I haven’t been updating this blog lately. There’s a very simple reason why: I haven’t been writing lately. I’ve been utterly overwhelmed with everything that’s been going on in the world lately, and especially here in the United States. I know that my country hasn’t always been the shining beacon of goodness and democracy that it has claimed to be, but I do think that overall, America has tried to do the right thing for the world, even when that has been misguided or just plain wrong. To see the events in Minneapolis recently, alongside the threat of a pointless war with Europe and the crumbling of eighty years of the post World War II world order, has been almost more than I can handle. Everything sucks these days, and for all the last month, I haven’t been able to work on anything except in the most desultory manner.
But in times of trouble, like many people, I take comfort in my holy book. For me, that is probably Lord of the Rings.
Yeah, it’s a cliche to say that I encountered Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and had my entire personality and worldview changed. I’m not the only one. Be glad that it was Tolkien that triggered my writing obsession, not Robert Heinlein or Ayn Rand.
If there are any lessons to be taken from Lord of the Rings, it’s that anyone, even the smallest among us, has the ability to change the world, and that no one, not even the most wretched among us, is beyond “pity”, as Tolkien put it, or empathy, as I would more likely phrase it. But that’s not what gives me comfort in this moment. No, it’s the chapter where the Isengard orcs kidnap Merry and Pippin in order to, as the meme says, “take the hobbits to Isengard”.
The reason why Merry and Pippin are able to escape the orcs isn’t because they overpower them with strength of arms. It’s because the orcs kill each other. The orcs are composed of three different groups striving for dominance: the warrior Uruk-Hai, the orcs of Mordor, and the goblins of the Misty Mountains. The squabbling and posturing between them eventually leads to a massacre, because that’s what always happens among evil people. They will always destroy each other through the force of their own hatred and stupidity.
The only way you can get evil people to work on a unified goal is when someone even stronger and more evil forces them to submit to their will. And, fortunately, the man who is the eye of the storm of darkness consuming my country is not strong. He is a fat, demented slug of a man, a lazy narcissistic coastal elite who, for some reason, has managed to grift millions into thinking he’s a working-class hero, with no interests or desires aside from satisfying his own vanity and enriching himself. And you just have to look at him – the softness in his body, the deadness in his eyes – to know that he’s not long for this world. Once he’s gone, who do you think can wield the kind of strength and cruelty that can keep his minions in line? J.D. Vance? Kristi Noem? Stephen Miller?
For people who claim to be Christians, the current government clearly hasn’t learned the gospels’ warning re: houses built on foundations of sand. Only in this case, they’ve built their empire on a foundation of fat, saggy flesh, piloted by a brain that is just a couple Filet-O-Fishes away from a hemorrhage so powerful it could kill God. The greatest enemy of evil is evil.
I’ll finish with the following quote by Tolkien himself, from “On Fairy Stories”:
In what the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, escape is evidently as a rule practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds […] Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. Just so a Party-spokesman might have labeled departure from the Führer’s and any other Reich and even criticism of it as treachery […] Not only do they confound the escape of the prisoner with the flight of the deserter, but they would seem to prefer the acquiescence of the ‘quisling’ to the resistance of the patriot. To such thinking you have only to say ‘the land you loved is doomed’ to excuse any treachery, indeed to glorify it.
It is our duty to resist. It is our duty to love. It is our duty to dream of other, better worlds, no matter how many orcs or balrogs or Nazgûl stand against us.
Besides, all things are temporary. This will end. We will remain.
~ Ian (listening to the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?)
