America's Game of Thrones Candidate: Joffrey The Donald

Emily Nussbaum

Watching Donald Trump on stage and watching the crowds in front of him react, I had the feeling I was Arya Stark, the daughter in "Game of Thrones," who watches a play depicting the story of her father's murder, and the sympathetic portrayal of the kings and queens who committed it, while standing among a crowd of people who respond with unbridled sympathy for the murderers and with disdain for the victim.  There is no loneliness more complete than feeling alienated from the crowd around you.

King Joffrey: Inherited Power

Jews must have felt this watching Hilter bring his crowds to their feet; Muslims, Mexicans, a whole host of scapegoats must feel it now.

Inherited Wealth

Trump, of course, isn't really the problem, as Kevin Baker noted in last Sunday's New York Times. Trump, he observes is, "Nothing more than the slithering id of a nervous age. He comes off too often as the candidate of "Game of Thrones" America, a bombastic, misogynistic knight errant in an endlessly wandering unfocused narrative; traversing a fantasy landscape composed of a thousand borrowed mythologies, warnings endlessly of a dire apocalypse that never quite materializes."

As alone as you may feel, reading, hearing someone express and refine your own thoughts is an intravenous infusion of life reviving fluid. 

Amy Davidson

So it is, for me at least, with the New Yorker, which arrives every week in my mailbox with my lifeline from a better, more vital world. 

When my mother moved from New York, the greatest city in the world ("Hamilton"), to what was then a sleepy Southern town, Washington, D.C., her brother provided her with that lifeline in the form of a New Yorker subscription, so no matter how bleak things got in the land of "whites only" bathrooms, red lined neighborhoods where no Catholics, Blacks or Jews need inquire,  she would have that weekly reminder humanity is not like that everywhere; back in Gotham, living brains resonated with her own.

When I moved to New Hampshire, I didn't know what to expect the people would be like. I did meet a fair number of men who wore plaid flannel shirts, suspenders and belts with their trucker hats, but there were others, native Granite Staters who popped in and out of Boston and who had visited New York at least once in their lives. I even met a woman who subscribed to the New Yorker and read it.  For years, I had subscribed but read only the cartoons, until my older son packed off to NYU, where he developed the habit of reading it cover to cover every week and eventually, he got me doing the same thing.


This week's New Yorker cover shows a John Cleese, Monty Python esque man in a bowler hat taking a "Silly Walk Off a Cliff," and nothing more insightful than that need be said about Brexit.

Jill Lepore

Inside, Emily Nussbaum delivers one of her casual, astonishing reflections on "Game of Thrones" a series I have stopped watching as often as the average smoker gives up cigarettes, and she delivers a new way of seeing this show I've loved and hated for so long:
"I groaned when, in one of the show's undeniably breathtaking battle sequences, these blue-eyed demons streamed over a steep cliff like so many black sequins spilling from an Oscar de La Renta ball gown. There were enough skimpily motivated characters, to my mind, without folding in soulless monsters defined by their unstoppability. Then somebody on Twitter argued that the White Walkers symbolized global warming--a radical existential threat that the Westerosi clans had failed to unite against, too busy squabbling over that hideous iron Barcalounger that serves as a throne. One solid metaphor and I was on board. Fine, bring on the zombies."

Anthony Lane

She relates a comment from a friend that the only thing that matters in the show is dominance, that the core of the show is essentially nihilistic. But, as she notes, it is a nihilism which arouses a response.  Yes, as human beings we can live short, brutal lives guided only by a will to take.  She sees parallels to Bernie Sanders in the High Sparrow, "a revolutionary ideologue who is obsessed with purifying the elite," and with another character, a preacher, who tells the Hound, "You don't cure a disease by spreading it to more people," to which the Hound replies, "You don't cure it by dying, either." 

We hear both ideas advocated whenever some lunatic wearing a headband and waving an ISIS banner blows up people in an airport or at a movie theater.  ISIS has shown us, if nothing else, there are people who want to live in a world of nihilistic dominance, who believe life is about hacking and chopping off body parts and subjugating others to your will. 

We often have to ponder: What am I to think of these medieval minds who speak of caliphates, who hate music, liberated women and questioning minds?  What we think about all this must arise from many minds before it can coalesce around any one response and in The New Yorker, in Nussbaum, we  have a writer who learns from GOT, from Twitter, who is no snob about where she finds meaning but who can see it and express it, and there are plenty of soulmates on the New Yorker pages--Jill Lepore, Amy Davidson, Anthony Lane--who quietly, week after week simply speak and send their thoughts out there like those radio signals we beam out into deep space, hoping that somewhere out there, there are minds who can respond.