up for the rest of his miserable life.

Nancy Pelosi does not need to bluff, because she has more power here than Trump does, and she knows it. Trump, propped up by Republican propaganda and by stooges (such as William Barr) in key positions, has enough power to slow things down and to throw sand in the works, but ultimately it’s Trump’s criminal guilt that will take away all his power and ensure his doom. Pelosi’s task is that she must expose Trump’s crimes for all to see, on television. She has everything she needs to do that. She has the power of Congress, and the law, behind her. State law — not only in New York but probably also in other states — are a backstop against Republican dirty tricks and presidential pardons.

When Nancy Pelosi used the word “prison” yesterday, she knew exactly what she was saying and what she was doing. Now we get to watch as she plays her hand.

Update: Jennifer Rubin, at the Washington Post, drawing on another article by constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, describes an actual legal structure for what Nancy Pelosi may have in mind. The article is, Forget impeachment. Tee up prosecution.

Part of the argument is that the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has already prejudged the case for impeachment. Republicans would look the other way and blame Democrats no matter what Trump has done. So, by this kind of road map, the House would investigate Trump’s crimes, concluding with a resolution referring the case and all the evidence to prosecutors as soon as Trump is out of office.

That sounds like a plan to me.

A training ground for Highland hiking


Looking south from the crest of Hanging Rock, with mist, just before rain

Though North Carolina’s Hanging Rock State Park is only a 15-minute drive from Acorn Abbey (through the picturesque little colonial town of Danbury), I don’t think I’ve ever written about the park here. These are iPhone photos that I took this morning.

The northern border of Stokes County, North Carolina, is formed by the state line between the states of Virginia and North Carolina. Just north of the Stokes County line, in Virginia, the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian chain, rise out of the foothills. Stokes County is a foothills county, but it has its own little mountain range — the Saura mountain range. Two mountains in this range are state parks — Pilot Mountain, and Hanging Rock. Both are fantastic promontories with extraordinary views from the top.

Like Pilot Mountain in the Yadkin Valley, Hanging Rock is a monadnock. Hanging Rock rises steeply out of the Dan River valley. Hanging Rock stands about 1,700 feet above the surrounding terrain. You could almost throw a rock from the top and have it land 1,700 feet below. The surrounding terrain — though you can see well into the Yadkin River valley — is the Dan River valley. The average altitude in the Dan River valley is about 800 feet above sea level. (We are about 265 miles from the Atlantic coast.) When you drive into Hanging Rock State Park, your car will get you to the visitors center at an altitude of about 1,700 feet. Then an uphill hike of about 1.3 miles will get you to the highest point in the park — Hanging Rock itself — at an altitude of 2,139 feet. The top photo was taken right on top of the USGS marker that officially marks the altitude.

The mountain is called Hanging Rock not because anybody was ever hanged there, but because a large outcropping of rock hangs out over the terrain below.

Last summer, when I was training for a hiking trip to the Scottish highlands and islands, Hanging Rock was my go-to place. At only 2.6 miles round trip, it’s not a long hike, but it’s intense. My Apple watch shows an altitude gain of 50 floors in only 1.3 miles. Most of the trail is uphill through woodland. But the last half mile or so is very steep, over a rough terrain of rocks and soil. Finally you reach the crest, the top of the monadnock. The top is fairly flat, a wooded acre or so with views in all directions.

As you might have guessed, I’m training again for another trip to Scotland, this time to the Outer Hebrides, in August. I’ve already hiked enough in the Scottish islands to know that, as in Stokes County, there is no such thing as flat land. It’s up and down, and always over uneven terrain. The only thing that a place like Hanging Rock cannot prepare you for is hiking in a bog. Nothing but hiking in a bog is like hiking in a bog. Still, uneven terrain in a bog, with lots of ankle-breakers, is a lot like uneven terrain over rocks, bog or no bog. If you’re my age, a hiking stick is an essential item.

The August trip to Scotland will include a couple of days in Edinburgh. Then the itinerary is Inverness, Ullapool, Stornaway, Mangersta, Aird a’ Mhulaidh, Lickisto, Tarbert, Kilmuir, Edinburgh. Though I’m flying into Heathrow, I’ll be bypassing London this trip and traveling through Oxford instead. I’ve never been to Oxford. Oxford will be one of the settings in my third novel, so I need see the place and do a little pub-hopping.


Part of the final ascent to the crest of Hanging Rock

The church sees rot everywhere but in itself


“Tintern Abbey and Elegant Figures,” by Samuel Colman, 1780-1845

Conservative minds are obsessed with institutional decay. They can’t stop writing books about it. To the conservative mind, change is an existential threat, as though the Dark Ages were a utopia that we must return to.

Do you remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s famous quote? “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”

Consider Niall Ferguson’s The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. Or consider another book that is regarded as a classic among conservatives, Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. I have not read these books (nor am I going to).

The church knows that people are leaving it, particularly young people. The American church knows that, in Europe, secularization is decades ahead of secularization in America. Church people see where it’s going. Though there are those in the church who can reconcile religion with social change, most church people cannot. Those with conservative minds cannot conceive of the possibility that the church itself might be a two-thousand-year-old problem that society is finally beginning to solve — by ditching the church. Instead, the Manichean mind (which can only see the church as good), believes that the decline of the church reflects (and is actually caused by) a surge in the wickedness of the world. They believe that they are in a culture war, and that they are losing. Their panic and their desperation is leading to debate among the faithful about the church giving its blessing to ugly tactics to try to stop the losses. The tactics aren’t new, but the blessing would be.

It is shocking to observe that it isn’t just Trump voters in flyover country who are in on this. It’s also theologians and Christian intellectuals.

The Atlantic is alerting us to what’s going on with a piece published this week, What a Clash Between Conservatives Reveals. Alan Jacobs, the author of the Atlantic piece, is drawing our attention to an article published last month in First Things, “America’s most influential journal of religion and public life.” The article is by Sohrab Ahmari, a converted Catholic of Iranian descent. Ahmari writes:

Civility and decency are secondary values. They regulate compliance with an established order and orthodoxy. We should seek to use these values to enforce our order and our orthodoxy, not pretend that they could ever be neutral. To recognize that enmity is real is its own kind of moral duty.

I believe this translates to: Christians should make use of incivility and indecency if that’s what it takes to “enforce our order and our orthodoxy.” If I’m reading it correctly, then isn’t that the evangelical rationale for seeing Donald Trump as having been sent by God?

As Jacobs makes clear in the Atlantic, not all conservative Christians agree with Ahmari. Still, it seems to be taken for granted by all conservative Christians that we of the “secular left” are not “playing fair in the culture wars.” This unfairness from the secular left is never explained.

In any case, a mind that believes that it has not just the right, but a duty, to enforce its notions of order and orthodoxy on the rest of us — whether with or without civility and decency — is a mind that is too primitive for a discussion about fairness. A mind like Sohrab Ahmari’s can believe that he’s defending the church. But what he’s really doing is driving the better people away, hastening the rot.

Apple sticks it to Facebook and Google

For years, Facebook and Google have been running a racket for tracking people on the Internet — “Sign in with Facebook,” and “Sign in with Google.” I have never fallen for this, and I hope you haven’t either. If you use these things, you’re practically handing Facebook and Google a detailed dossier on where you go on the Internet and everything you do.

Now that Apple is coming out with “Sign in with Apple,” one wonders why they didn’t do this a long time ago. Do I trust Apple’s policies on privacy? Yes. Do I trust Facebook and Google? Never in a million years.

One nice feature of Apple sign-in is that, if you use it to create a new account somewhere, you don’t have to give your real email address. Instead, Apple lets you hide your real email address by randomly generating a virtual email address for that account.

Before I upgraded my iPhone to an iPhone XR about six months ago, I would have imagined that “Face ID” was a minor frill of no great value. With Face ID, you sign in to your iPhone (and to many apps on the iPhone) just by letting the phone’s camera have a look at your face. But I have found that Face ID saves a huge amount of time and aggravation, not only because I don’t have to poke in a password with my fingers, but also because I have fewer passwords to remember. When devices can securely remember your passwords for you and you don’t have to key them in, you can have longer, more random, more secure passwords.

The ability of Apple sign-in to hide your email address also is a welcome feature. The reason we all get spam is because dark players on the Internet “harvest” email addresses and sell them. I have an email address that I’ve used for more than 20 years. It gets lots of spam. I also have an Apple email address that I use only for people (and a very few companies) that I trust. The Apple email address has never received any spam, and I have used it since 2012.

What the world is still waiting for is secure email, in which email is always encrypted and always signed with a security certificate. The technology for doing this has long existed, but no one has turned it into a system that is easy to use, because Internet companies all want to bombard us with email. I dream that Apple will do that someday. (For now, there is OpenPGP, but I doubt that anyone other than nerds would want to use it.)

Slate has a pretty good piece about Apple sign-in. Slate’s angle is that Apple actually is regulating Facebook and Google (since the U.S. government won’t). The Slate article also mentions other matters of security that I need not go into here (such as reminding people that, if you have a Gmail account, Google can read all your mail). The article is Apple Is a Tech Regulator.

Apple says that Apple sign-in will be available later this year.

Tone, irony, snark, and smarm


H.L. Mencken. Portrait by Carl Van Vecten, 1932, Library of Congress

To see similarities between snark and gun violence is wrong of me, I admit. Both are epidemic. But one is deadly, and the other merely wounds. But I had been thinking about two different posts that I might write here, one on snark, and the other on shooting guns (forthcoming, later). In that state of mind, I came across a long piece in this morning’s New York Times by Gregory Gibson. The piece is A Gun Killed My Son. So Why Do I Want to Own One?

The piece is beautifully written. It reflects the soul-searching and self-awareness that the author has gained in his years-long quest (it definitely was a quest) to come to terms with the senseless, wasteful death of his son, a college student. But, if you read this piece, don’t expect a clear conclusion wrapped in vellum and tied with string. It’s a lot of questions with few, if any, answers.

So it is with irony, snark, and smarm. A lot of culture pieces have been written on these three things in the past twenty years. You can take sides if you want, just as you can take sides on the heated subject of gun control. Or, like the author of the gun piece in this morning’s New York Times, you might see that, the closer you look at the subject, the more complicated it becomes.

The cultural warfare over irony, snark, and smarm started around 1999 with a young man named Jedediah Purdy. We first heard about Purdy in a New York Times article, “Against Irony,” that was published on Sept. 5, 1999. Not long after that, when Purdy was only 24, his first book was published, For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today. Almost overnight — among the literati, anyway — the subject of irony became a battleground, like gun control. There were those who wanted to (and did) rip the liberal and kind-hearted Purdy to shreds with snark and irony. And there were those (like me) who have followed Purdy’s career ever since.

It was more than ten years later when Purdy took a direct hit from a nuke dropped on him by Tom Scocca. The piece was “On Smarm,” published at Gawker in December 2013. It’s a long piece, and Scocca expends quite a few paragraphs to take Purdy apart with snark. I’ll quote only the first and last paragraphs here:

First paragraph:

A Fable From the Age of Smarm: Once upon a time, in the high hills of West Virginia, there lived a young man named Jedediah Purdy. Jedediah was fond of animals and of taking long walks through the woods; he liked to eat fruit that was not entirely ripe. His parents had gone into the hills to get away from electricity and the corruptions of civilization, to raise their children apart from “the hollowness of mainstream living,” as the New York Times Magazine put it. They built their own home and slaughtered their own pigs.

Last paragraph:

Jedediah Purdy is now a professor at Duke Law [later Columbia] and has been a visiting professor at Yale Law, the school at which he got his own J.D., after he graduated from Harvard, after he graduated from Exeter. For this, pigs were butchered. Such are the fruits of renouncing the mainstream.

Personally, I find Scocca as irksome as Scocca finds Purdy. But I must agree with Scocca that irony — and even its weaponized version, snark — can serve (like guns) a noble and defensive purpose if in the right hands. However, no background check and permit are required to employ the weapon of snark against people. Anyone can do it.

Scocca reminds us of the enduring power that snark and irony can have when discharged by those who are morally sane and gifted as writers:

One curious fact about this long view is that it’s quite untrue. I can’t recall ever, unless compelled by duty, rereading a Malcolm Gladwell article. What I have reread is Mencken on the Scopes Trial, Hunter Thompson on Richard Nixon, and Dorothy Parker on most things—to say nothing of Orwell on poverty and Du Bois on racism, or David Foster Wallace on the existential horror of a leisure cruise. This belief that oblivion awaits the naysayers and the snarkers shouldn’t survive a glance at the bookshelf.

If it’s true that there is no defense against an idiot with a gun other than a non-idiot with a better gun, then it’s also true that there is no defense against an idiot with snark other than a non-idiot with better snark. Though I have done my best to stay away from places (and people) in social media where the snark flies like bullets, not infrequently I still find myself caught in the crossfire, or hit with a stray round of snark. What do I do? I fire back almost as a reflex. I’m a sharpshooter when it comes to snark.

But I do wish to draw a line. Just as we (we Americans, anyway) live in a gun culture, we also live in a snark culture. But, for the sake of our mental health (and our relationships), we’d better have some safe space. We all need people in our lives who not only will never use irony and snark against us, but who also will come to our defense.

I have spent a great deal of time over the years editing not only what I have written myself, but also what others have written. Post-Purdy, I have developed an editing mode that I call “snark detecting.” Most of the time (and here I find myself agreeing with those whom Scocca berates as smarmy) I find that snark and irony greatly weaken a piece of writing. I often quote a friend who is a very fine writer as saying that there is no sin for a writer worse than insincerity. Except for those emergency occasions when some snarky idiot needs to be lit up, outsnarked, and taken out of action with superior snark, I think we’d all do well to employ our snark detectors and edit out the snark.

Writers and editors often talk about tone. But we are all writers now, because we all use email. Tone can be difficult to control. When writing anything that could be touchy, I try to take the time to reread what I’ve written just for tone. For example, consider this line, which is taken from an actual business email sent to me relating to a publishing project:

Do we need to talk, again, about division of labor?

Note how the two commas around the word “again” change the tone from reasonably neutral to remonstrative and slightly snarky. Yes, I took offense (though I did not respond with snark).

I have a not-exactly-tacit agreement with one of my friends to never use irony with each other, let alone snark. In fact, several years ago, when in a casual remark he employed a touch of irony (not against me, though) I didn’t understand him and had to ask him what he meant. Irony-free zones, I would argue, are necessary for our mental health.

If I have a conclusion, it’s about where I draw the line. I detest irony and snark. These days, irony is as inescapable in our popular culture as snark is in our political culture. (In popular culture, think of “The Big Bang Theory” — all snark all the time, and anti-intellectual snark at that. It was almost violent in its snarkiness. I didn’t find it the least bit funny.) Occasionally I hear couples snark at each other in public, as though we as a society are normalizing the Big Bang theory of relationships. I think to myself, there goes a relationship that is in its last season. Intimacy and supportiveness cannot survive against snark, though society can. And regardless of what it says about me as a person, anyone who snarks at me on Facebook (or at an auto parts store) can expect a blast of snark in return, aimed right between the eyes, because civility is no defense against snark (no matter what they say in smarm school).

If snark was fatal, as guns can be, then I would be pretty dangerous. But I would like to think that I also know when not to use it. I carry snark as a concealed weapon. Outside our safe spaces, where snark flies like the bullets of angry and unstable white men, you never know when you might need it.

An aside: In searching the Internet for photos of one of America’s greatest curmudgeons, H.L. Mencken, I was surprised to find the one above. He is sitting at a piano (who knew?), with an open book of music. A little Googling shows that Mencken was a pianist, and that he played regularly with a group of musicians who called themselves “The Saturday Night Club.” They got together to drink and play music. What is that piece of music on the piano in front of Mencken? No matter how much I zoom in, I can’t read the title. But it looks like German to me. The arrangement is clearly for voice with piano accompaniment. My guess is that it’s a book of Schubert lieder. Knowing that Mencken was a musician helps, I think, to understand why Mencken’s snark and irony were so beautiful and so effective as cultural and political commentary. He was an artist at it.

A UFO resistance? Count me in! (updated)


A “black triangle,” Belgium, 1990 (Wikipedia photo)

For many years, I have been alert for anything that might advance our knowledge of UFOs. Very little that could be seen as reliable has come along. The Disclosure Project did some interesting work back in 2013. And, in 2007, France made its UFO files public. Other than that, it has been mostly crickets, other than the usual non-serious stuff.

But, in the past week, we’ve gotten a little traction. On May 26, the New York Times ran a piece on Navy pilots who have reported UFOs. On May 28, the Washington Post ran an op-ed with the headline UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact. The author of the Washington Post piece, Daniel W. Drezner, includes a link to an academic article published in the journal Political Theory. The article is titled Sovereignty and the UFO.

Though the Washington Post piece includes a fascinating video of radar imagery from Navy jets, none of these articles advances our knowledge of UFOs in a scientific way. That’s not happening. Why?

Sovereignty and the UFO lays out a brilliant argument for why no one is permitted to take UFOs seriously. “Our argument,” the authors write, “is that UFO ignorance is political rather than scientific.” The questions then become: How do our political arrangements make it impossible to take UFOs seriously? And: How might it be possible to disable political control of the UFO mystery and make it a question for science instead? The authors’ arguments are dense and a touch postmodern. Nevertheless I found their case quite persuasive. In their conclusion, they argue that resistance is the key to making it politically and scientifically possible to seriously study UFOs:

The structuralism of our argument might suggest that resistance is futile. However, the structure of the UFO taboo also has aporias and fissures that make it—and the anthropocentric structure of rule that it sustains—potentially unstable…. The kind of resistance that can best exploit these fissures might be called militant agnosticism. Resistance must be agnostic because by the realist standards of modernity, regarding the UFO/ET question neither atheism nor belief is epistemically justified; we simply do not know. Concretely, agnosticism means “seeing” rather than ignoring the UFO, taking it seriously as a truly unidentified object. Since it is precisely such seeing that the UFO taboo forbids, in this context seeing is resistance. However, resistance must also be militant, by which we mean public and strategic, or else it will indeed be futile. The reproduction of UFO ignorance depends crucially on those in positions of epistemic authority observing the UFO taboo.

In the Washington Post, Drezner, also a scholar, is arguing that we must take seriously the possibilities that UFOs are extraterrestrial.

I am greatly concerned with the mystery of UFOs because, almost 50 years ago, I saw one. It was not a mere light the sky, and there was nothing vague about it. It was instead an enormous object less than a quarter of a mile away from me, well before dusk, in rural eastern North Carolina. The object appeared cylindrical. It was as long as a football field. It was hovering — silently — just above treetop level. There were lights — not exterior lights but what looked more like windows and a lighted interior. A friend who was with me saw it, too. We watched as it made a slow turning maneuver. After that, I can only describe it as falling upward into the sky at a steep angle. The acceleration was astonishing, and perfectly silent.

Epistemologically, I’m well aware that my testimony (even combined with my friend’s) proves absolutely nothing to anyone other than myself. But, because there was no mistaking what I saw, it proves to me only that UFOs are real and that their capabilities far exceed any earth technology. Because it fell into the sky and into space, then assuming that space is where it came from would seem reasonable to me. One of my great hopes — and I’m not getting any younger — is that I am able to live long enough to see the UFO mystery solved. I would agree with the authors of the Political Theory article that the investigation must be undertaken by science, and that political notions and political power must no longer be allowed to sweep UFOs under the rug.

The consequences of proving that there are UFOs and that they are extraterrestrial would of course shake our world profoundly. Many — particularly those who are powerful — don’t want the world to be profoundly shaken. But there are many like me who would like to see the lords of earth taken down a few notches. The authors of the Political Theory article write:

The ontological threat is that even if the ETs were benign, their confirmed presence would create tremendous pressure for a unified human response, or world government.

If you think for a while about the possibility of a galactic federation — as a great many science fiction writers have done — then the need for a unified earth, an earth subject to a whole new kind of sovereignty and law, becomes apparent.

No wonder the governments of earth find UFOs so threatening that they’re best denied and ignored. Wouldn’t it be fine thing to be a citizen of the galaxy, with a passport issued by the Planet Earth?

Update: In comments, Chenda and Ken asked for a sketch of the UFO I saw. I’m not much of an artist, but here’s a sketch. The object was just above the treetops, less than a quarter of a mile from us. It was a great deal longer than a Boeing 747. It was hovering silently. While we watched, it made a slow turning maneuver. Then it silently accelerated at a seemingly impossible rate (toward the northeast, at about a 45 degree vertical angle) and disappeared into space in seconds.

As for the location, it was along U.S. 264 about 10 miles east of Greenville, North Carolina. (See the red circle.) At the time, this was rural farming country. I remember power lines along the highway, but there were no houses in sight. The date would have been October 1971, I believe.

Season 8, the final episode

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

Many thanks to all who have come here to read these posts, and to all who have commented. It has been a lot of fun, and no doubt Ken and David will do more co-reviewing in the future as suitable material comes along.

Ken:

Morning David,

Were you as sad as I was to see the credits roll? This has been the best series I’ve ever watched, and it’s played a small but special role in my emotional life of the past 9 years. We are still in the golden age of television, so perhaps we’ll be surprised again in our lifetimes, but for now there’ll be a big hole that GoT had occupied for a quarter of my life.

As for this episode, it was solid, if unflashy. There are probably some fans who cannot forgive the show for what it did to Dany, who was practically a Nazi empress in the end. I have my sympathies with them, as you know, but if we can accept the plot and forgive the writers their mistakes, I think this was a good enough episode to conclude a legendary series. Stray thoughts…

– There seemed to be two episodes in episode. The first one ended when Drogon turns the Iron Throne into lava. The second one begins with the constitutional convention outside of the city with all the remaining lords and ladies of note. There was dissonance between the two, and I wish they’d broken this episode into two. The moment when Jon kills Dany was such a HUGE moment, but yet it felt improperly placed at roughly the twenty-minute mark of the episode. Think of how dramatic that scene could have been if they’d ended the episode with it. You can’t kill Ned Stark on the third minute. You can’t kill Jon Snow in episode two of a season. Timing matters. Placement matters. And to maximize the gravity of that scene, and to simply do respect to such an important character, you have to give her the dignity of dying in the last moments of an episode.

– After that scene, it was as if a new director took over. It flowed awkwardly into the constitutional convention, which is the sort of scene that isn’t a strength of the show. Later on, the camera work following the backs of the characters’ heads is the sort of scene I’d typically love, but I found it a touch confusing and rushed.

– Does everything fit together? You know I’m unhappy that we didn’t get any closure to the magical and fantasy side of the show (The Night King, the fire religion, etc.), but I think we got good closure for the political situation and for the characters. Dany did indeed break the wheel, and Westeros has evolved into a crude republic. Arya got to go on her adventure, Sansa got to Brexit the north from the realm, and Jon got to live a free life. I’m sure many of us were hoping it would be Jon on the Iron Throne, but Bran makes sense, and it’s nice to know Jon will get to live a life, wild and free, in a land he felt drawn to, and where he’ll have many adventures. (Let’s just hope there’s no “King of the Wildlings” spinoff series.)

– Why did Drogon melt the Iron Throne? Was that rage or wisdom?

– If you’re George R.R. Martin, how do you feel watching this episode?

– What are your thoughts?

David:

Mornin’, Ken …

Well, here we are. This is the first day of the rest of our lives after Game of Thrones. On this hard day, we snap back to the “real” world and think about how the story has changed us. Having immersed ourselves in a collective experience (we have so few of them), we’re on our own again. It doesn’t help that when we squint and peer into the harsh light of the real world, as though we’ve just emerged from a dark theater, we see that we’re in a big mess. Maybe we don’t have to completely let go of Game of Thrones, though. As we look back at the series, there are a great many metaphors and encrypted meanings to be mined. In fact I think that the final episode points us in that direction and encourages us to get to work to fix this world. Where should our characters go next, and what must we do?

I do have some dissatisfactions. For one, I think we needed more catharsis. At least this episode slowed down and gave us time to think and time to feel. But I agree with you that it would have been better as two episodes. On the stage, there is a wonderful part of the show that film does not have — the curtain call. On the stage, the catharsis will have occurred during the last minutes of the drama, but somehow the curtain call seals and verifies the catharsis and smoothes the transition back to the real world. Some films try to replicate this experience by showing portraits of all the characters as the credits roll, revisiting key scenes. Something like that would have been a great help with Game of Thrones.

The story did indeed follow a classical trajectory, and for that I am extremely grateful. On the whole, the good were rewarded, the wicked were punished, and the surviving characters have a path to their hearts’ desire even if they have not yet achieved it. I don’t want to quibble, especially on the day that we’ve arrived at the end and all of us are in need of therapy. But I do think that there are too many loose ends and too many ill-fitting elements that seem to have been contrapted. At the end of the previous episode, in which Daenerys broke bad, I still hoped for something closer to perfection. But now I would agree that the final two episodes could have been better. Was it Martin’s touch that was lacking? If so, will Martin’s forthcoming books do a better job?

When Drogon melted the Iron Throne, I saw it as both rage and wisdom — rage that the throne was the thing that Daenerys died for, and wisdom that it wasn’t worth it. Drogon no doubt felt rage toward Jon but decided to spare Jon and direct the rage toward the throne.

Though many people had recently guessed that Bran would end up as king, it still rates as a major surprise, I think. Martin is telling us something with that — the importance of qualifications that come with being broken, abstract, reserved, and far-seeing, as opposed to a person of all action and a great deal of talk. I think that Martin also is telling us something with what you called the constitutional convention, in which everyone, including the lord only of onions, gets a vote. As for how George R.R. Martin might feel watching this episode, my guess would be that he saw the flaws more clearly than anyone and that his energy for finishing the final volumes is greatly renewed. At least I hope so. We do have that to look forward to — reading the last two books.

Ken:

Let’s start with quibbles….

Why did the show-makers have to rush these past two seasons, and these last two episodes? I doubt that there were logistical impediments. By now, they had obscene budgets. The actors were all in. The fans were happy to wait an extra year to give them a chance to get everything right. HBO would have loved to have millions of people visiting their site and channel for a few more weeks, right?

But yet it all felt rushed. It’s such a shame because there were so many things that could have been developed, starting with closure to the Night King plot. There was some mysterious connection between the dead, climate change, and magic, and I think this would have been difficult (but rich and complex and one-of-a-kind) storytelling if they’d really taken the time to sort it all out. And time and resources they had! There were so many more little conversations that could have happened. Just put a slosh of wine in two cups and have a pair of characters talk for a scene. This could have made these last two seasons feel less rushed, and it would have given the writers more opportunity to better tie up everyone’s story. It could have made Dany’s turn less abrupt. And this is the sort of scene that isn’t that expensive to produce.

As for the curtain call, wasn’t Arya on the boat and Jon on her horse in the woods enough, or did you think the curtain call could have been longer and richer? Or are you suggesting we actually see the characters as actors? I think I’m with you, but I’m not sure how much more we need. Jon erecting a teepee or winking at a wildling? How would you have orchestrated a proper curtain call?

What about catharsis for the hundreds of thousands of commoners who’ve been pounded into the dirt by years of war and flame? Yes, this has always been a story about lords and ladies (it’s a Game of Thrones after all) as well as the few commoners bright or talented enough to climb the ranks (such as Davos and Bronn…). I’m not trying to sound sanctimonious here; I’m merely making the point that the Westeros world-building feels a little empty without having true commoner characters and points of view. I know I’m beating a dead horse, but I want to beat it one last time. We see everything from the point of view of a few conveniently-born characters, and never (except when they’re being incinerated) the people of Westeros. And Westeros is more the people than the elite, right? They experience years of warfare and genocide, but we don’t get to hear their complaints or calls for justice. There should have been a voice from the King’s Landing masses who called for the heads of every lord and lady after the most recent incineration. In reality, that kingdom ought to be ripe for a French Revolution. I suppose we got a bit of this with the Grand Sparrow and his religious uprising, but I feel like the show has failed to give the people their proper ending.

That said, I’m fine with the show ending as a crude republic (“oligarchy” might be a better term). Democracy can’t sprout up from just anything, even ashes. And this Iron Age empire just wasn’t prepared for it, but we have seen positive incremental change, and that, as a form of government, is good enough for me, even if the wheel is still sort of rolling.

I think Bran as king could have been set up better. We’ve seen that Bran has knowledge and that he’s level-headed. And yes, there are virtues to having been broken, or from having lived a hard life. But have we seen any leadership from Bran? Couldn’t the show have done a better job either emphasizing his supernatural gifts or his fitness for office? I suppose I don’t think the show integrated the three-eye raven part of his character with his new role as king. Is Martin saying leaders should be like three-eyed ravens? If so, I’m not sure what that means. I thought Bran might end up living in the roots of a weirwood tree, like the last three-eyed raven, but what was even that dude’s role, other than being the keeper of knowledge? Maybe there’s something here, but it all feels a bit muddled to me… The problem with Bran, at bottom, is that we saw him collecting information, and not necessarily wisdom. Wisdom requires a bit of suffering, and while Bran has certainly suffered on his journeys, I’m speaking more to his vision quests and time-traveling journeys, on which he seemed like artificial intelligence gathering data about humans, and not quite a human, living and learning. That fact that he’s this autistic Spock-like creature in the end emphasizes this problem.

Okay, less quibbling…

GoT is such a groundbreaking show because it has done things no show has attempted to do. Can you think of a plot that is as long and interwoven as GoT’s? Yes, much of it clearly was not figured out ahead of time. But a lot of it was (seasons 1-6, I’d argue), and I do think the big things were: that Dany would turn, that Jon would stab her, that Arya would kill the Night King, and that Bran would be king. Such storytelling is a monumental and, to my knowledge, un-replicated feat. It was imperfectly executed, but nothing comes close to rivaling the epic length and complexity of the story.

The show’s display of political backstabbing spoke to the cynicism we have for our politicians. The threat of the Night King and a long winter spoke to our looming worries of overpopulation and climate change. That our favorite characters died and terrible people came to wield power speaks to our own experiences in our own countries. The death and devastation and treachery, the idealistic dying and the powerful prevailing, all felt strangely comforting. That’s because this fantasy show was more real than reality TV. It exposed conventional storytelling narratives for the fakes they are, always letting the superhero miraculously survive and triumph. Like our world, it was a savage, gritty, predatory universe. Whether by luck or design, GoT was the perfect show for the 21st Century. It failed when it swept plots under the rug (“winter is coming”), but it succeeded in tapping into the zeitgeist and into our psyches to tell a story that spoke to our gravest concerns and sincerest hopes—hopes for a better world. It tells us to go on long journeys. To suffer so we can empathize with others. To play fair, but when you play, play to win. To take incremental change when you can get it. To put the wise in power. To let the kind and savvy advise him/her. To kill the tyrants. To live free. To explore. To Brexit (?). To let go of your longings for hateful revenge. And, all the while, to make the world as you wish it to be, while always seeing it for what it is, good and evil and everything in between.

David:

Very good thoughts and good words, Ken. For now, I have only two small things to mention.

By curtain call, I was thinking about brief clips of scenes that include the characters who did not survive until the end. (The film version of “History Boys,” for example, has a kind of virtual curtain call at the end, the dead included. That was very effective and helps to give emotional closure. Doesn’t “Princess Bride” do that, too?)

You mention the Iron Age. Let’s hear it for the Iron Age! One of the many things that made Game of Thrones so enjoyable was being able to spend so much time in an Iron Age world — horses, wind-powered ships, buildings of stone, lots of fireplaces, rough roads, long travel times, terrain unspoiled by heavy machinery, artisans rather than factories. One of my dreams for the real world is that, whether accidentally or intentionally, most of our technologies fall back to the Iron Age.

For an update, I’d like to think some more about science fiction and fantasy fiction (and film) in general and how Game of Thrones has advanced the state of the art.

Season 8, episode 5 (2 updates)

Ken Ilgunas and David Dalton are reviewing each episode of the final season of Game of Thrones. Check the “Game of Thrones” category to list all of these posts.

David:

Mornin’, Ken …

We just watched, I believe, the most extraordinary television episode ever made. It wasn’t just the spectacle, which topped all the previous accomplishments of this series. It also was the drama. In the middle of all that destruction and death, it was the fates of our beloved characters that kept us mesmerized.

I miss Varys already. The Hound did not deserve to die either, but at least he took his monster brother with him into the flames. So much for wondering whether Jaime would save Cersei or kill her. Instead he arrived just in time to die with her. Good riddance to Euron. Qyburn deserved a slower death, but as expected he was killed by one of his own creations.

You know how much I have wanted this series to follow the trajectories of classical storytelling, with a satisfying and irony-free ending in which, on the whole, good triumphs over evil. With one episode remaining, we are on course for that. There was no way that Cersei was going to go down easy. She got her just deserts (with an enormous amount of unjust collateral damage). Much justice was done in this episode, yet much injustice was done in the process. At least three of the remaining characters — Jon, Tyrion, and Grey Worm — are greatly disturbed by this injustice. The camera spent a great deal of time on the suffering of the innocents, about which Tyrion and Varys had worried so much. Injustice and cruelty on that scale do not bode well for Daenerys. Grey Worm’s troops could have gone to the Red Keep and captured Cersei. But Daenerys wanted total destruction. She will have to pay.

And though we are on course for a classical ending, it’s not at all apparent how that will be achieved. Since dying in dyads seems to be the new thing, it’s conceivable that Jon could die with Daenerys, or that Tyrion could die with her. It’s possible that Daenerys will abdicate the throne, recognizing her own unsuitability, and cede the throne to Jon, because she knows that Jon is loved and she is not. But I think we should believe Jon when he has said so many times that he does not want the throne. And yet, how could Jon go on living and not accept the throne, since by the rules it is his?

As for the throne itself, I wonder if it isn’t safe to suppose that the throne was destroyed and will never be used again. That probably bodes well for the future of the Seven Kingdoms. I expect the capital to move — to Winterfell. Was that snow falling in the final scenes, or ashes? When a heroine gets up from the rubble and storms away on a white horse, what can that foreshadow other than last-minute matters of urgent justice? Both Jon and Arya appear to have rethought their lives while Kings Landing burned. The setup for the final episode is as near-perfect as any mortal writer could make it.

Ken:

Morning David,

GoT’s episode scores on Rotten Tomatoes are getting progressively worse. At this time, the latest episode, “The Bells,” is less than fifty percent “fresh.”

This is a bit surprising to me because I thought “The Bells” was exceptional. Spectacular even. I agree with you that this might have been the finest hour in the history of television.

That said, I think some of the criticism is probably valid, centered on the question of the Mad Queen: Was Dany’s descent into madness true to her character? But the fact that we’re asking this question is partly what makes it so exceptional. Her turn was both a surprise and a reasonable outcome. It is Martin at his best. Or Martin at his almost best.

If you think her turn was too abrupt and too out of character, I can see why someone might hate this episode. Frankly, I don’t know. Just an episode or two ago she seemed well adjusted. And she has been a beloved character for eight seasons, freeing slaves along the way, who has always done well to manage her worst instincts. So maybe it seemed a touch unpleasantly random. I get that. That said, I respect the hell out of Martin for creating such a naughty story: We watch a young and charming idealist build power for eight seasons and then, at the last moment, she turns everything to ash. No other writer would be so bold. This defies all the norms of classic storytelling.

Maybe it could have been foreshadowed better? Maybe we should have seen more of her madness before she did what she did? One episode she’s fighting alongside Jon in the north and she’s clearly got all of her wits. A few days later her hair is a mess, her eyes are wild, and then she’s burning a city alive? I’m thinking that maybe her descent into madness could have been a bit more complete.

I suppose we also have to ask the question: What’s in this for Dany, the breaker of chains? Why is conquering Westeros so important if you’re just going to burn it to the ground? Why not take the remains of your army back to Essos, where you’re loved?

I ask these questions because I’m wondering if there was a point to what just happened. Is this her breaking the wheel? Is this her ending tyranny? Did these people need to die and did the city need to burn for, as she says, the future generations of Westeros? Why does she even care about the future generations? I suppose the ultimate question is: Is there a larger point to her destiny (that doesn’t even factor in her own wellbeing)? Or is Martin saying that there is no such thing as destiny, and that Dany’s story is the story of a ruthless conquistador, who wrongly thinks they’re fighting for a higher purpose, when they’re not…

If there is a point, maybe “The Bells” lays the groundwork for a more peaceful empire, even if her life must be sacrificed along with the thousands of innocents in their crisped hovels and charred alleyways. Maybe this is just me trying to twist the narrative into what feels right and expected and narratively-coherent. But maybe Martin is saying “nonsense” to all of that. Maybe he’s still breaking with the traditions of classic storytelling. And I love him for that; even he’s not leading us to a place where we can satisfyingly watch, in the last moments of the show, the king and queen united, and the kingdom at peace, just as the curtains close.

I’m eager to discuss this more, but a few stray thoughts for now…

– Sandor Clegane has long been my favorite character. His last moments with Arya were touching, and his death with his brother, though hard to watch, seemed like a proper end to his character. The makeup, costumes, and setting design (which too often go unnoticed) were top notch. These were like two gods duking it out on the peak of Olympus. To use an overused word, it was epic. He died with his vital life force: revenge, plunging her brother, and himself, into the flames that made them who they were. Without his death, there may have been nothing to keep him going and nothing to feed his better instincts.

– I thought Jamie and Cersei’s deaths were beautiful.

– One quibble with your review. I do not think Grey Worm was disturbed by the injustice, but that he was complicit in it. I believe it was him who hurled the spear at the Lannister army that’d already surrendered. He let his mid-battle bloodlust get the best of him.

– I would be very upset if the Iron Throne was melted off camera. That’s a hugely symbolic moment that I hope they’ll show us next week.

– Very fascinating theory about Winterfell being the new capital. It’s not a great port city or well positioned, but why not? Does Sansa somehow get to be queen? I don’t see how that’ll work. But you’re right to imagine a whole bunch of successor scenarios, and dyads dying together.

– I thought the whole episode was a visual and cinematic spectacle. The camera work, the flames, the defenses, the rubble… It was a visual feast, but in a more honest way than what we saw in the zombie battle episode. Here, we saw pain, devastation, rape, murder, bloodlust. We saw the worst instincts of mankind. Has GoT said anything more honest?

– I think that is probably the last we’ve seen from Arya, unless it’s an image of her getting on a boat and sailing away. It was a fitting and beautiful end to her story.

– Emilia Clarke’s acting was outstanding. The best we’ve seen from her. Give her an Emmy.

– I don’t think it was in Missandei’s character to yell, “Dracarys!” in the last episode. Why is a former slave telling Dany to kill a whole bunch of innocent people? Where does Missandei’s rage come from? She was taken fairly in battle and given a swift death. It would have been more in character to tell Grey Worm and Dany that she loves them in her last moments. And that would have given Dany more reason to do what she did.

– Will Dany snap out of her murderous delirium, and say, “What have I done?” Or is she the Mad Tyrant from now on?

– What’s to be done? Tyrion and Jon and the rest are appropriately horrified. Will Dany take a sword in the back? By whom? I think the conventional storytelling arcs, if they’re to be trusted, has the Mad Queen going down and the Just King taking her place on the Iron Throne. That would be the end that most satisfies the typical consumer of Western storytelling. But at this point it’s fair to say, “Who the hell knows.”

Update 1:

David:

I’m so glad we agree on the quality of this episode. As for the progressively worse reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, that is very interesting. All I can suggest is that it’s what I call “vindictive” reviewing, which I often see in Amazon book reviews that take a stand on a controversial subject. To a vindictive book reviewer, if you don’t like the book’s message, then it must be a bad book. By now, I suppose, so many people’s pet ideas have been frustrated that they’ve gotten vindictive because they haven’t had their way. Maybe that’s an advantage of my easy ability to suspend disbelief. I just go with it and don’t complain very much. Not that I would do that with just any author. But I trust Martin.

To follow up on some of your observations:

— If Daenerys is mad, it comes and goes. We’ve seen this before, as when she crucified the slave traders in Meereen. Though it was cruel overkill, that was an act of justice. As for the innocents inside the walls of King’s Landing, surely Cersei deserves some of the blame for that. She brought them inside to use as shields. It’s not that I’m apologizing for Daenerys. I’m only thinking of how, in Game of Thrones, there is never a sharp line between good and evil (except maybe for Jon). As for the state of Daenerys’ soul, much depends on what she does next.

— That Sansa could end up as queen surely is a possibility. That the next king or queen should be loved seems to be a rule. Sansa is loved, though not as much as Jon is loved. As for the other rules of succession, one rule surely must be noble blood. In addition to Daenerys, that would leave Jon, Sansa, Arya, Bran, and Tyrion, and maybe Yara as candidates. If Martin or HBO violate the rules of classic storytelling, it’s even possible that we don’t even end up with a winner. Instead we end up with a failed state, and winter coming. Yikes.

— That Arya’s storming away on a white horse was the last we’ll see of her makes sense. But what would she do? Wander, with winter coming on? I think she sees Winterfell as her home. She loves her siblings. Surely she will return there. The opening scenes of the next episode could be in some unexpected place, as part of the endplot. But I’m guessing that we’ll go to Winterfell next.

Having said that I trust Martin and willingly suspend disbelief for him, it would be a huge blow to my psyche and to my sense of story if we get a twisted ending with whiffs of nihilism and more injustice and unhappiness than I can stomach. Still, it’s a great credit to Martin as a writer that with an hour to go, anything could happen.

Ken:

Scanning the reviews, it appears the biggest gripe is about Dany’s unearned turn from idealist wannabe queen to genocidal nutcase. They have a point. All of a sudden she becomes her crazy father, even though she hasn’t exhibited any real symptoms. I think we have to ask ourselves if this is indeed truly bad storytelling. You’re right that she’s judiciously executed others (usually individuals or slaveowners in small groups), but never have we seen her kill innocents, and I don’t think Cersei can take any of the blame for that. The battle had been won. Soldiers were surrendering and the bells were ringing. The people weren’t at all being used as shields. Dany had gone full-on crazy. No one can be on Team Dany anymore, and that’s got to be very hard for fans. She might be able to make a better decisions after she wakes from her bloodlust, but I don’t think there’s anything to be salvaged. Even kind gestures will not change the fact that a beloved character’s soul has turned rotten for good.

I don’t think you’re appreciating the gravity of her crimes. I suppose I’m suggesting that the criticism of the episode isn’t entirely vindictive and that there are reasonable complaints. I loved the episode, but it might have been a bit more logical if we’d seen her turn foreshadowed better.

I’ll say it again, though: this was a magnificent episode. I’ve had my issues with the show, as you know. I thought the writers committed a dereliction of duty by failing to bring cosmological closure to the White Walkers. I thought there’s been a few too many cheesy action scenes. The last two seasons have been out of pace with the rest of the series. I thought the political machinations (so clever at first!) have gotten dumber over the seasons. I could go on. But I think this episode makes up for missteps. I think the show has found its footing for the finale. GoT is not perfect, for all the reasons I’ve shared these past few weeks, but at this point it knows where it’s going and is poised to conclude grandly.

— I think you’re right about Dany coming to her senses. Perhaps abdication is her way of regaining a tiny bit nobility after her genocide. Giving the Throne to Jon and heading back to rule Essos would be for the greater good, but I’m doubtful it ends that cleanly.

— I could be wrong, but I do think that that’s the last we’ll see of Arya. She’ll be a better sort of Clegane. A knight errant, but one who’s not driven by hatred or revenge. I do not think she’ll return to Winterfell. She said as much to Clegane on their path to King’s Landing.

— Care to make any predictions of where everyone winds up? Mine:

Bran crawls into a Weirwood tree and lives among its roots.
Dany gets murdered.
Grey Worm dies defending Dany.
Jon‘s the reluctant king with Davos as his hand.
Sansa either becomes Jon’s hand or rules as warden of the north.
Tyrion dies. I’m not sure where he belongs…
Brienne is the captain of the King’s Guard.
Bronne? No idea.
Arya sails off the west coast into waters unknown.
Sam becomes grand maester of Citadel.
Yara is never on camera again.

Who am I forgetting?

Update 2:

David:

If it turns out to be true that Daenerys has succumbed to the Targaryen madness, then I think I’ll continue to be the contrarian here and say that it was decently foreshadowed. In researching the history of the Mad King, this turned up:

“The Mad King was obsessed with it. He loved to watch people burn, the way their skin blackened and blistered and melted off their bones. He burned lords he didn’t like. He burned Hands who disobeyed him. He burned anyone who was against him. Before long, half the country was against him. Aerys saw traitors everywhere. So he had his pyromancers place caches of wildfire all over the city. Beneath the Sept of Baelor and the slums of Flea Bottom. Under houses, stables, taverns. Even beneath the Red Keep itself.”

―Ser Jaime Lannister

Did you notice how, as King’s Landing was burning, there were bursts of green fire here and there? That, I would assume, would be leftover caches of the Mad King’s wildfire, connecting lots of dots.

This is not looking good for Daenerys. I feel for the fans who loved her. She is very likeable, when she isn’t cruel. If there was a last straw that tipped her over the edge emotionally (and there were many recent provocations including the murder of Missandei and Varys’ treason), then I’d say it was her last scene with Jon, in which she realized that she had lost him. Jon might have been her last connection to a world of good.

Ken:

Indeed, there’s plenty of foreshadowing to draw from. She’s mercilessly burnt many and it’s in her DNA. But she’s also amazingly resilient. At the end of Season One, she’d lost her man, all the Dothraki, even the clothes she wore. All she had was Jorah and few Dothraki stragglers (and three baby dragons). Yet she believed in herself and prevailed. I don’t know if it’s right that her recent losses merit her complete plunge into madness. Yes, she’s lost a lot. (Jorah, Missandei, two dragons, half an army, and a romance with Jon). But she still had a lot! (Friendship with Jon, a dragon, half an army, various cities to the east under her influence, her health, her youth, etc.) There is nothing about King’s Landing or the Lannisters that should summon the degree of rage she exhibited, at least on the surface level. (I’m open to hear deeper, more psychological explanations tying in her unusual relationship with Westeros as her birth country, not to mention her murdered parents or messed up family life.)

I see this all as a healthy debate and I’m definitely not firmly on the critics’ side; I merely think such criticisms (at least as we’ve framed the debate) are healthy literary criticisms. I think I would only argue, as Josh has articulated for me, that we needed to see more psychic breakdown between the zombie battle and the King’s Landing battle.

Why do we know so little about socialism?

John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, by William A. Edmundson. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 212 pages.

I am going to propose an answer to the question that I raise in the headline: The reason we know so little about socialism is that, for two generations, since the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the Overton window has been narrowed and pulled hard to the right. Socialism now lies outside the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. Even Democrats are terrified of the word socialism, because it’s now a grenade word flung from the right to demonize and sabotage any idea that might reduce economic and political inequality or that might help the poor or hurt the rich. (Not that this is new. Decades ago, the right also saw the development of Social Security and Medicare as treacherous socialism.) The end of the Soviet Union in 1991 is believed to have been the last word on the viability of socialism.

Public discourse now holds that, on the matter of socialism, the case is closed. Yes, Bernie Sanders rudely brought up the subject. But few people really know what he might be talking about. If Sanders himself knows, he’s doing a very poor job of explaining it. The political problem for liberals seems to be, how can we make gains in justice and equality without being defeated at the outset by the s-word grenade?

But there is a very great irony here, though it is an irony that only the intelligentsia are aware of. That is that, while the idea of socialism was being driven out of public discourse, enormous progress in moral and political philosophy was being made behind the scenes, in academia. In 1971, John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. This book almost certainly will stand as the most important work of the 20th Century in moral and political philosophy. Rawls, in dialogue with other scholars, continued to develop his theory of justice throughout his life. He died in 2002. The year before his death, he published Justice as Fairness: A Restatement. Those were his last words on the subject.

Rawls’ theory of justice is still very active terrain in academia, though it rarely spills over into public discourse. Why is that? I would suggest that there are two reasons. The first is that justice as fairness lies outside the Overton window, and it is far too liberal to be tolerated in today’s public discourse. The second is that what has been written on the theory is very difficult to read. It is written by philosophers, for philosophers. I recently complained to a friend that, in other difficult subjects such as physics, we have science journalists who work to make progress in science known to the intelligent public. Scientists themselves often write books for lay readers. In philosophy, there is a wall between public discourse and the ivory tower. If there are journalists of philosophy, at least in English, I don’t know who they are. If you are, like me, an ordinary non-academic but motivated person, and you want to know about justice as fairness, you’ve got to climb a wall.

Edmundson’s John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, though it is as dense and difficult to read as Rawls, wants to make only one simple point. That is that Rawls eventually concluded that liberal democratic socialism is the only form of government that satisfies the requirements of justice as fairness. Five types of government are candidates. Four types fail: property-owning democracy, laissez-faire capitalism, welfare-state capitalism, and state socialism. (The Soviet Union, by the way, was an example of state socialism.)

Before Rawls, Karl Marx would have been the go-to source on socialism. The hippies of the 1960s had only Marx. (In fact, the hippies of the 1960s almost destroyed the manuscript for A Theory of Justice. Rawls was at Stanford University at the time, and the manuscript was in his office. In April 1970, students firebombed the building in which Rawls’ office was located. The adjoining office was completely destroyed. Rawls’ office had smoke and water damage. Rawls and his wife salvaged the soaked but legible manuscript, dried the pages, and retyped it.) After Rawls, I think it would be safe to say that Marx is now mostly obsolete and mostly of historical interest.

It would be similarly safe to say that, after Rawls, the previous state-of-the-art in moral philosophy is obsolete and has been replaced by justice as fairness. That would be utilitarianism, which boils down to the greatest good for the greatest number, a moral philosophy under which some can be permitted to suffer if it makes others better off. Justice as fairness does not allow the suffering of the few for the benefit of the many.

Of course Rawls has critics. It has been a while since I attempted a brief survey of arguments against Rawls. My impression, as I recall, was that many of Rawls’ critics are people such as academic theologians who don’t want what they see as the authority of “revealed” sources made obsolete and superseded by human reason.

Because Rawls almost never comes up in public discourse, it occurred to me to wonder how I became aware of Rawls in the first place. I believe that the answer to that is that Thomas Piketty refers to Rawls in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. There are four references to Rawls in that book’s index (only one is in the text; the other three are in the notes). The title of Rawls’ first book, A Theory of Justice, certainly would have caught my eye, and that’s probably when I looked into it and ordered the book from Amazon.

Rawls’ ideas — whether on justice as fairness or on socialism — are just too much for me to try to go into there. I can only encourage people to do their own reading. One reason that Rawls (not to mention Edmundson) is difficult to read is that there is a long list of concepts that must be understood. The concepts have names that often aren’t very helpful. For example, it’s not enough just to know the meaning of the English word “reciprocity,” because the term stands for a much more complicated concept in Rawls’ writing. Other terms are “the difference principle,” “fair value,” “the special psychologies,” “distributive justice,” “envy,” “excusable envy,” “ideal theory,” “non-ideal theory,” “lexical priority,” “the motivation principle,” “nearly just society,” “non-comparing groups,” “peace by satisfaction,” “perfectly ordered society,” “principle of continuity,” “pure procedural justice,” “pure ownership,” “reasonable pluralism,” “reconciliation requirement,” “reflective equilibrium,” “relative stability,” “restricted utility principle,” “self-esteem,” “self-respect,” “social minimum,” “socially dangerous extent,” “testamentary freedom,” “unusual risk aversion,” “well-ordered society,” and so on.

All of the above terms are of course defined somewhere, but the trick is to grasp the concept when you first encounter it and attach that concept to its term. I would suggest that anyone who wishes to read up on justice as fairness make a list of these terms as they are encountered, with one’s own notes on what they mean. The terms are used over and over again, and if you’ve forgotten the concept, then the text will be opaque.

The memory of relatively recent experiments in socialism (at least in the English-speaking world) also are being lost. I was born in 1948, and thus I have no memory of Clement Attlee, who followed Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in 1945. Attlee did deliver on his promise of bringing socialism to the United Kingdom. That form of government stood until Margaret Thatcher dismantled it. I know very little about this period, so a biography of Attlee and a history of that period in the United Kingdom are now on my reading list.

Ironically, academic philosophers are aware of how other and better alternatives to our current form of government are unknown to most people (though they’re doing next to nothing about it). Edmundson quotes Michael Walzer:

For many years now, I have been worrying about what might be called the cultural reproduction of the left. [I]n comparison with the different religious communities, the secular left does not seem able to pass on to its next generations a rich intellectual culture or an engaging popular culture. The tradition is thin. I worried about this with regard to the American left and also, in greater anxiety, with the regard to the Zionist left.

Indeed, the problem is general…. [C]ompare three national liberation movements — in India, Israel, and Algeria. In each case, the movement was secular and leftist; in each case, it succeeded in establishing a secular state; and in each case, this secular state was challenged some 30 years later by religious zealots. Three different religions but three similar versions of zealotry: modernized, politicized, ideological. The leaders of the secular liberationists, people like Nehru, Ben-Gurion, and Ben Bella, were convinced that secularization was inevitable — the disenchantment of the social world. But they did not succeed in creating a rich cultural alternative to the old religion. They thought they didn’t have to do that; modern science was the alternative. Modern science, however, does not produce emotionally appealing life-cycle celebrations or moving accounts of the value and purpose of our lives. That’s what religion does, and secular leftism, though often described on analogy with religion, has not been similarly creative.

What this all boils down to, I think, is that those of us on the left have a great deal of intellectual work to do. And, having done some of that work, it must be shared with the rational public.

I’ll attempt an analogy to cooking. I have sometimes made fun of some provincial Chinese restaurants in these parts after discovering that Mexicans are doing the cooking. That cooking is bound to be terrible, because the cooks don’t even understand what they’re trying to achieve. So it is with alternatives to our endangered American democracy, with its appalling injustices and its extreme economic and political inequalities. Something must be done about it. But we’re not even sure what we’re trying to achieve, or how to talk about it.

How did that happen? Partly, as Walzer said, we on the left have been doing a poor job. And partly it’s that the sheer meanness and glibness of the opposition, with their simple, cunning, and deceitful stories — have gotten way out ahead of us.

The left needs a clear vision of what it wants to achieve. The left needs the necessary concepts and language for a public discourse in which we can work out our differences, and for what Walzer calls “cultural reproduction.” And somehow this must be explained to the many, many people who would benefit but who have very hard heads addled by fundamentalist religion and opposition propaganda.