2012 4
There is still a lot of Game of Thrones around us
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Middle East with No Comments
We are in Sagaponack, NY. Nina, Leo and Mia went to see the Southampton 4th of July parade. I am sick in bed with a bad summer flu. I stayed in bed watching a Game of Thrones marathon. I am on Season 2 Episode 4. I almost never watch TV but I do enjoy TV series. I watch them mostly during flights off my iPad. And now because I am sick and can’t stop coughing I watch them in bed. By now, I have probably watched over 10 hours of Game of Thrones over the last 3 days.
Game of Thrones has a great deal of sex and people talk about that, but sex is nothing compared to the amount of violence it depicts. A violence that it is at the limit of what I can stomach, as when they kill a baby off a woman’s arm. But the story is good and I am hooked. At this point anything that makes me forget my flu is welcome. Still, I suffer as I watch the most violent scenes. When I watch these horrors, I remember the child in myself saying, this is just a movie, this is just a movie. But then, during a break I read the news. The real news. And I see this. A very Game of Thrones real life story going on right now in Syria as Bashar Al Assad tries to stay on his throne and goes on a killing rampage. Reuters reports.
Video clips showed rotting corpses lying in dried pools of blood in dark hallways, their faces covered with flies. One showed a woman and her child prone in a living room. The activist narrating the video said they had been stabbed.
A third video displayed pieces of charred flesh which activists said were severed genitals.
“There was more here yesterday,” said a man wearing plastic gloves.” “But the dogs were taking them.”
So now my defenses stopped working. I think about what is going on in Syria, a country I visited in 2003 and found it quite attractive. Here are my pictures of that trip. I can’t imagine how those who appear in them are doing now in this horrible civil war. Why would Bashar al Assad, a man who trained to be an ophtalmologist in London and his wife Asma al-Assad who was born and raised in the UK and has a degree in computer science go on murder rampages to stay in power?
There is still a lot of Game of Thrones around us. The middle ages are still here.