Two people who should read MORE science fiction and fantasy

[mmcirvin]

1. Rick Santorum should read somebody other than Tolkien. The use of Lord of the Rings metaphors by people advocating a maximalist neocon foreign policy is distressingly common in blogs (a commenter on Timothy Burke's blog went on in this vein in great detail recently), and it seems to be happening in the real world too (come to think of it, I think actor John Rhys-Davies endorsed a similar argument in an interview while he was playing Gimli).

These people really do seem to think in terms of all the Muslims we don't like (in a few cases, all Muslims, period) as a sort of orcs driven by a central Sauron-like driving force rising in the East. It's a misleading and damaging metaphor, in that the orcs are hardly even independent agents (an issue Tolkien struggled with creatively), and nothing the Good Guys do short of destroying the Ring has any effect on Sauron's reentry into Middle-Earth; all you can do to stave off the darkness sweeping over the world is try to fight his armies as hard as you can with everything you've got. That wasn't even true of the USSR and its global client empire, which was much more like an overwhelmingly powerful unitary enemy on the other side of the world. It's an even weaker metaphor for the set consisting of al Qaeda/global Islamic radicalism/Iran/Saddam Hussein/the Looming Demographic Menace of Eurabia/American Muslim immigrants if you're being really hardcore.

I'm not at all sure Tolkien would approve of this particular appropriation—as Tim Burke said, the Ring stands for the temptation of power, the ability to use that power to do good is one of its many seductions, and the grand neocon program to remake the world smacks of the arrogance of Boromir or even Saruman. But I can't be sure because Tolkien's dead.


2. Oliver Curry should read somebody other than H. G. Wells, in order to come to a realization of how easy it is to pull speculations about the future evolution of humanity out of thin air, preferably in a freshman dorm room around one in the morning, and how varied the results can be. Really, he could have come up with something more original.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I'm not at all sure Tolkien would approve of this particular appropriation

I'm reasonably certain that he wouldn't. He makes it pretty clear that the human beings who fight on Sauron's side do so not because they are evil, because they are deceived (note that the person who describes them as "wicked" is Gollum, hardly a reliable narrator). And the orcs are bad because they were created by Sauron, against the natural order of things. (Even the dwarfs are described as more likely to go bad than other races, because their creation wasn't exactly sanctioned either.)

Tolkien might very well have had issues with cloning, genetic engineering, and so forth, but there's at least one well-known example of his being distressed with his work being used for nationalistic purposes.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I thought of something else. In Peter Jackson's movie adaptation, once Sauron goes down the world is essentially saved. But that's not how it was in the books. The Eye of Sauron is distracted, the Ring goes into Mount Doom, the great evil goes down--and Saruman still swaggers into the Shire and takes over, and they have to go back and kick his ass. So Santorum's metaphor doesn't even work in the most direct sense; fighting Sauron's armies and distracting his Eye is not enough to keep the Shire safe.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...on the other hand, I suppose the people pushing for an extended Tolkien metaphor would just take that as indicative of an immigrant/fifth-columnist menace.

[jwgh]

I'm not entirely happy with the idea that the US is Frodo and Sam while Iraq is Minas Tirith. I feel there are many things left to be desired in that mapping.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of putting a grim little coda on my essay asking precisely who on the planet today best maps on to the Dark Lord and his world-smashing minions, but figured people would probably read into it suggestions for remedies that I didn't intend.

[jwgh]

Where in the world is Mount Doom?

[twillis.livejournal.com]

I have a Mount Doom at my place, but it's relatively small. And made of horse manure.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Hell, ISTR at least one cast member from the movie had a less than popular idea about that one.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Mr. Mortensen, I presume?

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. That was cut for reasons of not making the final episode even longer, but you know, the more I think about it the more I think it wasn't just a coda tacked onto the end. Part of Tolkien's point is that nobody gets out unscathed.

It's a bad idea to try for one-to-one correspondence between his book and any world situation, anyway. His opinion on allegory is well known.

[(Anonymous)]

I' sure Tolkien would not approve. Consider the following from the Preface of "The Fellowship of the Ring", where he explains that LOTR is *not* an allegory for WWII:

"The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its processor its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied ... In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves"

And this is the war we call "the good war". He must be spinning in his grave thanks to l'il Ricky.

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkien even argued -- via the proxies of Gandalf and Frodo -- against killing both Gollum and Saruman, both of whom were real nasty pieces of work.

[paracelsvs.livejournal.com]

I saw that Oliver Curry thing linked earlier, and my eyes just glazed over. My brain just automatically protects me from silliness on that level.

I mean, what the hell? No, really, what the hell? Is the trick to getting people to pay attention to you really to hide the absurdity of your statements by piling on even bigger absurdities?

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I just remember that Professor Tolkien went to war, in some of the same places my Grandfather did. Places such as Passchendaele.

And then, twenty years later, they were the fathers. My father, as a farmer, wasn't allowed to go to war, though he trained as an ARP volunteer, the people who would dig the survivors and the corpses out of the rubble after a bombing raid.

Compared to people like that, what does Rick Santorum know? He's neither "bowled them over like skittles" with a Lewis Gun, nor seen the ash falling from the sky downwind of a burning city.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yep. I wonder what my own granddad would think, too.

(I already know what grandma thinks: I was talking to her the day the big Saddam statue went down, when I was still deluded enough to think that this war might be worth something, and her response was "I think Bush has egg on his face. Where are the WMD?")

[tongodeon.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that the "Eye of Sauron" analogy works just as well the other way. While we've had our eye on Iraq, pouring money and lives into a wasteful attack against people who did not attack us, smaller and more genuine threats have been taking advantage of our distraction to advance against us.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Beyond that, Mount Doom is in Mordor -- so Santorum is saying that America is the Evil Empire? And who are the hobbits, and what's the ring, and what happens when Mordor/America is destroyed? What nation is he claiming to be Gondor, then?

Damn, the Democrats need someone who's read LOTR to point out this kind of thing!

(linked here from Making Light)

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

coming over from makinglight...

Rick Santorum should read somebody other than Tolkien.

Or at least read the foreword.

beard

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

This suggests that Mount Doom is in the U.S., which would make America Mordor. The "Eye of Mordor" being drawn away from "Mount Doom" echoes Aragorn's distraction at the Morannon.

There's a few ways to interpret Santorum's analogy, but I doubt he intended any that would place Iraq and Iran in the roles of Rohan and Gondor. If his Eye is being drawn to Iraq, that could mean that Iraq is the Black Gate, a mere distraction from the true objective. (It should be noted that Aragorn believed his feint to be a suicide mission for the troops involved.) This leaves the curious association between Mount Doom and the U.S. I can only imagine that here the Senator is taking liberties with the story to suggest not that America is Mordor, but that the goal of the war is America itself, ie its invisibility to the terrorists - a power granted, by the way, by the ring the hobbits carry.

Alternatively, the Mordor-America analogy might betray a certain distrust or fear on his part of the United States - or at least part of the United States. The Eye of Mordor might not represent the interests of al qaeda at all, but rather what he sees as subversive elements within America itself. Rohan's leadership, corrupted and controlled by the smooth-talking servants of this evil force, has recently been healed, and it is time to strike back. So long as the Eye is focused on what is happening at the Gate, it will not be looking within to notice his heroic little hobbits destroy what Sauron finds most precious - his source of power, his cover of anonymity, the One Ring forged once upon a time in the same place it can and must be destroyed, the terrible flames of the U.S. Constitution.

There are nine Supreme Court Justices in black robes, you know.


From here. (http://www.poe-news.com/forums/sp.php?pi=1001326130)

Rick should *read* some Tolkien

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

and not just watch the movies, rather.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Nice of old Rick to admit that the war in Iraq is intended as a sideshow, a distracting action, and not any of the high-minded things that W keeps claiming it's for.

Nevertheless, the spokesmen of the West didn't then go on the media and explain that they were distracting Sauron. Who is Sauron in this metaphor, and why is Santorum so sure he doesn't follow US media?

What's worse, though, is the response of the Democrat: "You have to really question the judgment of a U.S. Senator who compares the war in Iraq to a fantasy book." Look, Santorum is inept, but that doesn't make it inherently stupid to draw moral lessons from great literature.

[joeve.livejournal.com]

"Anonymous" above is correct in saying that Tolkien never meant his novels to be an analogy for WWII or anything else for that matter. Tolkien was a linguist who wrote the stories, in part, because he had an interest in creating a history for the languages of Elvish and Dwarvish he was creating.

The only analogy I ever took from LOTR, or rather, the works of the Silmarillion, is that America is more like Numenor, which was a land created by the Gods for Men who had aided the Elves in their war with Melkor (Morgoth), who was Sauron's boss. But when the Darkness rose again in Middle-Earth, King Gil-galad asked for aid from the King Meneldur of Numenorians to combat it. He was loathe to make that decision, and resigned the Kingship early in favor of his son, Aldarion, who had been to Middle-Earth on many occasions, and whom King Gil-galad called "the greatest Elf-friend" in the world.

But a consequence of the aid from Numenor was that there were many captains who sought nothing but conquest, and the wealth and power of Numenor grew. And the later Kings despaired that their lives were so short, and sought immortality, as the Elves had. In the end their arrogance brought them down, and the Gods destroyed Numenor and all who lived there, save for a few of the faithful who were swept back to Middle-Earth to found the Kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. And among the enemies of the two Kingdoms were the Black Numenorians who had established their own Kingdoms in places like Umbar.

Anyway it's a bit more complex than that, I recommend reading Aldarion And Erendis from the Unfinished Tales book for more detail. But that's how I see America in that sense: greatness brought down by hubris.

Of course better analogies are found in real life: the rise and fall of the Athenian Empire (read Thucydides) and the rise fall of the Roman Empire. Both began as democratic Republics, both became Empires, both eventually fell. And so it will go with us, I believe. And I think we will be a better nation and a better people for it. I hope so, anyway.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Though, as people sometimes point out when the Rome analogy is raised, the Roman Empire lasted for hundreds of years after the Republic ended, and its fall was actually very slow unless seen from the vantage point of 1500+ years later. The Roman Empire is a little like the dinosaurs: something often used as a metaphor for failure just because it's dead now, when it was actually amazingly successful and long-lived as these things go. What I hope is that our loss of empire runs more like the British 20th century model; they got off easy.

[joeve.livejournal.com]

This is true. It's also true that the Roman Republic lasted longer than the American Republic has, thus far. And it's quite possible, even likely, considering human history, that the American Republic can fall and easily be replaced with an American Empire that could last five times longer than the Republic did.

And so long as our "citizens" are more concerned with the adventures of blonde, multimillionaire heiresses and winners of so-called "reality" TV shows than they are with the admittedly more difficult task of understanding how our government works and what their duties as citizens are, then the powers that be will just keep on going until we finally get to the point where we'd welcome a monarchy of sorts, perhaps with just enough of a pretense of representative democracy to make us think we still have control over our own affairs.

The only question I have is how long this will take, and will it happen in my lifetime? Some say the turning point will be in November, I believe the turning point already came in 2000, when Bush ascended to his current position. These people aren't going to give up power without a fight...