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Reviewing HBO’s “Game of Thrones”:

It’s strange, then, that fantasy writers would so often take the oddest quirks of the imagination and the loftiest flights of fancy and boil them down to the same pools of blood in the dust. Why invent nomadic tribes, noble kings and mythical creatures from whole cloth, only to doom them to repeat the worst mistakes of human history or reflect the saddest aspects of human nature? Surely, someone, somewhere can imagine an alternative to this endlessly repeated unhappy ending.

Ultimately, this is the worry with “Game of Thrones” — that, like so much in its genre, it will turn out to be all thrones and few games. Sure, the life-and-death, gods-and-girded-warriors gravitas of fantasy explains much of its appeal, but maybe we should try throwing in a gaggle of philosophers, artists, scientists and idealists, who might collaborate to lift us out of the mire of our shared dread, to prevent us from reproducing our own suffering in the generations to come. That way, maybe, instead of blindly fornicating and fighting ourselves to death in a repetitive loop, we might imagine a whole new ending. Isn’t that what fantasy is for?

James Howard Kunstler writes:

So much of the Tucson story was whether there is any remaining shred of something like common purpose between the opposing political wings and the answer resolving out of all the grief and soothing gel is no. Common purpose is AWOL in our politics lately because whatever terrain of the issues is not occupied by sheer lying is filled by cowardice and ignorance. We lie to ourselves incessantly about the nation’s financial condition. We’ve suspended both the rules of accounting and the rule of law in banking matters (lying). We’re too frightened to go into the vaults and find out exactly how much we’ve swindled ourselves (cowardice). And we aggressively misunderstand issues that will shape our future, such as how much oil is really in the ground, and how long people will be able to live in places like Tucson the way they do (ignorance) – all of this prompting us to march off the edge of a political cliff where we hang today, the cartoon coyote of nations, undone by our Acme techno-fantasies.