American Tolkien? How about American Hobbes: a comparison of Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones

Blog Song for the Moment

Marian McPartland, Willow Creek, Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz Fest (2002)

(WARNING!  Some spoilers for those who haven't moved beyond the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones)

A couple of years ago I wandered through the five (soon to be seven I gather) Game of Thrones volumes, and found intriguing the characters, the story-line, and the grim political realism.  I also watched HBO's adaptation, and enjoyed them more since the screen-writers pared away George R. R. Martin's often turgid prose and sometimes tedious dialogue.

Lev Grossman at Time dubbed Martin the "American Tolkien" when reviewing the first book of the series--A Feast for Crows--back in 2005, and said

Martin has produced--is producing, since the series isn't over--the great fantasy epic of our era. It's an epic for a more profane, more jaded, more ambivalent age than the one Tolkien lived in.

The "great fantasy epic of our era?"  That's rather overblown and, really, later generations will have to determine that.  Will Game of Thrones be as widely read and appreciated sixty years from now, as is the case of Lord of the Rings trilogy today?  Doubt it.  Martin's writing is not in the same ball park as Tolkien's.

That said, Martin does give us a fully-realized fantasy world, as did Tolkien (both highly derivative).  And his characters are more multi-dimensional than those in LOTR--capable of right and wrong and everything in between, along with making whopping mistakes that are inevitably fatal for them, or those close to them.

And in contrast to Tolkien's rather static characters (good ones generally stayed good, the bad, bad) the Game of Thrones characters sometimes change in surprising ways--those that live long enough to do so, that is.  There's Tyrion Lannister, a remarkable character in the book--full of witty repartee and whose brain and heart are bigger than those of most anyone around him.

The Hound

There's the Hound, Sandar Clegane--no one can accuse Martin of coming up with boring names--one of my favorite characters, an intriguingly confusing mix of selfish brutality and nobility.

Jaime Lannister

Or there's Jaime Lannister, who seems to be growing a heart once he lost his hand.  You know, "It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell..." (Matthew 5:30).

Melisandre, the
Lord of Light's
high priestess

Despite efforts to create a totally "pagan" world, Martin can't escape his Western Christian heritage. Actually, he sort of trashes religion in general.  There's the bland "Faith of the Seven"--a state religion full of regalia, but of little substance apart from sanctioning royal marriages, and providing priestly fodder for raging urban mobs.  There are the "Gods of the Forest," who don't do much more than offer quiet solace to the various Stark family members who are wondering why their author is picking them off like flies.  The "Drowned God" in the Iron Islands is really just a set of rituals designed to confirm over-the-top macho violence.  The one religion that so far demonstrates tangible power is the "Lord of Light," who gives the dead life and provides demons to kill the living, a twisted version of the Jesus myth ("Light of the World"), and I doubt it's an accident that the one clearly nasty religion is monotheistic.

Tyrion Lannister

George Schmidt, over at Religion Dispatches, caught this difference in a thoughtful discussion of the "moral universe of the Game of Thrones."  Though there is no overt religion in LOTR, it is, as Schmidt notes, suffused with early Cold War Christian idealism.  Holding onto one's principles, whatever the cost, does matter.  The good guys win because they are good.  The evil-doers pay--even the good who momentarily lapse into evil (poor Boromir, for example, and even Frodo loses a finger when he briefly lets the temptation of the ring get to him at the end).  Drawing on the Protestant realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, Schmidt suggests that Game of Thrones is all about the tragedy of trying to do good in an evil world.  Hence anyone with a lick of idealism in the land of seven kingdoms finds out that virtue at times can be a vice, and vice-versa.  Thus the awful end of the "Hand of the King," Eddard Stark, the idealist.  His replacement in contrast, the diminutive and brilliant Tyrion, cunningly manipulates those around him on behalf of the royal household, but also himself. But are these the choices, blind idealism or cold-hearted realism?  Schmidt muses that Christian realism would be some sort of blend of both, and wonders if Daenerys Targaryen might be that blend.  She's a "liberationist" who frees women and slaves, yet is not above subterfuge and violence to achieve her ends.

I don't know.  Perhaps Schmidt, currently working on his Master's degree at Union Theological Seminary, is so immersed in his theological studies that he sees it everywhere (I remember doing the same in my grad school days).

Queen Cersei, who tried to school
Lord Stark in the Game of Thrones

For me, Martin's take on religion is just too relentlessly cynical.  It is not much more than an instrument of politics.  That is a rather simple way to view an aspect of human life that has been around since the ancients took time out from surviving to wonder about the meaning of things.  But then, everything in Game of Thrones is just a playing piece, even those trying to avoid that role.  As fervent fans like to quote, "When you play the game of thrones, you win, or you die."

Wow.  Like, deep, man...pass me the pipe, and are you up for some DnD, or what, man?

And that's sort of how I read Game of Thrones.  A really smart Dungeons and Dragons player with enough writing ability to get some adventures down in print, drawn from a DnD world where it's all about winning.  Rather than being reminded of Niebuhr, the story makes me think of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651) in which he argues that in a state of nature, there is no power (no "Leviathan") to restrain people from constant "quarrel" due to their ambitions, self-interest, and mutual suspicion.  In this state of nature

No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm enjoying the HBO series based on Martin's story-telling.  As with previous HBO series (e.g. The Wire, Deadwood), these are well-crafted shows with great acting.  And its array of distinctive, fascinating characters, and all the political intrigue, have me hooked.  But watching the story on the screen makes Game of Thrones seem more epic than it does on the page, and the story does not (so far anyway) leave us much to dream about or for--which is what I suspect caused LOTR to become such a phenomenon in the US starting back in the Age of Aquarius.

That said, LOTR has its own problems, namely in the areas of race and gender.  Game of Thrones does, too, but I'll leave these matters for another day...

DOMA's Dead, Long Live....What?

The Leave it to Beaver Cleaver Family

 A few nights ago we had dinner with some of our extended family--a sister-in-law of my two adopted nuyorican children, along with her her half-sister, whose mother is Colombian.  This is just the beginning of a complicated skein of relations and social origins that make up my extended family featuring numerous second (or more) marriages, step and half-siblings, adoptions, mixed couples, and so on.  There is not much "normal" in it, if by "normal" we mean the mythical US family made up of a nuclear couple in its one and only marriage, with two children, all the same race or ethnicity, all straight.  Now, we know that this is not always the typical family, but it is the norm--we can see it in the TV families of the 1950s and 60s (think Leave it to Beaver).  We can see this norm invoked in the non-traditional families that began popping up in the 1970s, ones that were edgy (One Day at a Time), comedic (Brady Bunch), or quaintly cute (The Courtship of Eddy's Father). They were--or tried to be--edgy, comedic, or cute precisely because they were not normal families.

Same-sex couple with two adopted children.
From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/13/
gay-family-photos-project_n_3436299.html

Though less powerful today--this norm still holds a sway over many Americans.  Witness the anger and grief over the Supreme Court's recent rulings dooming the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California's Proposition 8.  A narrow majority, 5-4, declared DOMA unconstitutional.  Another 5-4 decision, with a different mix of judges, refused on procedural grounds to deliberate a suit regarding California's Prop 8, a ban on same-sex marriage.  This turned the case back to a lower court that had already ruled against the ban.  In effect, this legalized same-sex marriage in California (NPR story).

The narrow splits in the Supreme Court reflect the seeming polarization of the American people on the matter LGBT issues and their connection to marriage and family.  A recent Pew Survey finds that a narrow 51% majority supports the legalization of same-sex marriage.  But I said "seeming" because this percentage shot up dramatically from 32% in 2003.  Moreover, 2/3 of Americans support the idea of civil unions for same-sex couples, and 60% agree that "society should accept homosexuality." So there's a social sea change out there that the Court does not appear to reflect regarding the issue of homosexuality.

In a harsh dissent, Justice Scalia called the ruling a "judicial distortion," but what really irked him was the subtext he saw in it.  The ruling painted pro-DOMA people as "hateful," as an "enemy of human decency," as "monsters" (Politico).  I didn't read the entire 77 page decision, but summaries (e.g. Huffington Post) of the decision can be boiled down to two issues.  The majority found that DOMA violated the the Fifth Amendment's "due process" clause, and that it unjustifiably denied a class of people equal standing before the law.  That is unconstitutional discrimination (it's not surprising that the decision cited the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case that struck down a state law banning inter-racial marriage--Washington Post).

Justice Antonio Scalia
http://www.oyez.org/justices/antonin_scalia

Scalia came up with those terms characterizing those opposed to full equality for homosexuals, exaggerating the language of his judicial opponents.  I think he did so in order to make the point that he should be allowed to be morally comfortable with discrimination.  It is not hateful or indecent to treat LGBT folks as second-class citizens, and how dare you suggest that...

Other reactions were equally visceral.  Mike Huckabee, former governor and presidential contender and current Fox commentator, tweeted "Jesus wept," a curious equation of Lazarus and DOMA (what Christ-like figure will appear to call to DOMA "Come forth!"?).  American Family Association radio host, Bryan Fischer, trotted out the tired saw that the ruling would lead to a sexapocalypse: "The DOMA ruling has now made the normalization of polygamy, pedophilia, incest and bestiality inevitable. Matter of time."  More sedate, the Conference of US Catholic Bishops called it a "tragic day for marriage"  (Tweets at Religious News).  Or you can go over to Rightwingwatch.org and wade through a slew of all sorts of dire predictions and accusations, starting with Focus on the Family James Dobson, who claims that the DOMA ruling "threaten[s] the entire superstructure of society" (Superstructure? Apparently, he doesn't know what the term means, but I prefer to think he's channeling Marx...).

I could go on like this, but I'll just get more sarcastic and snarky.  On this issue there's a gulf between a sizable minority and slim majority of Americans.  Those opposed to full equality for homosexuals depict their discriminatory position as moral or legal while those in favor of that equality see it as immoral or illegal.  There's no easy way over this gulf.  Every advance of equality has involved failed efforts to reason with one another, and ensuing conflict and bitterness.  We'll just have to endure it, and know that people in a generation or two--just as we do now looking back on the civil rights movements--will shake their heads at us, wondering how we could have been so obdurate

By the way--this decision has had immediate consequences here in Michigan, where a

...federal judge has ordered Michigan to stop enforcing a law that has barred community colleges and many other government agencies (though not universities) from providing any benefits to the same-sex partners of employees (Inside Higher Education).

This is perhaps a sign that all states that have passed laws designed to deny government benefits to same-sex couples--that is, trying to DOMA them at the local level--will face legal challenges in the near future.