The Boiling Frogs of Aristophanes

The tedious controversy over when George R. R. Martin’s next iteration of A Song of Ice and Fire will be released meowed to life the other day as it was reported that the hirsute author might never finish his series. A collective yawn went up to heaven from more than just his fans. Martin’s delay at completing his signature series has been a well-known feature of his writing dating back to the 1990s, that his followers excuse by either telling us how busy he (is counting his millions) or that it’s just a case of overachiever perfectionism.

No serious reader of fiction or fantasy buys this. Martin’s corpus is already a bloated saga still accruing characters and plot lines like a tractor wheel run amok through a garbage dump. What started out as a crisp tale of intrigue, forbidden romance and high politics devolved decades ago in to uneditable slop, bereft of narrative momentum. Thankfully for Martin (and his bank account) D.B. Weiss and David Benioff came to the rescue, resuscitating the swelling monstrosity with A-list British acting talent and top-notch direction from HBO’s Golden Age. It is no small irony that once the showrunners had trimmed the fat, and ran out of narratigve steam the show imploded like a jellyfish on the beach.

Martin’s writing has lately been criticized by thinkers on the Right for its postmodernism and lack of traditional heroic tropes. Naturally it’s been praised on the Left for precisely the same qualities. Martin’s world is a place where men are craven, greedy, lustful or cruel. Even the strongest among them, the hapless Starks, fail due to an implausible lack of guile (which is implicitly explained away as the fault of having too much honor). The only men who seem capable of successfully pursuing ‘the good’ are eunuchs and imps. The women, on the other hand, are resolute in conviction, capable of surviving outlandish odds, and abnormally strong with stomachs of steel. Even the really evil female leads receive the author’s approbation for their decisiveness and the ability to follow through in killing their enemies.

Of course none of this makes for boring story-telling or characters. In fact a whole new generation of writers have become inured to the blossoming cottage industry of “morally grey” characters, as if they were the first to invent the trope.

But the fact that Martin’s saga is incomplete (and likely to remain that way - let alone attain levels of fan satisfaction matched by the first books) remains a stubborn eyesore on an otherwise enjoyable literary landscape. It’s quite likely that, having tossed the traditional structures overboard Martin has killed the albatross and Poseidon’s revenge shall foreclose the possibility of this narrative ever reaching shore. Ever thus to postmodernist writers…

To me, though, Game of Thrones (whether the early books or the first seasons of the series) still remains one of the biggest Red Pill events in my memory. While other events like COVID, the George Floyd Riots, etc, rank high, I cannot forget how much my worldview changed after watching that first season. Martin’s creation of an anti-heroic world, where greatness and honor fail almost by definition, while a kakistocracy of flatterers and foreigners fail upward until reaching the highest echelons, filled me with revulsive dread. It also finally yanked away the veil of ignorance. In other ways the structure of his world is classic red-pilling: the White Walkers representing the coming, stifling Longhouse that will freeze Western civilization into a Fukuyamian ‘End of History’ sedentism, the Starks representing the captured institutions existing to thwart the latter’s advance but ultimately in denial and toothless, the Lannister’s unscrupulous selfishness looting the state like contemporary globalist CEOs and military elite. Martin’s world may be a tapestry of literary loose ends, incapable of sewing together a fitting ending, but it was a salient, poetic adaptation of the late empire political condition we now find ourselves in.

I doubt a grand political message was Martin’s intent. It’s more likely he was overly fond of his characters’ world and flaws as a departure from more traditional storytelling – after all, what creator doesn’t want to break the mold and innovate. But his work is oozing with so much pathetic irony that any reader wishing to read more into it must come away cognizant that the medium is the message here. For any red-blooded man or woman that message seemed pretty clear.

If the “right” takeaway from Game of Thrones is that girls make strong rulers and the only good men are obedient manservants and castrati, my read was that global politics is still filled with intractably tyrannical regimes and cultures – Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ notwithstanding – and the only solution is to abandon the gormless ‘Save the World’ sloganeering of late 20^th century Globalization and circle our wagons: Winter IS coming. The enemy is within the gates and he is both domestic and foreign. The anodyne retort of elites is not just self-serving: it’s self-denial. And as John of Salisbury once said, “Who is more contemptible than he who scorns knowledge of himself.” These people are mentally fastened to their experts’ platitudes and credentials, having lived their lives and careers in the salad days of Pax Americana… days unlikely to come again for centuries. The system works because everything did work for them. After congratulating themselves with a round of “new normal” declamations they’ll retreat to their defined-benefits pensions and fade away into smugness, leaving us to deal with a historical course-correction of epochal significance.

We’ve all heard the experiment of the slowly boiling frog. It’s been retold ad nauseum to the point that it has assumed parabolic status. It doesn’t matter that the frog in the experiments actually does jump out, or that humans won’t. All that matters is that, to Boomers like Martin, the postwar optimum is considered the sine qua non proof of that parable. And all that means to readers like me is that every single lesson taught and proselytized by Boomers for the past 70 years needs to be trampled and burned without remorse before it’s too late.

There is no new normal, this time is not different. There is only the emergent phenomenon of historical dynamics churning and cycling new rhymes. Martin once echoed this rhythm, and regardless of his intent his books pricked this frog to jump the beaker. No wonder he’s pissed.