What Game of Thrones Has Taught Us About Politics

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with a class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

For six years, the HBO show Game of Thrones has warned us winter is coming.

And now, it seems it's here.

In oh, so many ways.

What lessons can we draw from Westeros in winter?

And how might they apply to our very real world?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of the Atlantic.

Here with me in the studio in DC is Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber.

Hi, Megan.

Hello.

And over there in New York is Atlantic contributing editor and CBS anchor Alex Wagner.

Hi, Alex.

Hi, guys.

This week, Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, our co-host, is off gallivanting, so he is not going to join us for our conversations today.

And without him, we three will discuss Game of Thrones.

Who doesn't want to talk about Game of Thrones?

Who does not want to talk about Game of Thrones?

Even if you don't watch Game of Thrones, you should want to talk about Game of Thrones.

In fact, that is exactly the case.

This is the show that has launched a million takes.

The HBO show, Game of Thrones, of course, based off of George R.

R.

Martin's epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire, is often compared to everything.

I checked, and in random corners of the internet, the list of things that have been described as being like a Game of Thrones episode includes a Richard Dawkins tweet, finals week at UC Santa Barbara,

the apparent discovery of a buried forest off of the coast of Wales, Brexit, consolidation in the ad tech industry, and of course, the life of Francisco Pizarro.

One of the things most frequently compared to Game of Thrones episodes in recent days, days, of course, is President Trump's White House with its ever-changing cast of characters, Reince Priebus, Anthony Scaramucci, Steve Bennon.

The list goes on, shuffling on and off the stage.

So this week, the question before us, if American politics is like a Game of Thrones episode, what does Game of Thrones tell us about how politics works?

Now, if you don't watch the show, that's perfectly fine.

In fact, it might even be better, because you'll gain just enough intel on the show to participate in discussions about it without having to watch all 4023 or whatever hours of it.

But if you still don't want to listen to a conversation about Game of Thrones or you get tired of it, we've got you.

Just skip ahead to about 16 and a half minutes in.

Our second segment is about political lessons from other recent pop culture.

If you do watch the show, a warning.

We'll be discussing spoilers up to and including the events of the last episode of season seven.

And as a general warning, Game of Thrones involves a lot of, shall we say, adult content.

And as a consequence, this conversation will too.

With that, Alex, what have you learned from Game of Thrones?

I mean, I've learned everything I needed to know.

I learned watching Game of Thrones, right?

So many things.

I think we have a tendency as

fans to find metaphors where maybe there weren't any intended, but it seems eerie to me that we are in the beginning of the Trump presidency and Game of Thrones has reached its sort of like peak hashtag peak tyranny.

I think the most obvious takeaway is that power necessitates mercilessness, that once you gain it, you have to wield it mercilessly.

And we've seen that in a number of characters.

I don't want to, this is like on the internet, so I'm not going to spend a ton of time here.

Sansa Stark, I think, shows us a particularly merciless but correct, perhaps, decision-making and power-wielding in the last season of this episode when she chooses to execute Peter Bailish.

Sansa,

I beg you.

I loved your mother since the time I was a boy.

And yet you betrayed her.

I loved you

more than anyone.

And yet you betrayed me.

When you brought me back to Winterfell, you told me there's no justice in the world, not unless we make it.

Thank you for all your many lessons, Lord Bailish.

I will never forget them.

Okay, so, and then Lord Bailish's throat is sliced open and he dies bleeding out on the floor.

It's a, in many ways, I think a lot of viewers said this was the right decision.

Peter Bailish was cunning and ruthless and all the rest.

But the thing that struck me in this moment was the sort of mercilessness.

I keep using that word, the ice-cold justice-wielding of Sansa Stark, Stark, which is par for the course kind of in Game of Thrones.

You see characters that start out maybe not as alphas, but as betas.

And when they reach a sort of like turning point, their characters start acting with a certain disregard for emotions and softness.

And Baylish is basically begging for his life in that scene.

And she says, the only justice there is is the justice we make.

Boo-yakasha.

So that's like, I mean, and that's a, that's a, we see that in American politics, I think, in some ways, by the election of Donald Trump generally, which is, I'm the Mr.

No Nonsense, tough talking, unpolitically correct.

Bravado is my middle name.

There are enemies and there are friends and there are no in-betweens.

There's this desire, I think, for us to have our leaders use the sword deftly and swiftly.

And whether, I mean, I'm not going to suggest that Trump is doing a good job of that, but I do think he acts the part, right?

Like he's, there's no gray area.

There's no sort of like soft edges, there's no subtlety, there's no nuance, there's not a lot of intellectual reasoning.

It's all gut and it's all fury, I think.

And Game of Thrones has shown us a selection of leaders that are the same in many ways.

There's also this quality, I would add to that, this quality of unapologeticness.

Remorselessness is not the right word for it probably, but it is a quality that the president has in spades of powering through a moment when everyone thinks, oh,

he's going to apologize now, right?

This is going to spur a little bit more.

This is the one where he says, I was wrong, right?

Nope, nope, it is not.

Now, most of the American public may not like that, but his supporters love that he is defiant.

Yeah.

I do think there is a caveat that the Game of Thrones creators give us, which is that even tyrants need assistance, that even the most powerful, despotic warlords need counsel and help executing their plans.

And those that don't have that will either be not successful or could be turned towards the good side.

That's interesting.

Megan,

broad open, what has been your biggest political lesson from Game of Thrones?

Well, so I've long been interested in the world of Game of Thrones as sort of a media system.

Just the, you know, you look at the Ravens who bring information.

Thunder Raven, they send the Raven, exactly.

And so I'm thinking in particular of the kind of bonkers plan that they hatched together to kidnap basically an ice zombie from the north.

That was a bonkers plan.

It's really bonkers.

It's really bonkers.

And I don't want to go down the road too much of defending this plan because

it's bonkers.

But what I found so interesting about it was just this very realistic idea about what it takes to convince someone of a reality.

There's a scene early in the the season that I think really highlights that.

It's a moment when John reveals how frustrating that problem is for him when he's talking to Tyrion, who'd himself mocked the idea of the magical threat before.

Grumpkins and snarks, you called them.

Do you remember?

You said it was all nonsense.

It was nonsense.

Everybody knew it.

But then Mormont saw them.

And you saw them.

And I trust the eyes of an honest man more than I trust what everybody knows.

How do I convince people who don't know me that an enemy they don't believe in is coming to kill them all?

Good question.

I know it's a good question.

I'm looking for an answer.

People's minds aren't made for problems that large.

White Walkers, the Night King, Army of the Dead.

It's almost a relief to confront a comfortable, familiar monster like my sister.

What I found so interesting was the way the storyline is exploring these really urgent cultural anxieties about fake news and alternative facts.

It's exploring these ideas of what it takes to convince someone of a reality.

So I think that's one way the white-in-a-box storyline makes some sense, because John understands that making people believe in the threat will require a certain amount of intimacy.

He has to show Cersei an ice zombie and make her terrified of it up close to convince her that this army of the dead really is coming to kill everyone.

So yes, it leads to this hare-brained zombie heist, but I think it's the only solution John sees to this problem that's fundamentally a problem of information.

So I really appreciated this season how much the show has sort of understood that and how much the narrative has sort of arced toward making people appreciate that the threat is real.

You know, you could also say that climate change is real, that expertise is real, et cetera.

You could also say that we're in the ice zombie moment of American politics.

You very much could.

You could also say that the ice zombies are a a Chinese hoax.

You could also say that.

And I think a lot of people in the show have sort of kind of fake news this whole thing and said, no, it's not happening.

No, I choose not to believe it.

No, like I, it's, no, I don't want to.

And you have characters like Cersei Lannister, who currently sits atop the famed Iron Throne ruling Westeros, who understands the world primarily through the dynamic of power.

Yes.

Who has it and who wants it?

And

for her,

this narrative of the ice zombies, whatever, your effort to go like face off against this army of the dead, that is merely a pretext for trying to remove her from the throne.

She's so unable to understand the world sort of beyond herself.

And she just does not really understand the world in terms of systems.

She understands it in terms of herself.

And that's basically it.

And sort of everyone else as they relate to her.

It's sort of like make King's Landing great again.

But it is.

King's Landing is already great.

I mean, that's basically how we're left at the end of the season.

She's not wearing a red trucker hat that says hashtag MKLGA.

Did you see how long it took me to figure out what the initials would be?

But it is a MAGA-like worldview.

You know, she says the North will go first, let them go, which is kind of like the attitude that Donald Trump has about parts of the rest of the world, right?

We're here to protect our territory and our territory territory only.

So it's interesting to me how many different analogies are drawn between Donald Trump and different characters in the show.

George R.

R.

Martin, the author of the books, likened Donald Trump to Joffrey, Cersei's son, the intemperate young lad.

That's very youth.

Who seemed to be both governed by his id and also was not aware of the power of the forces underneath him.

I'm curious who you guys think is the best analogy in the show for our American president.

I would make an argument that it is a character named Yuron Grayjoy, who's not one of the more major characters.

He's certainly not a protagonist in this drama, but I think is an interesting one nonetheless.

In its most idealistic sense, politics is about choosing between visions for a nation, and politicians in their most idealistic aversions are campaigning for what can I do for you?

Who can do more for the people?

But in many ways, politics ultimately seems to come down to who do you want to follow?

It's not even just a popularity contest.

It can be this toxic competition among people with sort of vague claims to charisma.

And whoever you seem to think about as most charismatic is the person who is ultimately most persuasive to you.

And so we had this moment in season six when a people, this population of the Iron Islands, the Ironborn, is voting on their leader.

What has occasioned this vote is that this figure, Euron Greyjoy, has come and killed his brother.

the former king of the Iron Islands, and said,

I want to be the new king.

Vote for me.

And he has this.

He presents this just toxic agro testosterone-y charisma to his fellow Ironborn.

The other claimant to the throne is the daughter of the former king, Yara Greyjoy,

who presents that idealistic version of politics.

She says, this is what I can do for you.

I want to build up our fleet of ships.

I want to make it so that we're never under threat from the rest of Westeros again, so that we can protect ourselves, that we're not not subject to the whims of these foreign kings and queens.

So she presents this vision of the future.

Stronger together, was that her vision?

Yeah, stronger together,

you might even say.

And Euron doesn't even go for the here's where I'll take our country thing.

He insults her eunuch brother, Yara's eunuch brother, Theon, and says, I'm a man and I'm gonna take it.

I'm gonna take my equipment over the sea and get this other queen character, Daenerys Targaryen, to marry me.

He is, on the strength of his toxic charisma, elected.

There are a lot of parallels there, but the biggest to me is this guy whose only appeal, his political appeal, is just who do you want to cast your ballot with?

Her with all her strategies

or me

with my junk.

I think that there's some deep truth to that.

I think that in part we really do have

different visions of what effective politics looks like.

I also want to shout out a piece from the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum, which is about, in part, the sexual politics of Game of Thrones.

And she says in that piece called The Westeros Wing,

delightfully, quote, the sexual politics of Game of Thrones has long been a model of cognitive dissonance, like an anti-misogyny pamphlet published in the form of a penthouse letter.

And the girl power fantasies can often be one note.

Arya's training as a multi-faced assassin rivaled the torture of Theon Greyjoy for sheer tedium.

But place a lot of one or two note heroines side by side, and you gain a choral richness.

For all its contradictions, the show has something to say about the psychic cost for women of achieving power, with plots like Sansa Stark's slow transformation from the worst-off bachelor contestant to dry-eyed warrior queen,

smirking as she watches her rapist get his face ripped off by hungry dogs.

Oh, Game of Thrones.

Oh, Game of Thrones.

But that's exactly to the point about how women have developed over the course of this show from sort of like softcore porn bait to the leaders and the sort of war champions in the storyline.

When we come back, let's go beyond Game of Thrones to talk about other works of fiction that have relevance in our current moment.

Stick with us.

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Game of Thrones, of course, isn't the only highly relevant resonant work of fiction that is worth talking about and applying to our current political moment.

Megan and Alex, what else have you been reading or watching that you think has some interesting lessons to tell us about our time?

So I can go first.

I'm going to be very cliche, and I apologize, but I've been re-watching the show, The West Wing.

The Westboro's Wing or the West West West.

The actual

West Wing.

Yes.

People usually think of the show in terms of its idealism, you know, it's sort of like democratic fan fiction almost, you know, and also as kind of a workplace comedy almost that really gets into the nitty-gritty of how government works and all of that.

That is not why I have been interested in it lately.

One of the things that I do think is interesting about the show is the character of Jed Bartlett and sort of what he tells us about what we look for in our politicians and in our leaders.

Because Jed Bartlett, first of all, in the show is considered almost the ideal president.

Basically, he's a genius, he's a great guy, he's really good at the politicking elements of government.

The first appearance he makes in the show, he literally says, I am the Lord your God, and basically drops a mic.

And he is quoting the Bible, but it sort of gives you an idea of how the show regards this character.

I am the Lord your God.

Thou shalt worship no other God before me.

Boy, those were the days, huh?

Why I'm interested in him is I think he has a lot to say about sort of what we tell ourselves we want in our leaders versus what we might actually want.

And I think in general, we tell ourselves, you know, that we want something very transactional in our leaders.

We want people who will sort of represent our interests and work hard for us and sort of keep the machinery of government going and these very sort of practical concerns.

I think what we actually want, though, is something much more profound, almost spiritual in a way.

I am the Lord your God.

But I do think that Bartlett suggests, you know, just in how wonderful he is as a politician, like he's just so kind of talented and he's a natural born leader almost.

I think he reveals how much we actually do want that in the people that we choose to serve for us.

And it's deep in our lore, I think.

You know, there's all these myths about George Washington who, you know, he didn't want to be president, but he had to be asked and he had to be sought.

And it was only natural that he would be the leader.

And, you know, you have Bill Clinton, who's the man from hope, and you have Barack Obama, who was such a natural politician that it didn't matter that he basically had no experience in government.

So I think again and again, we see this sort of revealed preference elements of what we want versus, in some ways, what we say we want.

One of the interesting aspects of that to me is that this may be apocryphal, but the West Wing itself was envisioned, I believe, as a show about the people behind the scenes, not about the president, not about Jed Bartlett, but about his administration.

And the show itself was captivated by Martin Sheen's charisma

and the character of Jed Bartlett.

It was entranced by the totemic charismatic leader figure.

So much so that Aaron Sorkin sort of abandoned that original, you know, he got some wonkishness in there, but it was

fully within the prism of the charismatic leader totem figure.

Well, it's also kind of a time capsule, too, right?

I mean, the West Wing is in many ways Sorkin's love letter to American politics.

And yet, if you had a show called The West Wing now, it would look a lot more like Game of Thrones.

I just think it was kind of of a time and place.

We've changed.

I mean, this present administration has changed all of our ideas about sort of the work behind the scenes, the harmony, or the feeling of all-in-it togetherness that was very much a hallmark of previous administrations, or so we were led to believe by the West Wing.

And this West Wing is really the polar opposite of all of that.

And the sort of higher aspirations held by the president or his staff members just seem to be woefully absent in this particular moment.

I don't mean to poop all over what's happening in government, but

it's a different time, huh?

I would also say that the West Wing might be as much of a work of fantasy as the Game of Thrones is.

Totally.

The dragons are much less, they take human shape these days.

Can I say that I've been watching a show that is new, but I think equally relevant in this particular moment?

It's called Ozark.

It's a show on Netflix.

It stars Jason Bateman and Laura Linney.

Jason Bateman is an accountant whose partner, he has been laundering money for Mexican drug cartels and does something wrong and is forced to relocate to the Ozarks, where he is tasked with laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for the cartel or else.

And the show has taught me one thing about this moment more than anything else, which is we look for anti-heroes to be our new heroes.

And I go back to the same sort of idea that we don't want the anodyne, you know, perfectly quaffed.

This is, I guess, in opposition to what you were saying, maybe, Megan, but we want people with grit and gumption and flaws.

And Jason Bateman surely is a person that has flaws and is not necessarily who you would think of as the hero, but is very much that.

The other piece that seems particularly relevant is money laundering,

which is something we're talking about right now in American politics.

It's mentioned in conjunction with Robert Mueller's investigation of the Trump administration and campaign.

I'm not drawing any lines, but I do think

there's, I think, increasingly becoming almost a tacit acceptance in certain circles that desperate times call for desperate measures.

And I sort of wonder whether if there are crimes revealed on the part of certain administration or campaign officials that have to do with financial crimes, whether that will matter that much to Trump supporters and the American public at large.

I wonder how much weight something like money laundering carries in this day and age, because I think we've sort of done this rubberband reasoning that, oh, you know,

this all deal making in the end.

It's all of a part to sort of get ahead in the great American rat race.

And Ozark kind of shows us the softer side of money laundering, if you will.

Oh, we will.

I also think that there is the idea that the system's corrupt, so why not?

So why not take advantage of it?

Exactly.

And why not have the person in charge who's corrupt for me?

Right.

Right.

And

thus the fact that Donald Trump still hasn't released his tax returns.

I just think we're kind of letting things slide by a little easier than we ever have.

And you couple that with just the general resentment resentment of government, you know, and there's almost something noble in fighting the government, fighting the laws, you know, fighting the

forces that would want to keep you down.

Exactly.

Yep.

Yeah.

And I think a widespread sense too that I detect,

I think it sort of oozes through fiction,

which is interesting because it doesn't, I don't think of this as oozing through my interactions with like everyday people, with my neighbors, but a sense that this whole universe is just corrupt.

It's just dirty.

It's filled with people with bad, grimy motivations doing bad, grimy things to get a buck.

But the argument I wanted to make in my selection of A Lesson from Fiction is that our politicians and our politics reflect us.

One of the books that I found really interesting and resonant at this moment is Americana by Chimamanda and Goza Adishie.

Congrats on just like her name rolling right off your tongue.

Thanks.

It's a great name.

It's a great book.

She's a great author.

Oh my gosh.

Yes.

Adishier is such a perceptive, enthralling student of people and the way they work.

And at this particular moment in American politics, when we seem so torn apart by these calcified divides of race and gender and class, she has this way of illuminating a slightly different set of divides that kind of rhyme with our familiar schisms of black and white, upper class versus lower class, but they're just different enough that you get to see all of those conflicts in this fascinating and genuinely new way.

Because I couldn't come close to doing it justice, I want to play you this passage from the absolutely fantastic audiobook version of Americana by Recorded Books.

The passage is from the perspective of Ife Melu, who's one of the two protagonists of the novel.

And it's referring to a character in the book named Bartholomew, who, like Ife Melu, is Nigerian and specifically Igbo in ethnicity, and is like a stereotype of a guy who spends all day posting on online message boards under the handle Igbo, Massachusetts Accountant.

Listen to this.

And it surprised her how profusely he wrote, how actively he pursued airless arguments.

He had not been back to Nigeria in years, and perhaps he needed the consolation of those online groups, where small observations flared and blazed into attacks, personal insults flung back and forth.

Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see in the eyes of their relatives brightly burnished images of themselves.

Afterwards, they would return to America, to fight on the internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online, they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

There's such a powerful truth in that, and even this empathy for someone who is, yes, one of those crazy people on Reddit, winding themselves up about how someone on the internet is wrong, hustling to keep up with the middle class, just to get like a taste of feeling upper class.

Just forget presidents and kings and iron thrones.

I just think that there's this powerful lesson for everyone in how hyped up an ordinary person can be about status.

Yeah.

And all you're left with is a suitcase full of cheap watches.

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the things I love about that book, though, too, Matt, is how she explains, I mean, she really gets to the heart of the immigrant experience in America, which is fundamentally being caught between two worlds.

Because as acerbic as her sort of lick wit is about Nigerians in America, it's equally sharp when she looks at what's happening back at home home in Nigeria.

So it's like neither America nor Nigeria exactly fits this woman's life anymore or the outsized nature of her ambitions and her intellect.

And I think, you know, in this particular moment in America, both native and immigrant-born Americans are having a hard time figuring out which America is theirs or what identity is theirs.

And all those themes of kind of loneliness and loss and almost nostalgia for a life that was never quite yours are big themes of that book and so relevant relevant right now.

Absolutely.

I also have been looking at Wonder Woman and thinking that that is

a particularly relevant tale for right now.

Not just the sort of meta debate that we're having over like that James Cameron, director James Cameron, and the director of the film Patty Jenkins are having.

There's a big online debate they were getting into about what characterizes a strong woman, but

you know, this, the impossible, the impossible task of

landing on a profile of courage for the American female superhero, right?

We ask so much of women in this day and age, and I don't mean to go on a feminist jag, but I will, which is to say,

you know, women have to be literally, I mean, in this movie, I don't know everybody who's seen it probably can attest to the fact that the character kind of has to be everything.

She has to be soft, she has to be strong, she has to be sexy, she has to be bookish, not just for character purposes, purposes, but I think also for mass consumption purposes.

We want our women to be, our heroines to be all-encompassing in their greatness.

And I'm not just saying this because I'm now a working mom, but I just feel like it's impossible.

And now we're in a sort of meta debate over the character in the movie Wonder Woman and whether she actually checks the right boxes, which is testament to the fact that we can't really...

decide what kind of female archetype is the one we want.

Totally.

What was the onion headline about Wonder Woman?

Report more Americans willing to accept female Wonder Woman.

My takeaway from Wonder Woman was partially about Diana's decision to save humankind from being smitten by the gods, because even though we're fighting a world war against each other, we've got some goodness yet.

Wonder Woman is also a story about a kind of alien invasion of Earth.

And it joins many such movies with the popular trope that the threat from another species will unite humankind.

But what in America's response to like Russia manipulating the U.S.

election makes us think that humans will unite in the face of danger?

Climate change.

Existential threat.

All we need is a big enough enemy?

I don't, I think that's wrong.

I think a more honest lesson of what happens to humankind if the aliens invade comes from a movie like 28 Days Later.

It's a zombie apocalypse.

Only 10 people left in like the entire city of London, and they still managed to basically reinvent every great human evil, just among the 10 of them.

I think there's something that's deeply honest in that, and there's a lesson there too.

If the aliens invade, not only will humans divide into a faction that wants to fight the aliens and a faction that wants to welcome them, but also there will be a schism within the group of humans welcoming the alien overlords.

Humans that want to join the aliens and want to prove their allegiance to their new overlords, and humans who just want the aliens to destroy everything because they think we failed.

Oh, Matt.

I mean, I was just going to say, like, part of the reason we're not united in the fight against climate change is because there are certain very moneyed interests, in particular the oil and gas industry, that are predicated on fossil fuels and other pollutants remaining the order of the day.

As far as I know, and I don't know a lot, there is no faction that is devoted to or seeking profit or seeking to gain profit from an alien invasion as yet.

So maybe our chances of uniting under a banner of shared humanity to combat the alien invasion, maybe those prospects are better than we think.

But what do I know?

I'm pretty sure humans can find profit in an alien invasion.

Someone will, if there's a crisis, someone will turn it into a bus.

Someone's going to short sell humankind.

But this actually does make me think back to an episode that you guys did a couple weeks ago with Kurt Anderson and our propensity right now for magical thinking.

And I think what might happen if the aliens come is half the people simply won't believe that they have come.

They will think it's a conspiracy.

They will think it's a hoax and they will not want to do anything about it.

So I do think that's that's something that's changed in the past couple years, even since Independence Day, you know, where we just fully won't believe that it's happening and then it will be too late.

Gotta lock one of those aliens up in a box and take it to show Cersei.

Exactly.

That's a great idea.

Not bonkers at all.

We need a nice zombie.

We do.

Tying it all up with a bow.

Welcome, team.

That, I think, brings us to our closing segment, Keepers.

Alex, Megan, what have you encountered, heard?

read, watched, listened to recently that you do not want to forget.

Alex, how about you?

We're having a fairly light conversation.

Well, I guess the American politics side has its darkness and sadness.

But this big news story this week, domestically speaking, is the hurricane in Houston.

And there has been no shortage of tragedy and heartbreak and sadness.

Indeed.

But there have also been these moments of extraordinary

tenderness.

And

we're talking about a shared humanity.

There was a photo that was taken during the week that we showcased on the Atlantic by some of the great photojournalists who are down there getting amazing documentation of the struggles and the saving that's happening.

And it's a photo of this kind of strapping,

I think he is affiliated with one of the government services that's doing search and rescue, carrying a young Asian woman who is in turn carrying her baby through a sort of flooded street in the Houston area.

And I looked at it.

I mean, there's so many photos of, and it's hard to pick just one, but this one in particular, because I just had a baby and the babies were basically the same age.

And I thought, God, you know, the thing about disasters is it reminds you of the smallness of your life and the precarious nature of our existence.

And that help can come from any corner.

And sometimes in the corners you least expect it or the ones you most expect it.

But that the bond that is forged among us humans when we help each other in times of distress and duress

is a sort of unbreakable reminder that we are in it together.

And if there is like a really sort of important lesson I think that we take away from a week like this, it's that we can still save each other.

And as small as a discrete individual life may seem together when we, you know, put our efforts together and give each other a hand, we can survive.

I mean, I know that sounds pretty happy and like it's meant to cheer me up at the end of a tough week, but so be it, right?

These pictures are a reminder of our humanity, and that was like something I definitely want to hold on to long after the fact.

Absolutely.

That is both beautiful and also true.

Megan, what do you want to keep?

Mine is very much along the same lines, Alex.

I was struck looking at the pictures and watching the footage of everything that was happening in Texas by the existence of the Cajun Navy, which is a group of everyday people, mostly based in Louisiana, who have taken their boats into Texas to rescue people who are stranded.

Watching some of this reminded me of if you guys have seen Dunkirk and the sort of pleasure boat aid that came to Dunkirk.

It's very much that same idea.

And like you, Alex, I was just struck by you can feel, like you said, so small in a situation like this.

And I think as an observer, you know,

you're watching this on screens and you're feeling kind of distant from it, but also very connected to it.

And it's so easy to feel, I think, kind of helpless and hopeless and like, what can I even do, you know, not being there?

And, you know, there's a lot of conflicting information.

You know, you should give to the Red Cross, but no, you shouldn't give to the Red Cross.

And, you know, you should spread the word in this way, but, but not this word, because that's a hoax and all of this.

And it can feel very, I think, just chaotic and, yeah, make you feel very disconnected from things.

So this was just a reminder to me that, you know, these people didn't wait to be told what to do.

You know, they just, they had something that could help.

They had a means to help, and they went in.

Sometimes they literally dived in.

And I love that.

And I think that's just a nice, just lesson to take forward that, you know, you shouldn't wait.

You shouldn't, you know, feel helpless.

You should just do whatever you can to make yourself useful.

Yeah.

Those are both delightful and sweet.

I will add another image.

This is not my official keeper.

And that's the image of the wonderful podcast host, host of the show, Reveal, Al Letson.

Seeing a man in a street getting beaten, curled up on the ground, Al saw this sight.

Doesn't matter who the people were and what they were there for.

Al saw this sight and he just jumped in with his own body and urged the attackers to stop, just stop, and shielded the man from the blows around him.

And there's a video of this that is just has that, it triggers that same sense of, you know, actually,

for all our foibles, we can link together behind a common cause.

My real keeper is from this documentary called The Farthest, which I happened to watch recently and is delightful.

It is about the NASA Voyager missions, Voyager one and two.

And it really made me think, you know, we spin up these grand tales of humankind uniting together against something, but there is nothing like humankind uniting together towards something.

And in this case, towards the borders of

the solar system, out beyond the solar bubble, beyond the reach of our sun, into outer, outer space.

The mission of Voyager.

This is about the men and the women who launched the satellite in the 70s and sent it far beyond the point that any human has ever gone or might ever go.

And one of the things that you might know that was appended to that satellite was a golden record

reflecting a lot of fantastic 70s music.

Redundant.

And one beautiful song, the Pygmy Girls Initiation song that I wanted to play for you.

Listen to this.

And with that, we reached the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Megan, thank you very much.

Thank you so much.

Alex, once again, thank you so much.

Matt, Megan, thank you so much.

And now winter has come for this episode of Radio Atlantic, which was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks as always to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose immortal version of the battle hymn will play in full after these credits conclude.

As always, look for us at facebook.com/slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in iTunes and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

You'll find detailed show notes linked from the episode description.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Spare a moment for Houston, and we'll see you next week.

Oh

in glory

My eyes are seeing the glorious of the coming of the law.

Here's trapping, defending where the red and rattlesnake

had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war,

his troop is marching on

glory, glory,

hallelujah,

glory, glory, highly,

hallelujah,

hallelujah,