Tolkien Counter-Culture Once Again

Once again, the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien has become counter-culture. Back in the days of hippies and yippies, Tolkien was accorded mythic status by certain elements within the counter-culture movement. After all, a barefoot hobbit smoking his pipe and out picking mushrooms in the forest had some things in common with a hippie living in a yurt in the forest outside of Santa Cruz. At least, that’s one perspective.

Now, however, decades after the hippies have gone grey and taken the reins of industry and politics, and years after Peter Jackson completed the ultimate mainstreaming of Tolkien, the venerable professor is undergoing a new revision. A recent analysis by an obscure British government bureaucracy called the Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) has concluded that reading Tolkien can be an indication of right-wing extremism.

I myself would conclude that such analysis can be an indication of profound idiocy. But what do I do know? At any rate, the analysis seems to infer that belief in moral absolutes, in a worldview that acknowledges good and evil, is evidence of extremism. Right-wing extremism, mind you.

Tolkien is in Good Company

Of course, the genius report from the morons at RICU also called out C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and others as philosophically dangerous. I imagine they will go after J.K. Rowling next; though, to be fair, she’s already been targeted by elements of revisionist society.

The RICU report, as absurd as it is, takes place alongside the also recent kerfluffle involving the Puffin publishing giant–and not a big, friendly giant either–announcing their plan to edit the works of Roald Dahl in order to make his books more palatable to the thin-skinned readers of today. Dahl, as anyone who has read him knows, was fond of calling things as they actually were. If Augustus Gloop is fat, then Dahl would call him fat. If Aunt Spiker was a nasty, miserable wretch of a woman, then Dahl would point that out. Let the chips of reality fall where they may seemed to be his writing motto.

And all of us children understood accordingly and were not harmed in the reading. That is, until today. Apparently, the children of today are thin-shelled shrinking snails who recoil at even a few grains of brisk salt.

Modern Literary Criticism is the Wicked Witch

I’ve always detested the modern view of literary criticism that says the reader should bring his or her perspectives to a story and make that interpretation more important, more primary, than the author’s original intent. This is just a despicable manifestation of narcissism. Modern literary criticism is the witch holding out the poisoned apple.

A lot of people seem fine with the apple. As long as it is organic.

This inward focus is one of the same motivations fueling Puffin’s decision to sanitize Dahl for the modern reader. They are intent on remaking Dahl in their own image. It’s an absolutely outrageous decision and will contribute further to the overall dumbing down of society. When we decouple books and communication in general from the author’s original intent, we are separating ourselves from a proper understanding of history.

Oh, there are plenty of reasons why rejection of original intent is bad, but the loss of history is particularly troubling. If we forget history, we tend to then… well, you can fill in the rest of the sentence, unless you’ve forgotten your history.

Considering the intersection between RICU’s analysis of Tolkien and Puffin’s contempt of Dahl, I daresay it’s only a matter of time before someone suggest an edit of Tolkien for modern sensibilities.

And where do we go from there?

We cannot reshape reality into our own image. That applies equally to Roald Dahl, as well as the arrogance of the transhumanist movement in both its cyborg branch and its sad gender branch. Be content with making your bed when you consider reshaping reality.

I find it ironic that many of these revisionist nitwitteries going on–whether in academia, entertainment, business or government–are overseen by the aging post-hippies of the 60s and 70s, those admiring fans of Bilbo Baggins and his free-wheeling hobbit ways.

There and back again…

A Short History of Light

The Inflatable Hippies just released their newest album, A Short History of Light. Mellow electronica. I’ve belonged to the Inflatable Hippies for years. Can’t remember exactly how long.

I recommend belonging to a band if you don’t already. It’s kind of the musical equivalent of carrying snow chains in your car. Better to have them than not. You never know when it is going to snow.

Please encourage your friends, your Aunt Marge, other relatives, family-members, neighbors, bridge club, former associates in the mafia you once worked for, the local chapter of the Audubon Society, etc., to have a listen. Available on Amazon, Apple, Spotify, Pandora, etc.

The Inflatable Hippies are already hard at work on their next album, which is tentatively titled A Short History of Shadow. Point, counter-point, of course.

The album after that one will be largely inspired by Tolkien in order to counteract the pernicious effects of Amazon’s bizarrely deficient Rings of Power series. A whole lot of deprogramming will need to happen because of that series. Feel free to start that brave effort by handing out copies of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy, Susan Cooper’s Dark is Rising series, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea stories, Robin McKinley’s Blue Sword, Jim Butcher’s Aeronaut’s Windlass, George MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin stories, and, of course, three humble little books: The Hawk and His Boy, The Shadow at the Gate, and The Wicked Day.

All of these stories fit into the history of light. In different configurations, angles, points of view, sub-categories, spectra. Just as do certain music, sculptures, paintings, architecture, the oak tree, giraffes, lemurs, Neptune, dahlias, gophers (sadly so), sunrises and sunsets. And a whole lot of other stuff, plus all the grains of sand on the every seashore on every landmass on planet Earth.

Sauron in the time of Marvel

Tony Stark would be no match for Sauron.

My eldest has recently become interested in the Marvel movies. So, under no great duress, I’ve been watching some of them with him. I’ve seen most of them before, but it is a pleasure to watch them again, chiefly due to seeing how he enjoys them.

For the most part, they aren’t bad movies. They’re fun. Worthy of popcorn and putting your brain completely on hold for a few hours. Though, I have to say, Marvel has become addicted to a particular sort of end routine. It usually consists of huge things blowing up in the sky while New York or the world is about to end (yet again). This gets old after a while. There are a couple Marvel movies that deviate from this ending, such as the two Ant Mans, Black Panther (a rather dull movie, in my opinion, other than the world-building of Wakanda and Andy Serkis’ character) and Spiderman: Homecoming, but the Avengers movies are the worst offenders. 

Big hole in the sky? Check. Weird creatures from other dimension/galaxy showing  up? New York City smashed to bits for the umpteenth zillion time? Check. Small country in the Balkans about to get nuked? Check? The first Infinity Wars faithfully followed this tried and true recipe, with the somewhat ritalinizing addition of people vanishing en masse and an open ending (due to the fact that Marvel and Disney are intent on squeezing more nickels from the turnip via the sequels).

Despite, the frivolous amusement of the Marvel movies, they share a collective vacuum, a narrative absence equivalent to a galaxy-killing black hole. The villain. There are no Saurons in the Marvel universe.

The villains, large and small, from Michael Keaton’s conflicted father-businessman in Spiderman: Homecoming, to Josh Brolin’s Thanos in Infinity Wars, are really a bunch of shallow, whining milksops. They behave badly enough, I’m not arguing that. They blow stuff up, murder people, don’t seem to recycle, etc., but they aren’t villains in any profound way. They’re villains because of dreary things like resentment (Adrian Toomes in Spiderman: Homecoming), greed (Darren Cross in Ant Man 1), environmentalism (Thanos in Infinity Wars), resentment (both Loki and  Hela in the Thor movies), lust for power (Hydra in various movies).

I’m not saying these motivations make for completely dull villains. They’re decent motivations. In fact, they’re humanizing motivations because all of us as individuals fall prey to these temptations in different ways and in different intensities. And, while I don’t subscribe to environmentalism in any degree that would prompt crime on my part, there are nuts out there who run amok accordingly due to love of trees, small rodents, plankton, etc. However, these motivations, recognizable in their familiarity (as we all have the potential to be wicked in the quietness of our hearts), cannot stir us much beyond our cinematic enjoyment, because of that same dreary familiarity. 

Thanos, the most impressive of the Marvel villains, to put it mildly, is not Sauron. 

Thanos, despite his dedication to wiping out half of all life in the universe, is a bit of a dud in the villain occupation. There’s not much more to his wickedness than that. There’s no profound depth of evil in him. There’s no articulation in the choices of his character that evil is an absolute thing, a thing of vile corruption completely devoted to destruction of truth, beauty and goodness, a brutal concept that has existed outside the universe from before time began. 

Thanos is merely mixed up in his logic about natural resources and how their potential interacts with the purposes and needs of society. He went to the wrong college and took the wrong classes.

Tolkien had a much more profound grasp of villains and evil. He ran deep in his writing, plumbing the depths of what evil and good truly mean, while Marvel seems to find most of their material for villainous behavior on the floor of the psychologist’s office. Or, arguably, at best, ripped off from the dark nihilism of German national socialism. I have to admit, that’s probably been their best villain motivator, and they’ve certainly gone to that well plenty of times.

Hela, the goddess of death in Thor: Ragnarok, had tremendous promise. But she was reduced to a ho-hum motivation from a failed father-daughter relationship. Tolkien would have been wise enough to not use that color. He might’ve dabbled in it for some cosmetic dressing, but he would have scorned it as the dark foundation. He saw the world from an absolutist point of view, that good and evil are realities that exist outside of Man, that evil does not spring from the choices of Man, but that Man chooses evil. Or good, hopefully, from time to time. And this one difference, as opposed to the mindless materialist view of the Marvel universe, creates a great divide between Sauron and the spandex moderns.

Tony Stark would’ve died in Mordor. Sauron would’ve seen to that. All of today’s cheerful choices to defend freedom for the sake of freedom, built on an airy framework of nothing at all (at least, that’s what it’s become these days), would’ve crumbled into ruin on those dark plains. If they’d have even gotten that far.

The foundation stones of Barad-dur go down very far. Far below our everyday villainry. Far below even the best philosophies of our material world. And, as such, the hero who seeks to defeat such an evil must do so with something that is not a comfortable native of the world of men. 

Humility.

Which, again, is why Sauron would’ve easily defeated Ironman.