George R. Martin's book series Game of Thrones has developed a huge following and been turned into a popular television series. I watched a few episodes and some things became readily apparent. The land in which various groups live is teeming with rebellion as the dominant family, the Lanisters, having attained primacy through bloody means, slowly loses its grip on the country. There is treachery everywhere, unlikely alliances, lots of scandal and the overall sense that nothing is truly secure -- nor just. Good leaders are killed off, banished or marginalized, and in their place arise dubious figures bent on supremacy more than service. The kingdom appears to be in an endless state of unravelling.
My wife and I ended up watching it for a time until we eventually reached the conclusion it was all political expediency, mixed with gore, amorality, and decline. It was fascinating, to be sure, yet in such a world little seemed to be redemptive or progressive. Eventually we stopped watching.
In many ways, Game of Thrones is increasingly finding its modern equivalent in federal partisanship, and perhaps more and more in politics in general in Canada. In what was more or less a united land, one party has become dominant through a kind of domestic brutality, negative campaigning, and perhaps illegalities. Around them are other parties, some in search of a sustainable future, while another attempts to hold on to a new importance it acquired in a sudden splurge of popularity. It's politics all the time -- 24/7 -- and its machinations conveniently match modern news cycles, in which the open battles are more fascinating and lucrative to cover than the overall decline faced by all.
And that decline is important. Formerly vital Canadian institutions are being flayed by a thousand financial cuts. Alberta is displaying an odd battle between an impractical populism and a skewed conservatism. Internationally, our influence is ebbing, substituted my some kind of desire to look like an economic player to the detriment of the numerous other historic advantages such as foreign aid, peacekeeping and peacemaking, human rights monitoring and foreign policy expertise.
In other words, a kingdom in decline. Like Game of Thrones, average citizens merely fill in the sets -- their contributions, other than for campaigns of power, all but futile and non-essential. It's all about acquiring power, regardless of the expense to the land in general or the cost to the people that inhabit it. Honourable civil servants face pressure to cater to the whims of their political masters as opposed to the people they are assigned to serve. Voters? Who really needs them when they are willing to be duped, and fewer of them are required to keep power? Good politicians struggle mightily in Ottawa to restore some sense of perspective and honour, but when the government of the day used neither of these to acquire power, why would they be essential now?
A historian might well look at this modern kingdom and lament along with Matthew Arnold:
... for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help of pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
If the Game of Thrones leaves you with any sentiment, it is that of a loss of hope, of redemption, of national gathering or humble leadership. It is about mini-kingdoms in a vast and varied land that never seem able to combine in peace. It is no longer about democracy but power -- the kind that debilitates. Canada -- a land built by the good will of its people -- is increasingly governed by the covetousness of its leaders. The emphasis on power instead of the resources required for daily life ultimately arrived through a lack of attention by citizens and the very awareness of that fact by rulers who would rather decide for us anyway.
We are mere backdrops in a drama about the apportioning of power and a narrative that has been taken away from us in recent years. If we as a land are to acquire a more peaceable kind of politics, it will require a more honourable practice of democracy. And for that, citizens will have to re-engage.