Game of Thrones

This well-known pseudo-historical romance series flying under the flag of fantasy is written by America's most beloved serial killer. If your name is Stark, if you are married to a Stark, if you are friends with a Stark, if you have even bumped into a Stark in a crowded market-place, you are walking around with a bull's-eye painted on your backside.

The books are exceptionally well-written -- George RR Martin is a gifted writer -- which may be why they have blown so many people's minds. The books contain (so far) not a single unicorn and only a few virgins.


One of the Readership's favorite characters in the series is a young tomboy named Arya Stark, who was taught sword fighting and was given a blade named Needle. She is usually praised on message boards as "kickass."  And this is the first thought for the day: namely, the damning, patriarchal praise of women as "kickass."  It seems the Modern Woman (and her projection onto medieval and crypto-medieval tabulae rasae) is held as admirable only insofar as she behaves like a man. This is the stealthy victory of masculinism over feminism: that Womyn's Ways of Doing are discounted and thrust aside in favor of the certified kickass style.

     My patient was intelligent but badly educated, as only products of the British educational system can be after 11 years of compulsory school attendance. She thought the Second World War took place in the 1970s and could give me not a single correct historical date.
I asked her whether she thought a young and violent burglar would have proved much of a companion. She admitted that he wouldn't, but said that he was the type she liked; besides which—in slight contradiction—all boys were the same.
     I warned her as graphically as I could that she was already well down the slippery slope leading to poverty and misery—that, as I knew from the experience of untold patients, she would soon have a succession of possessive, exploitative, and violent boyfriends, unless she changed her life. I told her that in the past few days, I had seen two women patients who had had their heads rammed down the lavatory, one who had had her head smashed through a window and her throat cut on the shards of glass, one who had had her arm, jaw, and skull broken, and one who had been suspended by her ankles from a tenth-floor window to the tune of, "Die, you bitch!"
     "I can look after myself," said my 17-year-old.
     "But men are stronger than women," I said. "When it comes to violence, they are at an advantage."
     "That's a sexist thing to say," she replied.
     A girl who had absorbed nothing at school had nevertheless absorbed the shibboleths of political correctness in general and of feminism in particular.
     "But it's a plain, straightforward, and inescapable fact," I said.
     "It's sexist," she reiterated firmly.

-- Theodore Dalrymple, "Tough Love"

The irony is that the real middle ages marked the first time that women erupted onto the public stage. There really were not many masculine occupations that women did not fill back then, even if they did not fill them in quite the same frequency. Biology may not be destiny, but she does cast a heavy vote in the Diet of life.  It is left to the Late Modern and Post-Modern to propose that biology (like will, self, etc.) is an illusion and such things are culturally determined. (All other things are of course biologically determined by the genes and evolution.)

The second thought of the day was triggered by a conjunction between Game of Thrones and the Exsultet, a/k/a Praeconium Paschale. In the Game of Thrones, the Red Priestess often repeats a mantra of her religion:

"For the night is dark and full of terrors."

Then, on Saturday evening, came a rejoinder:

"The night shall be as bright as day,
dazzling is the night for me, and full of gladness."
Et nox sicut dies illuminábitur:
et nox illuminátio mea in delíciis meis.

which illustrates nicely the difference between the faux-medieval and the real thing.