And no one shall make them afraid
Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, they’ll be safe in this nation we made.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Teach Them How to Say Good-Bye
I began this blog by saying that silence was not an option and yet I’ve allowed myself, again, to fall silent. When I post, I feel I am just repeating myself – I wake every morning amazed that, finding ourselves governed by a madman who is also a criminal, there is apparently no way to remove him. I have no doubt that the Democratic Party will win again in 2020, but will they win by enough to overcome all the structural disadvantages the Republicans have managed to erect in their pursuit of un-democracy? That keeps me up at night.
A week ago, I told my husband there were two particular things I thought people should be talking more about – the Russian hacking into the actual electoral rolls in Florida and Illinois and the puzzling behavior of Rosenstein as he stood behind Barr in that execrable press conference. No sooner wanted than provided! Thank you (for nothing) Marco Rubio for confirming at last what, during the midterms, you refused to confirm. Thank you New York Times for adding so much value to the Rod Rosenstein story. Why are so many people willing to take out the trash for this despicable monster? It’s a mystery to me.
When I was a youngster, the Vietnam war had a daily scorecard. We saw it on our tvs – all the people killed on one side, all the people killed on the other. It was, I think, intended to persuade us that we were winning. Instead, it made the war a daily reality. I wish the news shows now would do something similar with family separation – how many days past the court’s deadline for reunification are we? How many children are back with their parents and how many are not? Where are these children? Too many stories simply drop out of memory – this one is important enough to justify a daily reminder.
In other news – I keep reading the concern and complaint that, much like Breaking Bad, the end of Game of Thrones seems intent on giving everyone everything they wanted – all the villains of yesteryear on the quick road to redemption, all the fanfic couplings made real – all to the detriment of George RR Martin’s more difficult and much more interesting story. So, moments before tonight’s blood-letting begins, I want to be clear to the showrunners that I am not getting what I want.
What I want: more direwolves. They seemed so full of portent and possibility, but ended up so underused. Specifically I want to see Nymeria and Arya, together again, fighting crime and solving mysteries. And Ghost. Let’s see lots more of Ghost in the short time we have left together.
Secondly, I waited all through the long seasons for the reunion of the surviving Stark children. It hurts me that, when they are finally all in the same place at the same time, on the day before the day they all expect to die, they have no interest in spending those final hours together. They all love to tell us how much family matters to them. But at the end of the world, they all have someone else they’d rather be with. It’s disappointing.
Thirdly, I’m looking, in my twilight years, for more shows that don’t end with a big battle. If that’s the hero’s journey, I’m sick of it. Less people with swords. More people with sandwiches.
