Two for the price of free
Got two unrelated short thoughts that I’ll just mash together like an Andrew Sullivan blog post.
Hard to believe, but there was once a time when Game of Thrones was everywhere.
It became instant appointment viewing; if you missed the East/Central time zone debut, you pretty much were forced to stay off social media until you got caught up. It became the most-pirated show of all time. The memes rivalled Spongebob memes in sheer quantity. Multiple baseball players used the theme as their walk-up music.
Nowadays? After the increasingly regrettable last few seasons, people now treat it like a person they don’t want anyone to know they dated. “Him? Of course not! Oh… oh, ok, oh this is so embarrassing… look, he seemed a lot more respectable at first. I was in a different place, ok?” While I’m sure people watch reruns while on lockdown, it’s not something that triggers much interest on social media. The actors have mostly vanished from the face of the planet — “Joe Jonas’ wife” will probably trigger more recognition, or Google searches, in 2020 than “Sansa Stark.” Even the stories about GRR Martin’s infamous writer’s block have dried up. Sean Bean today is memed more often as Boromir than as anything involving the possibility of a season known for chilliness and snow arriving at some future point.
It’s quite a rise-and-fall story for a pop culture institution, and goes to show just how badly the creators screwed the pooch once they ran out of GRRM’s source material — so badly that it likely cost them a Star Wars gig. All that cultural cachet, pissed away.
Sure, other franchises wound up aging badly in their later years. Seinfeld. Indiana Jones. The Simpsons. The Sopranos. But even freakin’ Scrubs seems to find more work with reaction gifs than GoT lately. I guess nobody wants to think back to that final season… oof.
I recommend this article about people who sold their souls to Donald Trump — and who got their just deserts. I can quibble about the list — while Sidney Powell, say, lost the respect of the legal profession, she has a bright future ahead of her in various Trumpworld grifts or as a “legal analyst” for OANN and Newsmax.
Bill Barr was the latest entry. While the once-respected Washington conservative showed his willingness to embrace endless depths of depravity in the service of the most incompetent president since James Buchanan, his attempting to reason with Trump and tell him that his legal flailings are doomed led to his predictable ouster. Now, he is set up for the full Jeff Sessions treatment no matter how much he protests his fealty to the orange king, and both politicians and media outlets of the MAGA variety will stop returning his calls. Denial of reality is not just one component of worshipping this president — it is the most essential component. Balk at that, and you’re no better than Mitt Romney in that gangster world’s eyes.
Something that conservatives used to believe in: Character matters. Yes, even if you’re a Republican. Your moral upstanding matters more than almost anything else. Some lucky bad people are rewarded for their villainy with only making lives of everyone else miserable. Most, however, wind up earning their karmic downfall. NeverTrump writers, politicians, and political operatives initially faced the hard road as they were fired en masse, voted out, or had their entire institutions destroyed at the beginning-to-middle of the Trump era as punishment for standing up for what’s right. But that’s the thing: living an upright life takes work and often sucks in the short term. If observing a moral code were easy, perhaps even Donald J. Trump would’ve done so.
