Tag: Game of Thrones

How Game of Thrones got it Wrong: The truth about democracy and nature of power

To say that I was disappointed with the final two episodes of the Game of Thrones would be an understatement. Here they were, the creative minds behind the popular HBO series had set up this really spectacular argument for what generates the nature of power and lust for it only to turn the whole thing into a diatribe for democracy while putting an all seeing eye into the central seat of power. To say that the show missed the mark after essentially 8 years of build up would be an understatement. It took 73 episodes of over an hour each to end with a very cliched metaphor on power that corrupts leaving the ever hopeful and wise character of Daenerys Targaryen to be murdered by the star of the series, Jon Snow. It’s a shame that all those liberal arts majors who work in film, television production, producers and the entertainment media have it all wrong on the nature of power. Shakespeare wrote some good plays on the topic as viewed from his day, but I think we were all hoping that someone noble and good would take the Iron Throne and show how leadership should really look. My thoughts on the Game of Thrones finale are very well represented by Grace in the following video.

This nature that power corrupts is essentially that old sentiment that we all have to provide an excuse for regressing back into the stone age as a civilization and in our entertainment I think it’s safe to say that we all yearn to see our fantasy characters do what real life often fails to give us. Does power have to be corrupt and are we all truly better off in a democracy, where the metaphor didn’t escape me to our current worldly situation. Do we really want cripples and midget philosophers running our world while the bold and brash of us win the wars then are murdered in sleep so that the tag alongs can rule? Is that really a better system? Most of us are not prepared to answer that question, our religions and educations have told us since we could first utter a word that power corrupts and that we should only trust institutions, and at the end of Game of Thrones, that was the conclusion. That the state should be handled by the weak and even the most parasitic while the best always fall to corruption 100% of the time.

I smell a hoax and a line of very bad thinking permeating out of pop culture in quite an audacious way. Ultimately, its just a story, but to us human beings, stories matter. And the trend is that we must walk away from something that usually feels good, like the Game of Thrones and be thrown back to the reality that all people are fallible, and the only protection we have against it is democracy. We don’t want to break the wheel; we want to stay on it perpetually. Even though we may be miserable on it, we are terrified to break from it and its sad that our entertainment culture feels that to be authentic to their art, that they must preserve the wheel.

After all, isn’t that why so many Democrats are upset that Donald Trump won the election for President in 2016. In the United States, we decided to break the wheel and so far, so good, the old myths about everyone who gains power becoming corrupted is being tossed out of the window. Donald Trump is no Daenerys Targaryen going crazy and killing people for no reason, even though her whole life up to that point she behaved nobly in pretty much every situation. We have taught ourselves that such a person doesn’t exist and that when they touch power, they all fall. That was the theme of the Lord of the Rings stories, that the ring corrupted everyone. And that is the story here, that the very nature of an Iron Throne to rule everyone corrupted all who sat on it without exception. But why? An answer is never given, we are just supposed to accept that power corrupts. End of story.

And at the end of the show I couldn’t help but think of Donald Trump. Heroes are supposed to do like Jon Snow and retreat from the world and hide somewhere until danger is about. At that time and those times only, the stragglers are to rule. The stories of corruption are spread by them to keep the best among us hiding away from the seats of power so that there isn’t any competition for the thrones they seek. The people of a democracy who end up in charge then start wars that need people like Jon Snow and they are happy to let them fight. They will even give them awards for their valor on the battlefield. But the manipulators of justice hope in the back of their minds that the heroes will die in combat so that they won’t challenge their lust for power. That was the message of the Game of Thrones in the end and I think most people watching were insulted because they see the scam that is going on. They may not be the powerful warriors themselves that they would like to be, but they’d like to think that we live in a world where such people can exist. Game of Thrones said with a fist punch into the dirt that “NO” the levers of the world belong to the least capable, and here’s why. Because power always corrupts, even the incorruptible Daenerys Targaryen. Not even she could stand up to its powerful call. And the hero that slew her was imprisoned and cast away until needed again. The people really in charge are the ones playing the games quietly while everyone else was fighting.

Yeah, the Game of Thrones was a major let down. And it shows just why the Hollywood types who are mostly Democrats hate the Trump presidency. They assumed that he would sit in the Oval Office and become corrupted into a mad king, that’s what they told us anyway. Instead it was all the Tyrion Lannisters and Bran Starks in the media, the Democrat Party, and the FBI who orchestrated an insurrection against him without any provocation to their suspicions but what they believe themselves about power, that it corrupts all individuals. The only protection any of us have is that of institutional controls governed by the most manipulative of us all in the form of a democracy while the heroes hide in wait to be called upon not by their own action, but for the needs of the many.

In my experience power is not for everyone. But its not for us to surrender ourselves to a democracy run by idiots either. Some people have it, and some don’t, and just because they get power, they aren’t doomed to fall like Daenerys Targaryen did, or Gollum from Lord of the Rings. We tell the stories about our culture that we most believe and this concept of how power comes about and what it does to people is as old as time. But I don’t think we have through art fully understood what it is or why its even needed. And we hope often that the next great stories that come along can put their arms around it and match our hopes and dreams. After all that time we all hoped that the Game of Thrones would unpack that mystery and tell us that power can be captured and wielded justly. Like we are seeing with the presidency of Donald Trump. But in the end they let us down with just another piece of crap concept taken straight out of the pages of the middle ages. The message that power corrupts, when in the back of our minds we hope not and yearn to see an example where it doesn’t.

Rich Hoffman

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Why we need More Good Guys with Guns: Social failures by the left leave us no other choice but guns to draw the line between good and evil

Even though more people were killed that day in Chicago with guns the political left pounced on the opportunity to exploit a mass shooting outside of San Antonia, Texas as the Antifa supporter and angry atheist Devin Patrick Kelly descended on a small church to kill all inside hoping that his mother-in-law might be in the congregation. Kicked out of the Air Force over anger management issues there was nothing to stop this 26-year-old assassin but a good guy with a gun. After killing 26 people of all ages inside the church Kelly moved to his still running vehicle to make a getaway and that’s where a neighbor, a former NRA instructor, engaged the villain with a rifle and disrupted the plans of the killer. A well-placed shot made its way between the body armor of Kelly forcing him to drop his AR-15 and hastily leave the scene. Being an experienced man with guns, 55-year-old Stephen Willeford still barefoot from a leisurely Sunday morning of rest grabbed his gun and engaged the target shooting Kelly in the leg and in the torso. He knew the young man would bleed out if untended, so he flagged down a cowboy hat wearing pick-up truck driver at an intersection and encouraged pursuit. The police hadn’t had time yet to even brew a cup of coffee, let alone assist in the act of terrorism so it was up to the two Texans to put an end to the nightmare.

The truck drive was a young man of ambition looking for an opportunity to rectify the situation so he caught up to Kelly quickly traveling at over 90 miles per hour in hot pursuit. With two bullet holes in him and miles from the nearest hospital with no way of being treated without being arrested, the panicked killer shot himself in the head ending the chase about 5 miles later. Without the pressure of the two Texas citizens, the shooter might have gotten away. And with a vehicle full of guns and adrenaline to drive him, he may have killed again before being caught by police who were rushing the other way—to the church. Yes a lot of people died, and it’s a real tragedy. But no more tragic than anywhere else in the nation. The difference here was that good people with a gun and a pick-up truck were there to stop the carnage, and that is the whole purpose of the Second Amendment.

We live in times where violence is going to be part of it. Not that I’m against the popular HBO television series Game of Thrones, I love the show, but it’s very violent. I love video games too, but they are very violent. Our movies, television, our pop culture are all very violent which is an obvious subconscious reaction to the elements of static institutionalism that have been thrust against our better judgment. We have created a society that is ultra-safe and politically correct in our schools, our businesses and our media culture leaving nowhere for our primitive needs to unload the pressures of our unconscious minds. Kids like Kelly grew up on video games like Grand Theft Auto where the heroes are the villains and the good guys are shot dead in the street for points. Most every family these kids know are fatherless and otherwise broken where their mothers are revolving doors of new lovers bringing immense instability into their domestic lives, and that’s not going to change any time soon. If we started today with a society that exercised stable family values like our society did in the early part of the Twentieth century it would take at least 50 years to see any results socially. So we have a mess on our hands. Communism and socialism have been taught to our children in public schools, they were also told to become activists if they didn’t get what they wanted. This assassin Kelly wanted something from his mother-in-law and he wanted to hurt her for a bunch of twisted reasons and he had no rational deduction to not associated innocent children in the congregation from the anger he had for his mother-in-law. In his mind it would all hurt her, so he opened fire and did his evil without considering the consequences. Like a lot of people his age, Kelly doesn’t have the intellectual tools to make rational decisions because our society has tried to manipulate those tools to many political agendas leaving most young people scribbled messes.

So shootings are up, violence everywhere is up and morality is down. That leaves peaceful people with only one option in the face of such vast institutional failure—guns. We need guns to defend ourselves and our friends, neighbors and fellow community members from the kind of evil that is the net result of all the modern failed politics. It’s that simple. There will be more shootings, there will be much more violence and it will be bloody because the modern failures of institutionalism have nowhere to go but into the hands of lost kids like this Kelly assassin where their frustrations with the outside world doesn’t match the fantasies of their coddled existence. When faced with the grim reality that all they have ever been taught was a falsehood they retreat into their childhoods where they were maniacs on Grand Theft Auto killing anybody who stood in their way, and the live out one last fantasy.

Even if the killer Kelly didn’t play that popular video game he lived in a youth culture where that entire generation has been desensitized to violence and respect for older generations has been utterly destroyed. There is no foundation of respect to build a peaceful society, so we are all potential victims to their frustrations as they learn in life that they must work and earn money to live a good life and that raising a family takes more effort than just sticking a penis into a girl and out pops some kids that the government then raises like plants in a nursery. There is a potential Devin Patrick Kelly in every neighborhood and they are becoming increasingly frustrated. They don’t have respect for the police. They don’t have respect for their parents. They don’t even have respect for the American flag. So there is no foundation to reason with them on, except a bullet from a gun.

The liberal gun grabbers who sought to capitalize off this Texas tragedy want to eliminate the option of self-defense because they really need the failures of all their social tampering to be hidden from the public. If there is a baseline of good people like these two Texas heroes, then there is a value assessment that can dispute the liberal failures that are producing people like Kelly into our society. Devin Kelly is a product of our modern society and the only real defense we have from them is the Second Amendment.

There should have been people in that church in Texas carrying firearms. I don’t mean one or two people, but virtually every adult. In every business, there should be responsible people endorsed by NRA classes carrying firearms to stop workplace violence at the point of the occurrence, and not 15 minutes later when the police are called and finally arrive. We need good guys with guns in movie theaters, shopping malls, at Wal-Mart, Costco, EVERYWHERE! In the case of the Texas church shooting, luckily there was an NRA member next door ready for action on a moment’s notice. But that’s not to say there always will be. We need a lot more people like Stephen Willeford, not less. And having more people like him won’t put an immediate stop to the attempts at violence from losers like Kelly. But it will keep them from doing the type of mass harm they expect to inflict when the disappointments of their own lives mount up to such destructive behavior and they take those frustrations out on a society that is foreign to them because they were taught incorrectly by institutionalism on how to deal with it.

Rich Hoffman
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The Reality of ‘Game of Thrones’: How Hillary Clinton is all too similar to Cersei Lannister

It has taken several years but my youngest daughter has finally talked my wife and I into watching the Game of Thrones, the popular HBO series based on the books by George R.R. Martin.  My first impression was forged when my daughter was watching an episode from Season Two many years ago where two women were essentially involved in pornography and each time I looked up from my work while she watched these episodes someone was naked.  So I didn’t have a very high impression of the show but for an excuse to get people naked and make it a medieval setting.  I thought it was just another tacky enterprise and I wasn’t impressed.   But it has done well over the years and people obviously like it for some reason, so my wife and I gave it another chance recently and started watching it from the beginning, and much to our surprise, we both actually like it.  For me, I find myself living in the Game of Thrones literally as I have those experiences in most of the people I know in politics, business, and family quite literally.  I find the characters created by George R.R. Martin to be very realistic in their motivations and how they apply those needs to the world around them.

I can’t help but draw parallels to the Game of Thrones and real life, specifically in the case of Hillary Clinton.  The character of Cersei Lannister comes to mind—the queen who will literally do anything to stay in power and close proximity to the throne for which her son sat for most of the first seasons once her husband had died.  House of Cards involves much of the same kind of power grabbing soap opera style narrative and when I was watching that series drew unmistakable parallels to the Clinton White House.  Now that Hillary Clinton has been caught and the DNC exposed the United States is having its moment or discovery where we learn how vile all these characters in this real story actually have been.   When we voted for Donald Trump many of us only suspected it, but now in the aftermath, we understand all too clearly what Hillary and her minions have been up to and the plots are not unlike the Game of Thrones stories, and for the same reasons that exist in the realms of that fiction.

My mom and my grandmother used to get very involved in their day time soap operas.  When I was a kid and went to the store with them on their daughter mother days I’d often make fun of how they’d cackle after the various narratives of whom was sleeping with whom and for what reason.  I never understood their fascination with such boring stories of love, lust, betrayal and scandal—it seemed small-minded to me even at a very young age.   However I do like fantasy stories, such as Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings, and clearly these are very similar styles of stories with a soap opera quality to them when you start getting into the private motivations of the human condition.  A fantasy backdrop seems to work well for our society in observing things that might otherwise be all too real for us.  And this appears to be the big secret of Game of Thrones.

I think this is why the actions of Hillary Clinton and many politicians just like her go by people generally unknown.  People may suspect many of these things but their only real acceptance to these motivations are best presented through fantasy stories which seem removed so far from our reality that the villains often get away with hiding from us in plain sight, and once we discover their villainy, we don’t know what to do with them because our only experience with understanding these types of characters is from the voyeuristic comfort of our television screens.

It wasn’t ironic to me that as I was watching Game of Thrones for the first time seriously and I heard the dialogue by the character Cersei Lannister that Hillary Clinton was doing media for her new book, What Happened.  What was revealed was a character right off the pages of George R.R. Martin.   Hillary was so insulted by the Donald Trump election that she couldn’t stop herself from showing the world just how arrogantly she believed she had a right to the throne of the American White House.  For her it was a rightful claim passed down to her from some progressive assumption that American politics was the same as European politics, or those throughout the world functioning from the same kind of social illness as we see on display in fantasy stories like Game of Thrones.  We rebelled in America to get away from this kind of thing, not to advance it.  We don’t look, for kings to worship in America, at least we aren’t supposed to.  Literally, the American White House is not supposed to be just another episode of the Game of Thrones or House of Cards.

In many ways I think this is the problem people have with Donald Trump—he is truly something different.  I know that’s why I voted for him.  Trump has virtually the perfect wife, he has perfect kids—Trump himself is a pretty perfect person—he’s not sick, he never sleeps; he doesn’t have little insecurities that he’s trying to hide behind public office.  He’s just a guy who loves to solve problems and be in the heat of the kitchen—and this doesn’t fit the narrative of the typical American politician that we have come to think of as corrupt.  Hillary Clinton does, but Trump requires us to accept all new motivations which have not yet been explored in a contextual way articulated through our fantasy stories.  I would go so far to say that only a novel by Ayn Rand begins to cover the Donald Trump presidency while most of us experience the range of human emotions driving modern politics through fantasy works like Game of Thrones, or even Harry Potter.

Deep inside us all is still that European fascination with names and titles—the very things we rebelled against as Americans.  We may not like people like Hillary Clinton, but we trust that dysfunction because it’s what we understand at a primal level.  In Game of Thrones I haven’t yet found a character I can relate to except for some of the Stark kids—but even then the idea of duty to a family name and the promise of a reign on some Iron Throne doesn’t make much sense to me.  But most people watching can find something they can relate to in the characters of the very sprawling epic that has become Game of Thrones.  And to my experience it works because it’s not so much fantasy, but is actually quite real.  The fantasy settings of dragon stories and magic allow us to create some emotional distance to the subject, but honestly the psychological explorations of the characters themselves is all too real.  What is shocking about Hillary Clinton is that she is every bit as vile as the most dastardly villain from Game of Thrones, but we have been exposed to her without the trappings of a fantasy story set a long time ago in a time long forgotten—but she’s standing right in front of us on full display.  Our modern society may not be as simplified as a medieval setting so to examine all the plotting and scheming that goes on in the human mind for the advancement of infantile ideas about control and human achievement, but the essence of those motivations are all too real—and not so much a fantasy.

Rich Hoffman

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