Since the beginning of Man-Time, up until very recently, the warrior and the poet have been two halves of the same cultural whole. Now, with seeming finality in our mass media, the hand of the poet has been turned against his physical counter-culture counterpart, the warrior, in the service of our faceless masters. From the insipid sentimentality of happily ever after novels cited by Spengler in 1933, to the failure of a young warrior like Samuel Finlay to get the ear of a publishing house because he refuses to make war stories palatable for the most denatured women of this overly domesticated meat herd of the mind, to the reduction of the term ‘hero’ to include handicapped children, we live in a world purposefully engineered to exclude the warrior. Martial arts schools are now daycare centers and public weight rooms are now pick up spots for carnally inclined sterile livestock.

I have been dimly aware of this since watching a Star Trek episode with my father some 40 years ago, and wondering out loud, “Dad, why do the wimps always win?”

He said something about it just being a story and we watched the next episode—my favorite—in which the big hairy unseen humanoids spear Federation trespassers from behind rocks! Now that was worth watching! But still, the sissy star trekkers won, they always won in some limp-wristed way: Kirk with his wringing hands, the doctor with his bleeding woman’s heart, the junior desk jockeys spouting warnings, and the doomsaying Scotsman espousing what could not be done. I just wanted to see a Klingon war chief murder these twits, and throw the buxom communications officer over his shoulder…

The longest running and most lauded TV and movie franchise in history is Star Trek—or the Bleeding Heart United Nations in Liberal Space. I really liked the original series and still think it holds up far better as allegory—even if I disagree with most of the liberal view—than the other incarnations, which I cannot stomach for even an episode. Star Trek the Next Leftist Impregnation might best be understood as The Death of Sci-fi.

The liberal infection immediately emasculated the protagonist of this vast story of our future in the most insidious possible way. Manhood is parsed out, and divided up among the races. A whole man may not exist. A Star Trek protagonist may not posses Strength, Honor, Virtue and Mastery. Ideally he is an expression of one of these keystones of masculinity, made functional by his submission to an encoded liberal doctrine complete with subservient military machine modeled on the U.S. Navy as U.N. task force to Planet Mangina.

The typical human leader is a passionate womanly figure of justice-weighted angst [Kirk or Number One], or a grandfatherly moralist monk [Picard] and never seems to be able to win a fight.

The only logical man of strength is an alien, whose entire race has been wiped out, which is a fine metaphor for the death of philosophy.

The only uniformly strong and honorable males are the alien Klingons who are obviously supposed to be black men, complete with poor impulse control.

The entire picture of fractured manhood is based on the model on which the future Star Federation is obviously based, the British Empire, upon which the U.N. is also based. The British Empire was a system based on cultural emasculation, in which the ‘honor and bravery’ of darker, lesser races [Indian Sepoys, Chinese Coolies, African Askari/ Federated Klingons] was guided by the wise moralizing mind of the white man, doing the bidding of his Queen.

Opposed to this collection of fractionary men is one reoccurring villain who begins in the original series, reemerges as the ultimate villain in the second movie, and has come back again in the latest series of movies, as the ultimate bad guy—because he is the Total Man: strong, courageous, honorable, masterful, and most disturbing of all—tribal? He is the genetic super warrior and mastermind known as Khan [and played by a likely conquistador type in the original series and second movie]. I forget what he was called in this last movie, but he was a product of genetic excellence, and a white man, and most egregious of all, is loyal first to his kin rather than to some higher ideal of cultural assimilation. The mega-message behind Star Trek over its fifty years emerges as an allegory that a man’s Strength, Courage, Honor and Mastery must be separated so that he may not oppose the womanly construct of our materialistic order.

What these stories propose is that the masterful warrior must be kept on a military leash or in an athletic cage of some sort—and is he not, so kept by our media-supported masters?

Have not the inheritors of the poetic, bardic tradition sold the direct action hero out for the moneyed chief? If written today, would not Beowulf be titled Hrothgar?

Everything that Ernst Junger and Oswald Spengler rail against in their anti-materialistic, anti-romantic essays as the death of Man’s soul is expressed as a supreme value in any of these Marvel Comic movie travesties, of which I have seen a half dozen, just to reassure myself that American masculinity has been strained through Hillary Clinton’s long-inviolate panties.

What so astonishes is the number of young America men who worship these superhero constructs and have heated debates over what tights wearing cipher could defeat the other in service to listless consumerism.

Recently I was tasked by my agent to write a story about two gangbangers killing Batman. I quizzed a comic author about this and he insisted that only a normal person dressing up like Batman could be killed. That no thugs, no matter how deadly, could seriously harm the older, smaller, less heavily armed hero. His skill would trump all. Where once every reader in the ancient world understood that the ‘matchless warrior’ Achilles could easily be killed by some dastardly coward hiding behind a wall and firing an arrow from behind, the modern imbiber of myth may not entertain the possibility of his hero dying, indicating what Spengler would characterize as the moral inability to even imagine tragedy, let alone deal with it.

Where Roman Senators might have once debated the virtues of Hector over Achilles with their Greek slave-tutor, the postmodern American now argues about Thor’s Hammer and Captain America’s shield; Man’s collective mind having descended from a mythic morality to material artifice, from a story of the struggle of doomed Achilles, to the victory of immortal economic placeholders.

I read the first four books of George R.R. Martin’s epic, which has become the apostrophe of masculinity in quality made-for-premium-TV storytelling. I stopped reading Mister Martin’s work, not because he killed so many characters that he got the reader invested in, as had some of my friends, but for another reason. Before continuing I must offer some back story to the uninitiated.

Game of Thrones is the TV adaptation of A Song of Fire and Ice, an epic fantasy set in a magical version of the British Isles, facing a very Eurasian continent, and peopled with historically based peoples. The lot of women and the poor living in a feudal agrarian society is accurately portrayed.

There is only one aspect of this fantasy that goes against the internal logic of the setting. Whereas the history this fantasy is drawn from is chock full of strong, honorable men [some evil, some good, and some both] literally carving history, in Game of Thrones all strong honorable men die without affecting the tide of events.

The only characters who affect the tidal forces of history are alternately scheming and pious women, children, and the maimed. In fact, in the fifth season, the only dominant man of honor is a formally dishonorable lord by the name of Jamie Lannister, the ‘Kingslayer.’ As an evil, child-maiming, incestuous brat, Jamie was the best warrior in the realm. It was not until he lost his right hand, that he became an honorable man, and is now ironically physically challenged to a comic degree.

Where the Star Trek franchise seems to have been written to push a liberal cultural agenda, and the various vapid superhero franchises seem a crass commercial cashing in on the dim racial memory of heroes now debased by that very medium, A Song of Fire and Ice, seems to me, to whisper insidiously of what became of Man, that the world no longer abides heroes, and that the consideration of an Achilles as a war protestor against the materialistic world order represented by Agamemnon, is no longer a topic worthy of discussion, as there is no pool of heroes from which an Achilles might emerge.

I see George R.R. Martin’s tale of medieval fantasy subverted by postmodern real politic, to the point of extinguishing even the possibility of strength and honor and success residing in the same person, to be the most apocalyptic, and final, offering in the field of modern heroic fantasy. A Song of Fire and Ice is the Iliad as if written to satisfy Agamemnon; a tragedy without the meeting between Achilles and Priam, the apostrophe on Achilles unwritten death scene, where the skulking coward Paris emerges as the moral victor even as Agamemnon emerges as the material one.

If George R. R. Martin had written the Iliad instead of Homer, the ancient Romans and their Greek slaves would have been arguing over whether or not the olive oil futures enjoyed by Agamemnon’s descendents were as lucrative as the shipping contracts enjoyed by Paris’ descendents, not whether Hector’s doomed fight against Achilles in service to his tribe equaled Achilles doomed fight against the gods in service to humanity.

In terms of modern heroic fantasy literature a Game of Thrones is nothing more than a story about the bullet that shattered Robert E. Howard’s brain after he lost his savagely honorable muse to the world.

Boys, youths and men, can no longer look to any mass media stage to see the striving of the hero in their heart reflected in art. Rather than fault an astute author like Martin for crafting an allegory of the final diminishment of Man at the hands of the State, perhaps we can regard him as the coroner of the false hope that Modernity deserves—or would abide—a hero. He is the last of the traitor bards, who ironically set the doomed warrior in us free to die a decent death to an indecent world.