Bob Ellis is an illustrious Australian playwright, screenwriter, journalist, filmmaker, and political commentator. Ellis has attracted a great deal of international attention (and incredulity) for his hyper-sophisticated remarks yesterday wondering why there should be so much outrage over the beheading of James Foley by a representative of ISIS. If Joffrey Baratheon can have Ned Stark beheaded, after all…
Queen Elizabeth I, an English hero, beheaded her female cousin. Henry VIII, a popular English monarch, beheaded two of his wives. William Shakespeare, a popular playwright, beheaded no more than eighty of his major characters, including Macbeth, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Buckingham, Thomas More and twenty-four of Titus Andronicus’s sons. Charles Dickens, a popular novelist, beheaded his most admired character, Sidney Carton. The Simpsons, a popular television series, beheads in its Halloween specials eight or nine people a year, and in its subseries Itchy and Scratchy hundreds of others. The Simpsons is watched by hundreds of millions of children. And no complaint has been laid. Beheadings occur routinely in Game of Thrones. And no complaint has been laid.
Why then all the fuss? Why especially profess such shock at airbrushed images in which there is no horror at all and serve only, I guess, as Rorschach blots or shadow-puppet silhouettes of imagined beheadings or severed heads?
The only possible observation is that decadence, deracination, and over-exposure to left-wing BS damages the brain and anesthetizes natural human sensibilities, making some people unable to distinguish between contemporary reality and fiction.
The poor chap is apparently afraid of getting virused, but more importantly he likes using WordStar 4.0. a word-processing program released in 1987. Martin is no fan of dancing paperclips, and dislikes (for obvious reasons) the spellcheckers embedded in more modern word processing programs.
You might think that some adversary of the current administration must have photoshopped this photo of the President seated in the Iron Throne, but no! it turns out that the photo was tweeted Saturday evening by the White House itself, titled “Westeros Wing.”
Business Insider tells us that Barack Obama is a major “Game of Thrones” fan.
Ed West, at Breitbart, argues that “Game of Thrones” provides a better education in Medieval History than you’ll get at one of our PC universities these days.
Most historical fiction basically features a protagonist with 21st century values wearing a codpiece; I gave up on the Tudors when Cardinal Wolsey started giving a lecture on why we needed a ‘European community’. Most people in Britain think the EU is a pretty stupid idea today; in the 16th century it would have been inconceivable, even if Wolsey’s Treaty of London talked about ‘perpetual peace’ in Europe (a peace that was broken almost immediately, because that’s how things were).
Even the most sympathetic characters in Thrones, and I won’t give any spoilers for season four, end up doing some appalling things in the later books, not because they’re villains but because that’s the way the world was then, and how it is for much of humanity today. Bloody awful.
But there is a deeper implication for the success of Thrones; most people in England would be pretty ignorant about these historical parallels, because of the revolution in history teaching that took place in the dark, sexually weird decade that was the 1970s, part of a wider cultural revolution aimed at transforming western societies (and which has its parallel in the US).
Whereas my father’s generation would have learned about the kings of England at school, the bloody battles and usurpations, the poisonings, the tortures and the love affairs, and King Harold getting shot in the eye, by the time I was taught the subject the sort of questions we were asked went along the lines of ‘How would the social changes experienced during the 15th century have impacted on a female weaver living in Norfolk?’ Or ‘Look at Source A and Source B; what differences can you spot and why might that have been? Anyway, children, next term we’ll be reading about the Nazis. Again.’
Barack Obama has been described as “binge watching” his favorite television shows. Apparently, unlike other Americans who binge watch after the season is over, from recordings or Netflix DVDs, President Obama is able to persuade networks to give him advance screenings of program seasons which have not yet begun to air.
Naked DC reports that the fix is already in for Barack Obama to score his own advance viewing of the upcoming season of “Game of the Thrones.”
Be jealous, America. Instead of having to binge watch the show on Netflix or HBOGo after the season is finished like everyone else in America, the Commander in Chief will get to watch King Joffrey choke to death an entire season early.
SPOILERS, sorry. Also, like you didn’t know.
Anyway, back when HBO’s CEO met with White House officials as part of a pow-wow over technological leadership and the balance of security and privacy, President Obama made it his top priority to request an advance copy of the next season of Game of Thrones and then reiterated his request last week at a State dinner for French President Francois Hollande (adding True Detective, of course, though he’ll have to watch that the same way we all do, now that the season has ended). And as it turns out, when you’re the President, you can pretty much get what you want, especially out of top level donors.
Shortly after the news spread that President Obama requested advance copies of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,†headlines everywhere speculated if the main man in charge would get his wish.
It turns out, he did.
When asked by Vanity Fair if the president got a sneak peak of the “Game of Thrones†season premiere, co-creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss jointly replied, “One perk of being the most powerful man in the world: yes, you get to see episodes early.â€
The episode premieres for the rest of America on April 6.
Geek and sundry, earlier this year, released a humorous ditty, urging George R. R. Martin to “write, and write faster. Winter is coming.” And…
“Please bear in mind, in the time that you’ve had,
William Shakespeare turned out 35 friggin’ plays!
And if you keep writing so slow,
You’ll hold up the HBO show.”
———————————-
And George R. R. Martin (assisted by Neil Gaiman) caught up with his tormentors only a few months later at the w00tstock 5.0 show at San Diego Comic-Con.
