Batman - Batmen

The Batmen

Break the Wheel

The Iron Bank

This post is a tangent to Red Frog's Tyrion the Liberal (8/30/2017) which I recommend you take in before proceeding here although there would be no law against reading them reversed. However you wish, dear reader. In any case please be warned that both here and there be Spoilers! Not that I myself believe in spoilers but I'm told that some of you are quite orthodox on this point. I have no intention of sparing such readers beyond this paragraph. Indeed, I will attempt, before I am through, to spoil season 8 as well.

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Enough filler. Let's begin with dragons. Red Frog notes that George Martin has said that the dragons are the equivalent of nuclear weapons. On this point and its implications I will be silent once I explain why. I am putting dragons, along with dragonglass, Valerian steel, three-eyed ravens, red witches, faceless men, and whatever else I have left out into a box labelled Magical Devices.

Magic, I have no doubt, occupies a central place in Game of Thrones. And it certainly tempts the viewer to subject the story to a Jungian reading. There is one magical element that I will get to later, the resurrection of the dead. But, for the most part, I am going to attempt a political economic reading. One that I hope will also shed some light on the dead.

Now that Daenerys and her crowd have landed at Dragonstone the story has been unified in the Westeros theater. Until this season it has been laid out across three economic zones; feudal Westeros, the Dothraki steppes, and the slaveholding merchant cities of the Essos coast. Under Daenerys the Dothraki and the slave army have uprooted and transferred the surplus of Essos, at least as far it can be expressed militarily, into Westeros. At season end the Greyjoy fleet and the Golden Company are offstage and sure to reappear in some form but the players of the Game are now all assembled within the Seven Kingdoms.

This geographic unity testifies to the social identity of the contending forces. We have come to love the Mother of Dragons as an amalgam of Spartacus, Lincoln, and Lenin but her claim is to a feudal throne on the basis of an aristocratic bloodline. Her military has an imperial character, uniting nomadic and slave armies, but it has no class basis now that it has crossed the Narrow Sea. If the contending houses, as we are led to believe, are historically based on the War of the Roses we might want to cast Dany, with her army, as a sort of Lord Protector and final two seasons as something of an English Civil War.

But I am, instead, insisting on the economic identity of Houses Targaryen and Lannister, equally expressions of a landed nobility living from the surplus of an invisible peasantry. If our story is to end with a victory for The Stormborn it could create a unified imperial state spanning Essos and Westeros but it will not "break the wheel".

Which brings us to the dead. Here is the real contradiction in the Game. The history of The Game of Thrones is one of murder and slaughter. None of the houses shrink from it and they all depend on it to maintain power. In such a system the maimed and the vengeful will accumulate but, above all, the dead will pile up. In our own world of reason and light the dead are no longer visible but in Westeros they persist. Immune to cold, to fear, and to hunger they are perfectly suited to the long winter to come. In addition, they are organized. If anything in this story points to a political economy beyond the feudal it is the army of the dead.

George Martin, Benioff, and Weiss are unlikely to leave us with a future of great promise. Think of the fate of Ray, the warrior turned septon, who nursed the Hound back to health (The Broken Man, season 6). It is not an optimistic writer who will immerse us in the Middle Ages. Stories of heroes with swords will always be with us. But in this world a man who lays down his sword in the spirit of co-operative labor is hung without mercy. In this world, where commodity production is unheard of or ignored, the working class is absent but I suspect that it is represented structurally by the army of the dead.

My prediction for the final season? I'm short on Daenerys and on Cersei. I'm long on the Iron Bank and on the white walkers.

Louis Prima Is Never Showing Up

If you've heard me tell this story before that's ok. I keep coming back to it as I watch our current events. It's told in the movie Big Night (1996). Two brothers, played by Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci, have emigrated to New Jersey to open a restaurant which is now on the verge of going under. The younger brother, Secondo, is in charge of the business side and appeals to the owner of a successful restaurant down the street. The owner, Pascal, played by Ian Holm, claims to be friends with Louis Prima and promises, if the brothers will throw a big feast, he will get his friend to stop by and turn their fortunes around by bestowing his blessing.

They invite everyone they know. But as the evening rolls on folks wonder where the guest of honor is. It is only as dawn approaches that Pascal's girlfriend reveals that the bandleader will not be dropping by, was not in fact even invited. Pascal's reaction to this is matter-of-fact, "I am a businessman. I am anything I need to be at any time".

The Republican Party is a tight weave between those of the propertied class who are most focused on the threat from below and that mass voter who is in passionate agreement that the working class must never hold power.

"So the Democrats have no ideas, no policy, no vision for the country other than total socialism and maybe, frankly, a step beyond socialism from what I'm seeing.(BOOING)"  Trump, Phoenix, Aug. 22

 But this alliance is a tense one because nothing is more necessary to the maintenance of our current relations of production than the insecurity of those who are so eager to uphold it. The linchpin holding it together right now is Trump's promise to restore American factory jobs. How is this believable? 

As a second generation real estate huckster Trump has been well positioned to tap into a persistent tenet of vulgar economics buried in his audience's view of global capitalism. In their shared conception wealth is obtained in the sphere of circulation, in the terms of the "deal" where the sharp party cheats the stupid party. Trump has learned this from a life collecting rental income but its endurance in public discourse is owing to the neglect and denial of labor as the source of value and unpaid labor as the source of surplus value.

Applied to international trade this results in the very strange idea that the national economy at the center of global capitalism, the U.S., the country and capital most responsible for the creation of the modern economic empire, has been drained of its wealth by the stupidity of its political class and the sharp dealings of its rivals. Even the Republican powerful gagged on this and were reluctant to admit, as 2016 developed, the need for such risky propaganda. What Trump saw and what the rest of the GOP did not was the level of desperation in their base remaining from the crash at the conclusion of the Bush administration.

Returning to our story. We can all understand when a celebrity of the stature of Louis Prima can't make an engagement, schedules being what they are. But that is not the situation here. Other than an initial flurry of reactionary proclamations to the applause and satisfaction of nativists and gun clubs it is every day more apparent that there is no broader program here. Whether or not Trump believed he could renegotiate the world economy and restore the American factory workforce to its post-war glory while leaving it bound hand and foot to the usual bosses nothing aside from rhetoric should be expected. Most of the working class never believed him. And for those that did disappointment will grow.

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home (Official Lyric Video)