Perhaps nowhere is the fundamental unseriousness of our time more apparent than the extent to which pop culture has permeated political discourse. Thanks to our septuagenarian president’s baby boomer penchant for memes, “Game of Thrones,” HBO’s megahit TV adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, has joined Harry Potter and The Handmaid’s Tale as the latest multi-medium series to become a partisan flashpoint.
Last week, President Trump posted GoT-inspired photos to both Instagram and Twitter with the caption, “The Wall Is Coming.” The meme promotes his desired policy of building a wall on the border with Mexico by referencing the famous “Wall” from the series, a towering, 300-mile-long, 700-feet-tall barrier of ice and rock fortifying the kingdom of Westeros’ northern border.
Groan-inducing, to be sure. But worse is the invariably over-zealous response of his critics, who, in their haste to mock Trump’s errors, commit witless ones of their own.
Liberals, journos, and other Internet pedants were quick to point out that the Wall did not survive GoT’s most recent season. “[C]an someone please tell POTUS what happens with the wall in season 7,” tweeted CNN reporter and professional busybody Oliver Darcy. “[T]he GoT wall didn’t work out,” chided NowThis. “Who wants to tell [Trump] that the central premise of Game of Thrones is that walls don’t work?” laughed Obama apparatchik and pod-bro Dan Pfeiffer, in a tweet liked over 60,000 times.
Unlike fellow Obama alum Ben Rhodes, Pfeiffer does not have an MFA in creative writing. But it does not take advanced literary study to understand that the series teaches the exact opposite lesson. While not in any way “the central premise” of the fantasy, “Game of Thrones” nevertheless presents a compelling case for strong border defenses. The Wall protects Westeros’ border from human and undead invasion for over 8,000 years and is only neutralized because a zombified ice dragon destroys it with magical, spectral fire.
Furthermore, GoT illustrates how generations of political negligence regarding the Wall’s upkeep, and the realm’s borders more generally, leads to fractious crises of immigration, regional instability, and institutional decay, for which the state and all partisan factions are unprepared.
Doesn’t that sound familiar.
