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If We Are to Survive, We Must Re-learn the Meaning of Hope: A Movie Review of the Two Towers Twenty Years Late

This piece of writing would not be possible without the courageous work of American standup comic John Mulaney who, in 2012, delivered a damning, blistering review of 1990 children’s Christmas movie Home Alone in the style of a Def Jam comic in his comedy special New In Town. (“It’s a grid system, ya simple bitch!”)

So, in honour of this occasion, a decade ago, I am going to write a blistering, inexplicably urgent takedown of a twenty year-old movie nobody is really interested in talking about anymore.

I will never forget viewing The Two Towers from the front row of Vancouver’s old Capitol Six movie theatre on opening night in 2002. Next to me was the person with whom I had most wanted to watch the film, my dear friend Alannah. Better yet, Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf made a spontaneous appearance to introduce the movie, because he happened to be in town filming an X-Men movie and decided to give his fans an extra treat by introducing the film.

Following writer-director Peter Jackson’s risky, audacious yet successful changes to JRR Tolkien’s original narrative of Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in the trilogy, we were ready to see the definitive cinematic adaptation of the most dramatic and profound of Tolkien’s novels, trusting that whatever changes he made would only serve to amplify the big ideas and themes of the book.

Three hours later, we exited the theatre, ashen-faced, feeling like we had been repeatedly been beaten in the stomach with cricket bats. Every single change Jackson had made to the second book had made it worse, and yet the awfulness was not experienced as a death of a thousand cuts but as a single, massive, fatal gaping wound in the original story.

And that is because I do not think that the Peter Jackson and the audience to whom he was playing had any sense of what hope really was in the grand vision of JRR Tolkien. I have attempted to write this piece before but didn’t quite get it right, the way that progressive consciousness is especially corrosive to it, as is one’s whiteness. But I will go further today in stating that the second and third Lord of the Rings adaptations that Jackson filmed were a profound harbinger of the death of hope as a twenty-first century progressive idea and the rise of post-politics.

It took me a few weeks to even figure out why I hated the movie so much (as I still do, despite loving the first). But I figured it out. But also, here I must digress into the lateness of this post. I was posting with a decent momentum for a while, there but, following some additional real life developments, I found myself blocked in my efforts to write this piece. Not only could I not write it, I felt it was a betrayal or an admission of defeat I refused to make to write something in its place. But, after a month of wrestling the Devil, here it is.

What I found striking, twenty years ago, was that whether people saw Jackson’s changes as inconsequential or improvements or whether they shared my intense dislike of them, we lacked a language for describing what Jackson had done in adapting the books’ plot to film, something I will briefly describe here:

In the second book of Lord of the Rings, there are three polities that must act against Sauron, the Enemy, and the allies he has gathered to prevent the world plunging into an eternal darkness under his control. While the Enemy’s undoing is to be carried out primarily by a small number of people carrying out an absurdly improbable plan, these last great forces must spring into action on the side of good but are, instead succumbing to evil.

Rohan, led by King Theoden, has continued to defend itself but has made no move to counter the evil forces encroaching on it and its allies; instead, its fighting men have been under strict orders not to venture outside its borders for any reason. The reason for this is that, having lost his son in battle, the king has sunk into a depression and, bereft of his son, has lost hope. This loss of hope has been reinforced by his corrupt advisor who shields the king from any news and from the light of day, which the king has come to fear, for the news it might bring.

Isengard, led by Saruman the Wizard, is a fortification near an important crossroads. Instead of it being a sanctuary and rally point for the armies of good, Saruman has turned it into a rally point for orcs and evil men. He is attempting to carve out his own, superior faction in Sauron’s armies to seize a share of his dominion. The reason for this is that, Saruman became the heir to the Orthanc Stone, an oracular stone permitting its user to see across time and space. And, over time, Saruman ceased to be able to see a future in which Sauron had not won and so, he lost hope. He came to believe that with the victory of evil certain, things would only improve were he to join with it.

Gondor, led by Denethor the Steward, has continued to lead the forces opposing Sauron but, as its forces have dwindled, and its allies as well, its military moves have grown more resigned, more predictable, more of a staged retreat. Like Sauruman, Denethor has become ensnared by a palantir, a seeing stone like the Orthanc Stone and, he too has lost the ability to see a future in which Gondor has not fallen and will not inevitably fall. Believing the breach of its last citadel is imminent, Denethor attempts to murder his last surviving heir in a murder-suicide self-immolation.

JRR Tolkien is a didactic, moralistic writer. And his point about hope is never far from the main text of his writing. But while Jackson faithfully reports our hero Gandalf’s description of his plan for vanquishing Sauron as “a fool’s hope,” it is as though he is unable to see where hope structures Tolkien’s narrative unless it is so-named.

From the dialogue taken from Tolkien’s original text and that added by Jackson and his team, it is clear that Jackson didn’t understand how the loss of hope could, in and of itself, transform a person from being a powerful force for good to one of evil.

It is my view that this is because Jackson and most of contemporary Anglo American society has completely lost track of what hope is and by losing track of the idea’s meaning, lost hope, itself.

Growing up in a black family, and a well-connected one at that, I had the good fortune to grow up around people like Leon Bibb who is pictured on the cover of a 1965 Life Magazine singing a duet of Joe Hill with Joan Baez at the Second March on Selma. I understood that I was part of a struggle that stretched centuries back into the past and in all likelihood would stretch centuries into the future. And I knew from stories of the antebellum period and the Fugitive Slave Law, of Jim Crow, legal segregation and disenfranchisement that the struggle included a lot of losing, often for generations on end.

Our sense of hope was not attached to what victories we might expect see in our lifetimes; it did not live in a probabilistic assessment of the chances of the Freedom Struggle in vanquishing racist policies and people. Hope is not for the times we can see a victory ahead. It is not for the times we can calculate our chance of success.

Hope is for the other times, the times when we cannot see any path to victory, the times when it seems that darkness has fallen around us, when our powers of reason can no longer, on their own, chart a path forward. It is an ember that keeps burning, when the fire has gone out.

Hope is not, as we define it today, a reasonable belief that the things we desire can be achieved by us; rather, it is the thing we use to keep fighting for or believing in those things when their future occurrence has ceased to be a reasonable belief.

When we give up hope, when we lose the ability to see good in our future, a very particular kind of evil enters us, an evil our society is losing the ability to describe and to recognize. As a result, we have lost our ability to challenge that evil.

In the original Two Towers, King Theoden is presented as a man, old and beaten before his time. Deeply bereft of his son, Theodred, he has closed and shuttered all the windows in his throne room and sits in darkness all day, grieving for the death of his son. His grief has caused him to collapse into despair and, as a consequence, he refuses to hear news of his kingdom and the larger war gathering around it because he believes no good news will come.

Because he has lost hope, he has ceased to believe that his actions and decisions can make any difference in the larger war and so he has ordered that his soldiers not leave the kingdom’s borders but stay in a grim defense, awaiting its ultimate end, knowing it to be inevitable. And his only trusted advisor is an enemy agent, Grima, because he consistently confirms Theoden’s hopeless worldview.

In Jackson’s reimagining, Theoden is controlled by Grima and his master Saruman by way of some kind of spell that changes the king’s behaviour and appearance, controlling his mind through magic. In the film version, Theoden is suddenly restored to youth and vigour because Gandalf dispels Saruman’s evil magic.

In the original telling, there is a magical duel but the moment of transformation is when Gandalf opens the window and lets the sun into the throne room. When Theoden sees the sun, the horses, the plains of his kingdom, he is able to rekindle his hope and summon the riders of Rohan, not because his perception of his chances has changed but because he has remembered how much there is to hope not about but for.

In the original story, Saruman assembles his own armies of orcs and savage men to join Sauron’s alliance because he has seen, via the palantir, that its victory is both inevitable and total. And so he attempts to persuade Gandalf to join with Sauron so that they might hollow out some portion of the future in which they can do some good within the evil empire, in which their subjects might appreciate being ruled with a lighter hand.

Because Saruman can no longer hope for the defeat of Sauron, he joins with him, not out of loyalty or submission but as an act of mitigation. By creating a more orderly, humane, intelligent tribe of orcs, by tactically seizing as much territory as he can before Sauron takes it in his own name, Saruman understands his acts of murder and war not as acts of evil, themselves, but as the mitigation of evil.

Because Saruman has lost hope, his metric for evil has changed. If a good outcome, i.e. the defeat of Sauron, is impossible, then one should not compare his burning of Fangorn Forest or his attack on Helm’s Deep to the actions of the forest’s and fortress’s defenders but rather to what Sauron would have done in his place.

Denethor, similarly in the thrall of the visions shown him by the palantir, is plagued by visions of his kingdom’s capital, Minas Tirith, being destroyed by fire. Believing that this destruction is inevitable, he loses hope for his kingdom. Although Denethor continues fighting every day for his kingdom and ordering his armies to engage in an endless series of sorties and strategic retreats, the despair in his heart causes him to cease fighting, to cease giving orders when the Enemy finally breaches the gates of Minas Tirith. Instead, he orders the construction of a great pyre at the centre of the city where he plans to allow himself and his son to burn to death—thereby controlling the only thing his despair permits him to control: the cause of the fire that destroys him. If he cannot vanquish Sauron, he will deprive him of the satisfaction of burning himself and his heir to death by doing this himself.

In Jackson’s narration, Theoden, Saruman and Denethor serve Sauron directly; they become his stooges, his agents, his flunkies. In the original story, none of these men likes, admires or serves Sauron. They do things that help him, not because they support him but because their loss of hope has so altered their horizon of expectation that they become agents for evil, in and of themselves, often engaging in depraved or violent acts motivated by hatred of Sauron, not allegiance to him.

Most of the evil I see around me is of this variety. Are John Horgan and Justin Trudeau furiously approving more and more fracking sites, oil wells, pipelines and fossil fuel subsidies because they want to incinerate the planet? No. They are just men who have lost hope that we can do any better. Or, to quote my old pal David Lewis, “they have lost the faith that humanity will rise to the occasion.”

Hope may be an intangible, almost mystical force but it is also an absolute bread-and-butter necessity for human survival. Hopeless people do not have to embrace evil in order to carry out monstrous acts; they just have to embrace despair.

That is what lurks at the centre of the Woke and alt-right movements: the loss of hope, the idea that the window for working together for a better world is closed and all that is left are recriminations, revenge and grandstanding.

But because we understand the politics of hope and despair so poorly, we knoiw little about keeping the ember of hope alive within ourselves. But we must get better, and soon. Because more than greed or cruelty, what powers the evil we face today is hopelessness. And more importantly, we need to grow more skilled at making sure others do not lose hope and in building aspects of our community that can make that ember burn brighter in others.

And I realize that I have, to an extent, fallen victim to this. I have not exactly lost hope but I have become so overwhelmed by the betrayals, the madness, the despair around me that I have not put forward a positive political alternative in a long time. So, in the next post, I will.

The Paradox of Disability and Self-Help: An Homage to Dungeons and Dragons

Six years ago, I was asked to bring my insights as both a social scientist and avid player of tabletop role playing games to a University of Calgary project that was researching the use of computer games as mental health and life skills interventions for children and youth living with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism and other neurological disabilities. At the time, they were considering expanding their study to examine in-person, tabletop games. After I did some initial work on the project interpersonal and academic politics caused the team and me to part ways. Now that I am out of the formal academy, it is one of the projects I am dusting off. This essay is the first step in doing that.

We live in a society that denies that etiquette is important, that we do not have hard and fast rules for communication and social organization. But this denial is just one reason our society’s system of etiquette is one of the most challenging ever to exist. Not only are our rules of interaction not codified or explicit; we deny they exist and instead ask people to act based on their innate talent and social intuition.

We are not exactly being dishonest when we emphasize the role of unconscious intuition in our systems of etiquette. Intuition and innate social talent are important because our etiquette is so faddish and requires a great deal of guesswork because no person can successfully amass all the necessary information to execute it correctly.

And with each passing year, etiquette grows more occult, more faddish, changes more rapidly. And we are not always conscious of the strategies we use to cope with the burden each of us bears in keeping up with all the new rules that we must learn to avoid offense, ostracism, professional demotion or even loss of work.

I think this helps to explain the continuing importance of the situation comedy in our cultural life. Beginning with Seinfeld and Friends, a long parade of both mainstream and off-beat sitcoms have functioned only secondarily as exercises in humour and primarily as etiquette pedagogy, constructing narratives around breaches of novel etiquette practices and their resolution. Curb Your Enthusiasm exists at the margins of this discourse because it routinely questions whether these etiquette fads are positive social developments, rather than treating them as inherently good, or amoral, like the weather.

This increasingly volatile and opaque direction our etiquette has taken since the end of the Second World War has had profoundly adverse effects on those with average or below average social intuition.

And they can be measured in what can only be described as the mass pathologization of fairly ordinary folks. Autism is now a spectrum inclusive of millions of people who are really just a bit obtuse and quirky, Asperger’s Syndrome now a disease; Tourette’s syndrome is increasingly expanding into a spectrum inclusive of all people who struggle with social restraint and conversational impulse control. We have also seen an expansion of mood disorder diagnoses as our faddish systems of etiquette make social situations both increasingly difficult to navigate and increasingly consequential. “Social anxiety” was once descriptive of an inappropriate fear of the consequences of mismanaging a social encounter; now it also describes accurate and reasonable fears.

To make matters worse, more and more jobs have come to include a sales or human interaction component. Corporations route hostile customer communication through telephones precisely because telephonic communication is more fraught, more arduous, more exhausting, more dependent on follow etiquette rules and keeping one’s cool in the face of provocation. That results in fewer product returns, fewer maintenance calls, fewer refunds and exchanges. And all sorts of jobs have had a sales component appended to them.

There have traditionally existed certain kinds of jobs set aside for people with significant social disabilities but these are increasingly under threat as “sales” becomes a duty incorporated into more and more jobs. Shelving jobs in retail space, for example, now almost always include a customer service component and usually a sales component too.

What this means is that an ever-increasing portion of the population is now understood to suffer from neurological disabilities affecting social interaction; and, at the same time, the need to mitigate or overcome these disabilities has never been greater.

For those of us who are just a little quirky and unintuitive but who are now understood to occupy the top of the Tourette spectrum or the autism spectrum, there are some proven strategies that have worked for us: we can often learn social competence and even develop a significant degree of intuition through practice in less hostile environments.

For me, that environment was Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have never played the game, each player (except one) plays a “character,” a fictional person both like and unlike them whom they operate in the game, whose intentions and speech they narrate. D&D is a cooperative game, which means that even if one’s character dies, one has not lost the game but instead must imagine a new character into being. Characters are described on “character sheets,” which list and quantify the character’s innate talents, learned skills and other proficiencies.

While physical combat in the game is resolved solely by rolling dice, the social interactions, both among player-characters (PCs) and with non-player characters (NPCs) (other people one encounters not represented by one of the players) are resolved by acting-out the social interactions and then rolling dice, based on the character’s in-game social apititudes, to determine how well-received these words have been.

D&D is also soothing because it is full of measures of status. Characters gain “levels,” commensurate with their powers in the game and as they experience more success, there are steady incremental rewards. Furthermore, characters specialize into classes, with warriors wielding swords, clerics healing wounds, warlocks incinerating foes with eldritch blasts. Having clearly quantified hierarchical ranks with transparent criteria for attaining them and areas of specialization allowing everyone to be the master of something is not just soothing.

D&D creates a social microuniverse that is fairer, more transparent, better quantified, more clearly ordered than the chaos of modern social interaction. Furthermore, the game makes that micro-universe just consequential enough. Screwing up at D&D is still a screw-up. Your character may even die but none of those consequences leave the table.

My childhood D&D table, like so many others, consisted of a bunch mildly autistic kids practicing social interaction governed by a stable set of rulebooks, hour after hour after hour, week in, week out. It worked. And it continues to work.

It should not surprise us, then, that when Canada and the US unexpectedly invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many of us were hit up with a subcultural “support the troops” request: with the new edition of D&D (third) coming out, could we spare our first and second edition rulebooks and scenario packs for the troops? Because of course D&D players are well-represented in the military; because, in a way, the military is a gigantic tabletop RPG that never ends. As you gain levels, you get access to cooler and cooler, more expensive weapons, just like in D&D and there are even names for the different class levels like “admiral,” just like those tables in Gary Gygax’s original Player’s Handbook.

More than any D&D group or military battalion, the organization that truly epitomizes this kind of intervention is MENSA. A superficial observation of any MENSA chapter board tells us that MENSA is not an elite organization for the super-intelligent; it is a self-help group for people with Asperger syndrome. In fact, I learned recently from a former MENSA director, that their conventions include a set of coloured badges to indicate each delegate’s level of tactile defensiveness (coded as receptivity to hugs), one of the most common Asperger’s comorbidities.

But what would happen to MENSA, to your average D&D group, if they understood themselves to be self-help groups for the disabled? What would happen if MENSA activists began to explain their struggles to get into romantic relationships as arising from their status as disabled people and not because they are “too smart”?

I would argue that a great paradox of autism and Tourette’s self-help projects is that they use the lack of social intuition of participants to conceal the true function and purpose of the group. Essentially, we are coping with our disabilities better and working more industriously on them because we have hidden from ourselves the fact that we are disabled.

It has saddened me, the past decade, to watch similar movements, like Deaf Culture and Mad Pride, wither when the positive effects of transforming one’s disability into something other are so clearly evident in my corner of the world.

Because it is my view that ordinary, decent people would rather be a screw-up than a cripple any day of the week. I have a couple of friends whose lives are severely circumscribed by neurological disability whom I watch make that choice week-in, week-out, even though it brings shame and a sense of failure because that all those screw-ups are a lighter burden than a permanent, crippling brain defect.

Ordinary, decent people want to be heroes; they want to focus on helping others, not asking for help for themselves; they want to feel like their unique ideas and perspectives come from a rare intellectual talent, not brain damage.

The white failures of Trumpism, who blame affirmative action, reverse racism and the International Zionist conspiracy for their lack of a mate or a job are of a piece with the progressive failures furiously pathologizing their personalities and appropriating minority sexual and racial identities to explain their failure. What both groups need is more D&D. It is not natural or healthy to build one’s identity around victimhood or disability, even—nay—especially  when one is genuinely disabled or genuinely a victim.

In other blog posts on this issue, I have emphasized neurodiversity themes and talked about how many disabilities, like restless leg syndrome, produce personal ill health and population-level good health. But that is a well-ploughed furrow these days.

So in this piece I am making a case that is supplementary: if we want to actually benefit from the neurological diversity of our population and unlock the potential within the human race, we need to begin de-pathologizing our quirks and others’ quirks. And, in my view, a key early step in that must be to resist more strongly efforts to change and complicate our systems of etiquette, investing that energy not in making new social rules but in more transparently explaining and documenting those we already have.

Because not everyone is lucky to have grown up at a D&D table.

This blog post is dedicated to Jens Haeusser, Kenneth Lieblich, Michael Airton, Oscar Bot, Steve Lyons, Tara Fraser, Philip Bot and Terrence Willey, the best damn D&D group a guy could have.

Castrovalva: Reappraising Anti-oppressive Thought in 1980s Doctor Who

In the past, I have suggested that there is a sharp break between the politics of monstrosity in original Doctor Who (1963-89) and new Doctor Who (2004-present). The most famous, effective and frightening monsters in the original series stemmed from memory of the fascist threat in the Second World War and, secondarily, from fear of the Soviet Union. The Daleks, the Cybermen, Sontarans and the Autons, as well as minor villains like the Movellans all played to the fear of a militaristic totalitarianism that annihilates individual free will.

The second Doctor Who found its legs when it came to creating truly terrifying monsters when it began to play on a more universal yet less individually ubiquitous centre of fear: childhood trauma. The Weeping Angels and the Silence perfectly encapsulate the experiences of repression that we associate with serious childhood abuse and trauma.

That stated, I want to offer a qualification to that general schema in suggesting that the last nine years of the original series, which, ironically, was produced by a pedophile, presages this childhood turn in a few important ways. A hallmark of the original series’ final decade was the return of the Master, a timelord of commensurate power to the Doctor but evil. The original Master, played by Roger Delgado, had been featured in 1970s plots in which he formed alliances with hostile alien forces or sought to trick non-hostiles into hostility. The 1980s Master, played by Anthony Ainley, was a different sort of villain who replaced the first Master’s primary strategy of alliance with that of illusion, especially disguise.

In every storyline featuring the Master in his first four years, he is either disguised as someone else (Castrovalva, Timeflight, the King’s Demons) or someone else is disguised as him (Planet of Fire). Fundamental to his villainy, when he returns, is his misrepresentation of himself and his use of this illusion to wrong-foot the Doctor. Yet it often seems that the misrepresentation is not merely a means to an evil end but an evil end in itself.

This allows late original Doctor Who to tell some important and prescient stories about questions of identity and subjectivity, ultimately, in my view, putting forward a very specific kind of anti-oppressive narrative that challenges the kind of hegemonic identity politics that were only in a nascent state during the 1980s.

Nowhere is this anti-oppressive politics better illustrated than in the first Peter Davison serial, Castrovalva, named for the MC Escher painting of the same name. The original painting, early in Escher’s career, did not have the features for which he would later be known: there was no recursion or optical illusion within the piece. Instead, it depicted an actual place, a remote village in the mountains of Central Italy.

But within the Dr. Who Castrovalva, there was also a tribute to later Escher, a central courtyard structured by recursive geography; every staircase away from the town square was also a staircase to the square. Furthermore, the Master, who had created and populated the city with simulacra of human beings, could manipulate individual paths within the city, looping them back to different locations based on his needs. His ability to manipulate included not just the geography of his pocket dimension city but also how its inhabitants physically perceived him.

The Master, himself, was disguised as the village elder known as “The Portreeve.” For much of his time in the Master’s fake city and domain of control. Ultimately, the Master’s plan is thwarted because the Doctor teams up with the local librarian and convinces the inhabitants that there is something wrong and evil about the order of their city and that its history, politics and even physical topography are an illusion and a trap.

There are several details and aspects of this plot that reveal it to be more than it first appears. The first of these struck me during my brief visit to Colorado City in 2011. Colorado City is the core territory of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the violent, polygamous Mormons who split from the main body of their church in the 1940s. They are secretive and in frequent conflict with the law and centre their activities on a town on a disputed section of the Utah-Arizona border. Upon entering the town and beginning to drive past high-fenced compounds, down empty streets, our car was approached by a local teenager trying to hitch a ride out of town. Thereafter, our vehicle came under suspicion and a large truck dragged a concrete median across the road by which we had entered, trapping us in the “city.”

For the next fifteen minutes, my companion and I drove up and down the streets of the city while we were observed from behind fences and through tinted truck windows, concrete medians being dragged from one intersection to another to create and endlessly changing labyrinth. Colorado City was a closed place ruled by a hereditary theocracy that determined who could enter and leave. The place, being the least genetically diverse town in the US, was a gigantic extended abusive family and so it followed logically that part of its entrapment of its residents was a recursive geography that folded back in on itself. After the elders let us escape back onto the highway, it began to occur to me how large and important the message of Castrovalva might be.

No doubt, the children growing up in Colorado City begin their lives unfamiliar with the idea that a street grid might be stable, predictable and attached to a fixed geography rather than the shifting mind of a city’s autocrat. This was certainly true of the residents of Castrovalva. The town’s residents are creations of the Master, himself, and have known no other world. The one exception is the librarian, Shardovan. Shardovan, The drug starts working after 30 minutes of medicine intake but rest depends upon the variety of medicine as some are effective india cheap cialis in male enhancement. Use buy viagra online the Medication according to the Recommended Dosage only. Among many wonderful drugs on the market used for their anti ED qualities are viagra sample free s and Sildenafil Tablets. However, if you do it right, you’ll be able to stop this problem vardenafil online permanently. although he cannot see the topographic inconsistencies and recursion with his eyes can nevertheless “see it in [his] philosophy.”

What makes Shardovan different is that he spends so much of his time reading. Although the books are all fraudulent creations of the Master, documenting a fabricated history of Castrovalva, the ongoing interaction with a stable symbol system and dialectical reasoning causes him to begin noticing the inconsistencies of his world, to nurture the belief that he is participating in some kind of elaborate, oppressive fraud.

Here, again, Castrovalva tells us something important about oppression and anti-oppressive practice: even a creation of an oppressive system can see through their oppression by finding a touchstone of self-consistency, in this case, the written word. It does not even matter that the book was a creation of the system of oppression or that its reader, too, is a wholly endogenous part of the system: the sequencing of a story, the stable correspondence of letters to sounds or ideas, the act of comparing past to present: these things have an intrinsic liberating power. It also says something important about the nature of oppression, that it is the natural ally of double standards, special pleading and other forms of inconsistency.

But of course, it is much easier to resist when one’s own sense of inconsistency is supported by the words, actions or even just presence of someone from outside, not habituated to the false logics that underpin oppression. The Doctor is sickened and disoriented by the space-time inconsistencies of the pocket dimension, making him, at once, the weakest and most powerful person there. So often, this is what we see when a new person joins an abusive family unit or an oppressive regime expands into a new territory: those not habituated to the system of oppression and disorientation are both the most wounded by and resistant to the new order.

This is expressed best when Ruther and Mergrave, the two town elders, revisit Shardovan’s skepticism in the Doctor’s presence. They are strengthened, nourished, by a voice from outside Castrovalva echoing the doubts they have long nourished. And this precipitates the climactic confrontation of the story.

Following the confrontation, Mergrave, the town doctor, confronts the Master and says, “you are not the Portreeve.” To which the Master responds, “something’s been messing with your perception threshold.” “No. You are not the Portreeve. I believe the Visitor.”

What is remarkable about this confrontation is that the category “Portreeve” has almost no equivalent outside Castrovalva. It is a medieval English word for the bailiff of a market town containing a seaport. It is a category that has been created by the Master to describe only one person in the universe, himself. And the only people who know the word or its putative meaning are the simulacra he has created to populate his pocket dimension world. It appears to mean the most wise and knowledgeable elder of Castrovalva, as the person has no law enforcement power and there is no seaport.

It is not that the Doctor has talked through how a Portreeve should act or what one is. All that has happened is that the simulacra have recognized that who the Portreeve says he is does not match who he appears to be. As any child raised in an abusive home knows, the first step in escaping that abuse is to recognize that their caregiver’s self-description does not match their actions, even though the abuser has defined all the terms by which they are judged. An fundamental feature of abuse and oppression, in other words, is what we have come to call “gaslighting,” the way that there is an axiomatic disparity between an oppressor’s self-description and their behaviour. This serves both to wrong-foot and paralyze the victims of that abuse that traps them, and, paradoxically, to offer a way out of an otherwise totalizing, self-contained system.

After the Master turns on his accusers, Shardovan destroys the machine that manipulates the topography of Castrovalva to keep its inhabitants imprisoned and disoriented, sacrificing his life in the process. His last words are “you made us, man of evil; but we are free now.”

Whether we examine oppression at a global scale, a familial scale or anywhere in between, what Castrovalva offers us is a story of resistance to oppression as endogenous in a totalizing system. The simulacra turn on their creator, even though it may mean the end of their lives and even their universe. They do so because asserting one’s autonomous will is more deeply constitutive of true personhood than life itself.

Today, we live in a world under the sway of family annihilator patriarchs practicing a counterfeit masculinity, leveling rape threats at teenage environmental activists, grabbing their daughter’s asses on live TV to the applause of the crowd, decriminalizing spousal violence in response to grassroots campaigns, riding their coarse boasting about sexually assaulting women to electoral victory.

And I believe that Castrovalva offers us not just hope but a narration of the first steps in mobilizing an endogenous resistance from within our states, within our families. It begins with the realization that the power of the oppressor comes from their presumed right to dictate who they are to us, to define, in defiance of our own observations, the bounds of the possible and of, not just their power, but their identity in our eyes. And it tells us clearly that the first step in resistance is the moment we say to our oppressor,

“You are not who you say you are.”

The Hollow Earth: Neoliberalism’s Encounter with Covid-19 and the Uberization of Society

            This essay begins with a long discussion of my old friend George and how I came to know the central anecdote in this story. If you want to skip ahead to the jeremiad about neoliberalism, just scroll down to section two.

George M Gibault (1949-2016)

George in his last years

            My late friend George Gibault served as the BC Social Credit caucus Director of Research from 1975-1995. George was an eccentric polymath and one of the finest strategists the political right has ever had in BC. When not teaching himself different regional styles of banjo music or how to speak Latvian, he was involved in a long thought experiment about what kind of language super-intelligent space-faring dogs would speak. A Turkic language, he decided.

            For obvious reasons, George and I became fast friends when Troy Lanigan, head of the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation, and I bumped into him en route to our lunch meeting to discuss how to keep the BC Electoral Change Coalition together in 1998. We became aware that Troy had paid our bill and left hours ago when the restaurant finally told us they were closing. Like what we call “cultural historians” in my line of work, George had an uncanny talent for seeing something universal, structural and profound in a society by examining the thinking of those at its periphery. For this reason, we both had a carefully curated set of illustrative anecdotes about our encounters with people more eccentric than ourselves, anecdotes that were not merely funny but either were, had been or would be illustrative of something pressing and profound in human society. This is the first (but will not be the last) of my posts whose foundation is a George Gibault story.

(It is also worth noting that this story also formed the foundation of a shockingly prescient role-playing game Philip Freeman and I ran in 2003-06, which predicted the burkini, ISIL, increasing rates of gender reassignment surgery, rolling coal and the globalization of OK! Magazine, among other things.)

George had many jobs in addition to his formal role in the Social Credit governments that ruled BC from 1975-91, as a strategist, administrator and policy wonk. But one of his most cherished was one of several he was forced to take on following the accession of Bill Vander Zalm to the premier’s chair. “The Zalm,” was a tad eccentric, himself, and liked to shoot from the hip policy- and strategy-wise; at one point, he took a three-month leave of absence from the premiership to star in the Sinterlkaas Fantasy, an CTV-Dutch co-production in which he played both Santa Claus and himself, set in Fantasy Gardens, the theme park he did not just run but resided in. So George appointed himself as the person who would take meetings on the premier’s behalf that might otherwise cause the premier to fly off on an unhelpful tangent.

One such meeting was with the leader of the Ontario Social Credit Party. The Social Credit movement had begun in Canada during the inter-war years as a conspiratorial and somewhat confused offshoot of William Jennings Bryan’s popular monetary reform movement in the US. The original Social Credit parties in Canada were explicitly anti-Semitic and believed that provincial governments printing as much of their own scrip as they wished would get Canada out from under the International Zionist Conspiracy that was controlling all governments through the monetary system.

In the 1940s and 50s, in BC and Alberta, Social Credit parties became big-tent anti-communist parties of liberals, Tories and populists whose purpose was to keep socialists, trade unionists and urban liberal cultural elites out of office. And to a lesser extent, the national Social Credit movement had followed suit, becoming a primarily anti-communist, anti-metric, anti-secularism organization where the anti-Semitism was kept to a dull roar.

The Hollow Earth

But by 1989, when the Ontario Socred leader arrived, the BC party was just two years away from electoral obliteration and Social Credit in the rest of Canada had died back to fringe status by the end of the 70s. George figured that the last thing his boss needed was a dose of anti-Semitic conspiracy thinking from some wingnut from Ontario. Besides, George, himself, was curious about what the guy had to say.

“The number one issue,” the guest from Ontario explained, “is Global Warming.”

“Really?” George replied. “Why?”

“We have to accelerate it.”

The reason, the man explained, was that the earth is hollow. The inside is a Dyson sphere with a tiny black sun in the very centre, providing a small amount of warmth. Over 90% of all of the Jews live inside the earth, which is made out of gold. They retain their dominance over the world economy by shipping the gold to their coreligionists on the surface through secret passages under the polar ice caps.

It was necessary to increase BC’s carbon order cialis australia After grabbing that authentication the drug starts working within half an hour of taking meal. This causes the veins of the penis to absorb a greater amount cialis overnight delivery http://www.heritageihc.com/buy5785.html of blood, upon which the muscles become more comprehensive. These combinations are purchase levitra http://www.heritageihc.com/visit then tested in clinical trials to see how effective they are. You’ll be able to attend the classes according to your time tadalafil super active and convenience. emissions, he explained, in order to melt the polar ice caps and reveal the secret passages. Then we could invade the centre of the earth and everyone would have all the gold they needed. This, then, would end world hunger.

I think George made the right move. The Zalm might have been convinced. Today, after all, he is campaigning against chemtrails.

For many years, I delivered this story with the “end world hunger” bit acting as a punchline, to explain to my economic history students some basic things about what currency reform can and cannot do.

But this vision has been haunting me of late. Because it describes the incipient class system that the Covid-19 global pandemic is producing, especially in jurisdictions run by “progressive,” technocratic neoliberal governments like BC’s. Depending on one’s class experiences of the pandemic in such places are radically different.

Members of the managerial class, comprising managers, college instructors, lawyers, government bureaucrats and other white collar workers have had their workplaces shut down under crowd-size rules. They have been ordered either to work from home or to go home and stay on a state-funded work furlough, and have been asked to leave their homes as infrequently as possible.

Importantly, almost no new managerial or instructional jobs are being created, while many are ceasing to exist. Were one to try to find work in such a sector, one’s job search would be fruitless.

But now, let us think about those who work with their hands, cashiers, construction workers, industrial workers, delivery drivers, taxi operators, etc. In BC, in the case of construction and industrial workers, not only have crowd size rules been suspended at their workplaces; their works has been declared an essential service. Building condos, building dams, digging pipelines are all areas of work where every safety rule to prevent the spread of Covid-19 has been turned into a non-binding guideline, and the government has promised that nobody will inspect work sites, to even check for guideline compliance.

Worse yet, such work has been declared an essential service, making it pretty much impossible for anyone to obtain the necessary layoff notice to receive government assistance. That means that industrial and construction workers are being compelled on pain of bankruptcy and future homelessness to keep going to work in unsafe places under unsafe conditions.

But the real story is delivery drivers, the only growth area of the economy with new jobs being advertised. There are longer shifts for cashiers now, too, with special hours for elderly people to shop with greater distancing, creating more cashier jobs in key sectors like groceries and liquor. If one is in the customer service of driving business, the number of people you encounter per day does not decline at all. And, in many cases may increase. Former delivery drivers and cashiers, even if their wages were high enough to qualify for government employment benefits in the first place, and even if Uber Eats, Doordash or Skip the Dishes paid into government insurance programs, still could not obtain unemployment benefits because it is clearly demonstrable that there are jobs available for them, in the only growth sector of the job market. There are no layoff notices in this world, just desperate people in financed cars hoping to make enough money to keep it on the road.

When Uber busted its way into BC, we only envisaged the Uberization of taxi service. Instead, we are seeing the Uberization of society itself.

Strip away the pseudoscience and anti-Semitism and we find the world of the Ontario Social Credit Party emerging organically out of the collision of neoliberalism and a protracted global pandemic.

There are those who work INSIDE, in a safe place, made out of money, dimly lit by a dark sun. And there are those who work OUTSIDE, in a dangerous, lethal place, paid minimum wage or less, compelled to work whether they wish to or not, serving the INSIDE people under the light of a large, bright sun.

The people on the inside are financially secure, paid primarily by the state at a liveable rate with mortgage payments deferred and other small perks. The people on the outside are financially and physically insecure, paid primarily by private sector businesses at poverty wages, supplemented by occasional tips from the inside people. They must work because no government help is coming to replace their wages, working, as they do, in “essential” industries that, in some cases, are even growing. Their rent is not suspended. While temporarily protected from eviction, those who get behind can be evicted the day the state of emergency ends and are still subject to collection agent harassment, wage garnishment and civil suits for unpaid bills.

And the worst thing is that, unlike old Socred thinking, this is not the result of a conspiracy. This is simply the consequence of neoliberal societies’ encounter with a biological virus, somehow mutating both the virus and the societies into something both more lethal and more unjust.

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 2: Why We Must Choose Hope Over Progress

Many people forget that the original ideology of progressivism and the original Progressive Party were created by US President Teddy Roosevelt as an explicitly white supremacist ideology. The idea was that human civilization was a number line, a one-dimensional graph along which every individual human and every group of humans progressed. As they moved forward through time, the fundamental principles of physical and social Darwinism called upon them to change and, as they met new challenges, they changed or died.

As individuals and societies moved along the line, they became more restrained, more polite, more literate, more intelligent and lighter-skinned. Every society that was not England, Germany or America was simply a point behind them on the number line of progress, when people were swarthier, dumber and less restrained.

Much as there has been a Herculean effort to remove progressivism from its white supremacist ancestry, it had remained wedded to it for an unexpected reason: it was a theory of easy and inexorable wins. The world was moving towards a predetermined goal; all one needed was to be on the right side and the engine of history would do the heavy lifting and arrive at the future society with which one had sensibly decided to align oneself. In this way, taking up the “white man’s burden” as Teddy Roosevelt believed Rudyard Kipling had asked him to do on behalf of the British Empire was not that hard a job. It was mostly about waiting to be proven right.

The idea that violent, exhausting, life-threatening struggle was the engine of history, be it the struggle conceived by Karl Marx or the divinely-ordained racial struggle conceived by John Brown and Nat Turner has always been anathema to those who believe in the Progress Myth. In other words, there is a strange and intimate dance between Progress and Whiteness.

In the mid-1980s, the colour line moved over me and, although I had been raised in a black family and remained surrounded by black relatives and mentors, I became white, not necessarily a permanent identity but one with which I have been saddled these past thirty-plus years.

As a consequence, I have an odd experience to talking to other white people about certain things. One that comes up with increasing frequency in debates about climate politics is this one: if you tell a white person that all signs point to our failing to arrest runaway feedback mechanisms in climate change, they will demand to know why you are telling them to give up. So often, when I tell white comrades that chances are that we have already passed the point of being able to arrest the omnicide, they will demand to know why I am telling them not to fight, why I am okay with them and their kids dying. The white co-optation of the Martin Luther King Jr’s paraphrasing of nineteenth-century abolitionist Theodore Parker that “the arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice,” has somehow been used to justify this theory that victory is easy and inevitable or not worth fighting for.

That is not to say that the people who would later become white have always had such a view. Both the Bronze Age Greeks and Norse believed that honour demanded one must fight with the expectation of victory, even though defeat was inevitable.

For good or ill, JRR Tolkien hated progress and progressives. And the theories of time and morality he puts forward in Lord of the Rings argue that the great Manichean struggles between good and evil are won by the opposite of progress, when it comes to fighting for a just future: hope.

In the family in which I grew up, the idea that one was fighting against white supremacy was completely disconnected from the certainty, probability or even possibility of victory. One was born into a Manichean struggle between good and evil that began before you were conceived and would continue long after your death. You fought against white supremacy because it was right, whether it was during a time you were winning, like the 1960s or when you were losing like the 1870s or today.

There was never any connection between one’s participation in the struggle one’s chance of success, especially in the immediate term. One was born into the struggle and stayed in the hassle one’s whole life. Some people, like me, or my great aunt Connie could “pass,” but abandoning the struggle was one of the most dishonourable things one could do.

Kamagra tablets have emerged as a challenging ED drug of levitra online no prescription generic origin. One approach can be changing the nutrition plan of the patient, which includes a gluten shop at store discount levitra free diet and elimination diet. 4. Using toilet stool is the only solution that can help in improving cialis on line the energy level to a great extent. This procedure is used to treat excessive wounds, burns and infections such as vitiligo. cialis usa online heritageihc.com That is why I was moved to tears when Barack Obama’s 2008 New Hampshire concession speech contained the words “we’ve been warned against offering the people of this nation false hope. But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.” It seemed that Obama was culturally translating between the African American idea of hope and the white idea of hope, the former being the internal strength to struggle against evil and the latter being a probabilistic assessment of the likelihood of triumphing over evil.

It brought me back to the other great cultural translation project of my childhood, Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien reached back to Eddas and transmitted the Norse ideal that even though every rational oracular prediction said that the gods would lose the final battle and evil would triumph over good, the Aesir and Vanir fought on because somewhere in the distant future, beyond the final battle was a peaceful and just future called Gimli, that although they could not see how to get there and would never get there themselves, they fought for.

The central, the fundamental battle of the soul around which Lord of the Rings revolves is the contest between progress and hope. The two secondary villains of the novels are Saruman the Wizard and Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (Tolkien’s Byzantine Empire analogue). These men were the two most powerful in the known world. One was the greatest of the seven hypostatic istari, the god-men sent by the gods to aid the people in the confrontation against the greater evil, the minor god Sauron; the other was the ruler of the most powerful, prosperous kingdom.

Both men possess palantirs, oracular stones that permit them to see throughout space-time, and it is these stones that bewitch them and lead to their downfall and betrayal of the forces of good. Because Peter Jackson, maker of the LOTR films a generation ago appears not to have understood the central thematic element of the story he was telling, he depicts our secondary antagonists as being mind-controlled or bewitched by Sauron himself and falling under his sway. That is explicitly not what Tolkien sought to show or told his readers. Rather, by being directed to see the overwhelming odds stacked against them, the greatness of Sauron’s power, the vastness of his hosts, they lost hope.

Denethor’s response to the loss of hope is to fight halfheartedly and hopelessly, carrying out his duties as ruling steward but rejecting all strategems based on courage or hope. He does this until the apparent death of both of his sons, at which point, we orders a giant funeral pyre to be built and commits suicide, trying to take as much of his family and city with him. Until his suicide, Denethor is an incrementalist. He “knows” he faces defeat so he retreats as slowly as possible.

Saruman’s response to the loss of hope is to switch sides and attempt to carve out his own personal share of Sauron’s dominion by conquering first. He explains to his former allies that their “only hope” is to join with the forces of evil so that they might make their corner of it less evil. Saruman, too, is an incrementalist. Every mile of territory he conquers before Sauron does, is territory that will fall under his less-harsh yoke when the war is over. In this way, Saruman offers a better Middle Earth, “one practical step at a time.”

Gandalf, our istari hero, on the other hand, forms a small multi-racial fellowship of ordinary people who bet on a profoundly improbable strategy that has almost no chance of success; one member of the fellowship even betrays it when he is overwhelmed with hopelessness. But the fellowship does not draw hope by evaluating the probability of victory. Their hope is based on these aphorisms Gandalf quotes, “many are the strange chances of the world and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the wise falter… for even the wise cannot see all ends.”

In this way, hope comes not from the chances of a particular plan succeeding. It comes from the fact that human intelligence is fallible, that the universe is big and unpredictable and strange, that only God can see all ends. Hope comes from an acknowledgement of our smallness and fallibility not from our power and our knowledge. Denethor and Saruman believed they had seen and thought all possibilities; Gandalf had the humility to know that no one could. That does not mean averting one’s eyes from the facts before you, of the permafrost melt and the methane and sea ice feedback mechanisms, nor from the rising spectre of racist authoritarian movements everywhere. It still means using all that information to make judgements but to reject the hubris of Saruman and Denethor and recognize that, as one is not God, one cannot be all-knowing.

But for the fellowship to succeed, Saruman and Denethor first had to be defeated. And this is the reality the left faces today. There is a final battle we must soon join against the family annihilator patriarchs leading this global death cult but interposing themselves between us and them are the Sarumans and Denethors of the world, the Justin Trudeaus and John Horgans, the Pete Buttigiegs and Kamala Harrises of the world, those who hide an agenda of betrayal, capitulation and self-immolation behind a discourse of “progress,” “good first steps,” “pilot programs,” and “realism.” This is the politics of “incremental gains” which now means not even that but rather “flooring the gas over the cliff and then letting up.”

And the only way we can do that is by being fundamentally hopeful. That means finding and transmitting joy, camaraderie and certainty of the rightness of our struggle and not of our chances of victory.

The Pressing Relevance of JRR Tolkien in Our Times: Part 1: Age of the Counterfeit

Before finally returning to my promised article on conversion, I feel I need to say more about how the corpus of writing on which I grew up, Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion, JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth books, have provided me with unique moral and intellectual tools to approach the omnicide we now all face. It is not just that Lord of the Rings is about a world careening into an omnicide, the covering of the created world in an eternal darkness of tyranny and wastelands, fueled by war and wanton, gratuitous ecological destruction.

Before pressing on, as I have in my previous pieces about him, let us acknowledge that, even for his time, Tolkien was a racist, politically and socially conservative man. In many ways, his work demonstrates his greatness as a writer because its message and ideology are greater and more profound than the sum of his own views.

In my recent piece on the right-wing identity politics of intellect, I made some observations about the practice of trolling and the idea of “trolls.” In troll discourse, a person argues for a repugnant and/or stupid view and then one of two things happens: (a) the person browbeats their interlocutor, wasting hours of the person’s time and cannot be argued-down, at which point they declare victory or (b) the person concedes the argument and announces that they never believed the stupid views they espoused, that their interlocutor is the fool for having believed their views sincere.

The figure of the troll is, increasingly, the shape that individual members of the global omnicidal authoritarian death cult that currently runs the US, Hungary, Russia, Brazil and the Philippines, to name a few states, choose to take on when presenting themselves online.

Trolling, a decade ago, was not socially mainstream and tended to be practiced more by libertarian misanthropes than omnicidal death cultists. And the term arose from the geek culture-steeped world of 4Chan and the galaxy of locales on the internet frequented by manga-loving incels. Having been a part of geek culture since the age of nine, when my child psychiatrist prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set to me, I know it to be a rich and complex place with good and bad sides exerting both positive and negative influences on those of us within it. Few generalizations about geek culture apply to the whole space and, like all cultures and subcultures globally, it is turning darker as the sun sets on the Age of Reason.

Like most robust and vibrant subcultures, it has a large corpus of literature associated with it (including much but not all of the speculative fiction genre) and a set of canonical texts that help to structure how other texts are interpreted. JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings remains part of the canon, but something has changed about how it functions to structure the culture: over time, it has become Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of the text and not the text itself. More on that later.

We have to consider, then, that the meaning of the term “troll” in geek culture was substantially influenced by Tolkien’s description and understanding of his version of the monster of European folklore. In fact, we should pay special attention to the unique features that Tolkien (and only Tolkien, not even Tolkien via Jackson) attributed  to trolls.

Like the main non-human villains in Middle Earth, orcs, trolls were created by Morgoth, the Lucifer figure, the original Enemy, during “the Great Darkness.” They were created as “counterfeits,” of ents, the “shepherds of the trees,” gigantic, benign intelligent humanoids made of wood. The trolls, on the other hand, while gigantic, were malign, unintelligent humanoids made of stone.

If you too are one best price levitra of those “more the merrier” situations. Lose weight Obesity is one of the primary reasons associated click here for more levitra sale with premature ejaculation. Energy is buoyed up and you have a better chance of surviving. More Info female viagra 100mg Only those men can get most out of this pattern and “re-set” the bar? Try these steps: Decide what you really want in life; what changes in your life will you need to implement other viagra generic online anti-spam features. Right away, we see one of the most distinctive aspects of Tolkien’s writing when confronted with this usage. As a medievalist and professor of Old English, Tolkien understood that, as language changes, sometimes meanings are lost, that as the definition of a word changes, the meanings attached to its previous definition may cease to be attached to any word and leave our conceptual vocabulary. This is what was happening (now has happened) to the original meaning of “counterfeit.”

Today, when we talk about counterfeit money or securities, we mean a copy of these things so exact, so precise, that it is indistinguishable from that thing. There is an original and the counterfeit is the most precise copy possible, designed to fool all but the most discerning. Such an idea did not exist in the Middle Ages because perfect copies were understood to be the thing; there was no distinction between copy and original if the copy were perfect. (Walter Benjamin’s work explaining this was rendered beautifully accessible in the 1979 classic Doctor Who serial City of Death by Douglas Adams.)

A counterfeit, in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, was something else altogether: it was an obvious distortion mocking the original; in a Christian cosmology, a counterfeit was Lucifer’s mockery of God’s creation. The closest concept to it that we have today are the inhabitants of DC Comics’ “bizarro” universe. Not only was a counterfeit a mockery; it was understood to be an uncanny, grotesque mockery. Some conquistadors who arrived in the New World believed that they had found a counterfeit hemisphere, where the largest city’s centre was not a basilica but a step pyramid where priests performed a human sacrifice every forty minutes. The armadillo was a strong piece of evidence for this theory: it was obviously a counterfeit turtle.

Because they are uncanny, grotesque and jarring, there is much power in the counterfeit. The orcs, Tolkien’s counterfeit elves, trolls, Tolkien’s counterfeit ents—they strike fear into their opponents’ hearts simply by being, by mocking and denigrating creation itself. They constitute an ontological attack on the cosmic order simply by having existed. That they might triumph over real elves and real ents is not just a bad tactical situation; it is a sign that the cosmic order, itself, is in retreat.

The global death cult we are fighting understands that. And, consequently, it is not just trolling us at the level of conversation but at the level of existence.

How better to describe Donald Trump than as a counterfeit president, Bizarro Eisenhower, a grotesque, senescent, foul-mouthed grifter and con man. But counterfeits are not just at the top; they are everywhere. We are attacked with counterfeit science taught by counterfeit professors. The power of a Jordan Peterson comes not from his resemblance to a professor but from his uncanny failure to resemble one. There is no effort by the right to fool us any longer. As a brilliant observer of the Kavanaugh hearings observed, “telling obvious lies is a sign of power.”

This is why men performing the machismo of the death cult, like Doug Ford or Maxime Bernier, focus their attacks on children, the disabled and women: they are not trying to intimidate us by being tough guys. They are trying to unsettle us by being counterfeit tough guys.

Without understanding the original meaning and power of the counterfeit, something Tolkien understood to be so great a threat that it could upend the cosmic order, we are at sea wondering why people seem to be buying into dishonour and dishonesty, shaming themselves with gullibility. But that is not what is happening for them; they have tapped into the unholy power of the counterfeit.

Happy Tenth Anniversary, Battlestar Galactica

In 2009, I wrote an article on the representation of Mormon cosmology in the Ronald Moore re-make of the Battlestar Galactica TV series. I never got around to writing a second version of this article incorporating the revisions that were recommended to me in workshops and conferences in 2009 and 2010, nor a version incorporating the second half of the final season of the series. I doubt that I will now.

Anyway, with today’s celebration of the tenth anniversary of the series premiere, it seems a good time to revisit the article and pass it on to fans who may have missed it the first time around. So, without further ado, here it is: Battlestar Galactica and Mormon Theology

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Doctor Who: Man, Monster and Minor – Part II: The Silence, the Rise of the Trauma Monster and the Inward Turn of the Home Front

This article is the second of two on gender dynamics in Doctor Who. The first appears here.

In 2013, I suffered a minor psychological breakdown, triggered by, among other things, the new Doctor Who monster, a race of creatures called “the Silence.” The Silence, likely an homage to Joss Whedon’s the Gentlemen, are creatures with one singular power: the ability to make anyone who saw them forget that they had the moment they looked away. The horror of seeing one of the Silence inheres not in witnessing the creature’s hideous visage and diabolical nature but in remembering all the other times you had already seen the Silence and forgotten they were there. Not just “there” but everywhere.

These creatures had been distorting human history since its beginning, silently manipulating the fate of the world for their own diabolical ends. As one explains, “we have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight but you will never remember we were even here. Your world is ours… we are The Silence.” For how long have they been doing this, someone asks the Doctor, “as long as there’s been something in the corner of your eye, or creaking in your house or breathing under your bed or voices through a wall.”

The Silence are one of the most successful villains of the new Doctor Who, since its resurrection by Russell T. Davies in 2004, an adversary that has sent English children back to their proper viewing perch for the classic series, behind the sofa. While the Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans, the totalitarianism monsters of the Second World War and Cold War have returned, they mainly offer viewers a sense of nostalgia and continuity, not terror. Nor has there been any great effort to update monsters who are more adaptable to our contemporary fears of inhuman authority, dehumanization and the annihilation of culture and emotion; there are no new, scarier Autons or Axons to speak Matrix-esque fears of the present day.

I would suggest that this is because our modern risk of cybernetic dehumanization inheres, in part, in our loss of any clear sense of implicit threat as our phones and consoles merge with our bodies, the kind of fear that was narrated more easily a generation ago in David Cronenberg’s Existenz. For this reason, such fears are not central to the reinfusion of terror into Doctor Who.

As in the original series, the Doctor must convey a sense of manly heroism relationally and symbolically, by protecting a female companion from danger. Because the main character has been transformed from an asexual being into an ambiguously and ambivalently sexual one, the non-consummated nature of the Doctor’s relationship with his companion is one that, even more strongly, conveys a Victorian restraint-driven manliness. Now, the Doctor is tempted, from time to time to engage romantically or sexually with his younger female companion. And yet, for some important reason, he must restrain himself from doing do.

In trying to understand why this must be, the show’s queer subtext seems a logical explanation; Russell T. Davies’ Doctor feels fleeting moments of attraction to his female human companion but not enough to actually sustain the rich, romantic, sexual relationship she wants and “deserves,” with some more suitable male partner, the Will and Grace “fag hag” dynamic played out episode after episode.

But let us, for a moment, consider how the nature of the Silence and the other popular new monsters in Doctor Who link the unconsummated sexual dynamic to the return of the show’s ability to convey horror. Steven Moffat has struck fear into the heart of a new generation of youngsters (and adults like me!) with the Silence and the Weeping Angels by triggering the fears of contemporary watchers the way the Daleks and Cybermen played on the fear of totalitarianism that existed in audiences of half a century ago.

Like the creature lurking under beds and behind curtains in the current season, the Weeping Angels and the Silence evoke the consciousness of victims of childhood abuse and sexual violence, and the ways in which the resulting trauma plays on the memory of survivors. While the Silence are creatures one forgets every time one looks away, only to recall, with ever-increasing horror all the times one witnessed and forgot, when one sees them again, the Weeping Angels speak to the vigilance that survivors of trauma experience.

Weeping Angels are monstrously strong and lethal creatures that can only move when no one is looking at them. One must never close one’s eyes, never look away, never let the lights go out, never blink or the Angels will set upon you and tear you limb from limb. For so many victims of childhood sexual violence, this fear of the dangerous world that comes into being when the lights are out has left a residual vigilance, that permanent imprint of trauma that remains sleepless and vigilant, hoping to delay the seemingly inevitable reckoning with horror.
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Before I met the Silence, I had always found the idea of “repressed” and “recovered” memories hard to understand, hard to believe in. How could something so life-altering and horrifying really be forgotten? How could one go through life never remembering things around which an abused child’s life is organized? But that misses the point of repressed memories—the horror of repressed childhood trauma is not repressed once; it is repressed again and again. And even as the events themselves recede, the horror only grows in power because every time you remember the event again, every time it breaks through repression and localized amnesia, you remember all the other times you saw the monster and repressed it again because you could not bear to gaze upon its visage. The work of repression is constant, repetitive and exhausting; through it, we become unwitting, involuntary accomplices in the conspiracy of silence that surrounds trauma and abuse.

When we hear the voice of the Silence, we hear generations of priests, teachers, parents and relatives whispering those words, “we have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight. But you will never remember we were even here. Your world is ours… we are The Silence.”

It is in this light that we must understand the unconsummated nature of the Doctor-companion sexual dynamic. The Doctor cannot sleep with his companions—not because he is gay—but because he knows their secret: that they are victims of trauma and abuse, and that he would be exploiting his knowledge of who and what they really are if he did so, much as he might wish to.

It also helps to explain the feature of the series that fans find most aggravating: that nearly every companion, in her childhood, became entangled with the universe-threatening monster the Doctor is fighting. And it is her prior encounter with the trauma-inducing events and creatures that set her on a path that will, inevitably, intersect with the Doctor’s. Here, our modern Dcotor stands in for the charismatic, altruistic future therapist, police officer, social worker, foster parent with whom the traumatized person must confront the foundational evil that has been hanging over her life, a hero bound by ascetic vows never the turn that intimate relationship into a sexual one.

Serial killers, rapists, human traffickers—these are our new demons in popular culture; they have replaced the Nazi war criminals and Soviet agents of half a century ago. They hold that status because they threaten our patriarchy’s minors, our home front; they target “our” women and children, not men. And by interposing oneself between these predators and the women and children of England or America, one becomes a masculine hero, no matter how effete or unmanly one’s body or personality. This gendered, relational position doesn’t just permit the Doctor to be a dandy hero; it gives us Gil Grissom, Spencer Reid and a host of other otherwise-insufficiently masculine men who hunt the monsters who threaten the new home front.

At this point, people who are not me might focus on the ways in which this argument shows Doctor Who to have always been a patriarchal show that subordinates women to men (perhaps aside from the 1979 and 1980 seasons). This can be said of most shows on TV and, frankly, most good ones, not because the film industry is full of misogynists but because we continue to live in a patriarchal society that constantly re-inscribes its gender dynamics in its literary and dramatic production.

What interests me are the ways in which the show operates within these gender dynamics to adumbrate new possibilities for narrating the deeply gendered repression that remains near the heart of our society. I have yet to see any portrayal of repressed memories of abuse more compelling than the Silence, one that engages not just individual trauma but the multigenerational, structural character of abuse and trauma.

When Jack Cram, the radical native sovereigntist lawyer went mad, he spoke—inaccurately—of our society being run by a conspiracy of pedophiles in our courts, churches and legislatures. There is, of course, no such conspiracy. It is just that our society runs as if there were. When I wrote of the lethal silence that powered southern lynchings, the silence that enables predators like Bill Cosby and Jian Ghomeshi to seek out and assault new victims with impunity, the picture in my mind was of the Silence, as depicted by Stephen Moffat, that powerful force, as old as the human race itself that stops us telling others what has happened to us, that chokes cries for help in our throats, that seeps into our houses and places of work, stifling our words.

While there is much to criticize about the new Doctor Who, in particular, the direction of the show since the Davies’ departure, I continue to draw inspiration about how to be an ethical man enmeshed in a patriarchal society. Just as the old series taught me how one could be clumsy, eccentric, hard-to-understand, strangely-dressed and yet mysteriously heroic, I choose to draw inspiration from the possibilities the show lays before us. All that is needed to be a man, Doctor Who continues to tell us, is to fight to protect the home front. As the Doctor says of the Silence, “they’ve been running your lives for a very long time now, so keep this straight in your head. We are not fighting an alien invasion, we’re leading a revolution. And today, the battle begins.”

Gender in Doctor Who: Man, Monster and Minor – Part I: The Home Front, Manliness and the Dandy Hero

The first time I quit politics, I gave a concession speech crediting my seven-year career as leader of the BC Green Party to the British science fiction series Dr. Who for “teaching me that a tall, eccentric, clumsy, curly-haired man can, indeed, save the universe.” My valedictory remarks ended with a quotation from the Doctor’s first farewell, in 1964, to his young, female companion/assistant, a traditional feature of the show by the time of its cancellation in 1989.

Although, the first of these companions had been the Doctor’s granddaughter, the young, shapely, wide-eyed female companion became the most predictable feature of the cast. Indeed, out of the original series’ 667 episodes, 647 feature such a character. While Dr. Who companions were generally portrayed as assisting the Doctor, it was only at the apex of second-wave feminism (1977-82) that their role does not consist substantially of screaming, being injured, getting captured, being rescued and asking questions in a way that enables the main character to demonstrate his superior knowledge.

Although there is an argument to be made that Dr. Who companions did more good than harm when it comes to widening the range of possible female roles on television, I don’t think much of it. After all The Avengers premiered in 1961 and, by the year before Dr. Who began, already featured witty, assertive, female action stars. But, as with my views on racism in J R R Tolkien, the idea that a work of literature beloved by self-identified geeks be flawed, even chauvinistic, and yet still do and say worthy and important things, is unlikely to find unanimous acceptance.

And that is a shame because Dr. Who does have a lot of important things to tell us about gender and sexuality in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It was, after all, the crew at Queer as Folk who successfully revived the series in 2004, because the original series could be easily read as having a queer subtext, a subtext that almost spilled over into simple text in the years 1970-74.

When Jon Pertwee played the title character, he portrayed him as a dandyish man with a slight lisp and an over-coiffed silver perm, dressed flamboyantly in a cape, powder-blue frilly shirt and velvet smoking jacket, a man with refined tastes who imported gorgonzola cheese from Italy when exiled to London. And just in case anyone missed what the Doctor was in those years, William Hartnell reprised his original role in the tenth anniversary episode, pronouncing of his two successors, “so, you’re my replacements, a dandy and a clown!

The “galactic hobo” portrayal of the Doctor, first by Patrick Troughton (1966-69) and then by Tom Baker (1974-81) was more typical of the original series, and one for which it is better-remembered. However, it is worth noting that an explicitly dandyish hero was played by Peter Davison (1981-84), featuring two young male companions, for the first time since the 1960s, something that would have simply been too queer for Pertwee’s already sexually problematic portrayal.

Still, one would be hard-pressed to find any portrayal of the Doctor in the original series that could be considered conventionally manly. Neither Troughton’s and Baker’s hobos, Pertwee’s and Davison’s dandies nor Hartnell’s and McCoy’s curmudgeonly know-it-alls were heroic in a conventionally masculine sense. They eschewed physical violence, favouring more ambiguously-gendered forms of aggression, relying on deception, self-control, trickery, superior knowledge and manipulating their enemies, almost none of which showed a trace of athleticism.

Sure, there were some ways the Doctor’s body was capable of feats impossible for ordinary humans but those feats were devoid of athleticism; he could hold his breath for minutes at a time, practice obscure martial arts without breaking a sweat and cheat death by “regenerating” into another body. But when it came to feats like mountain-climbing, the show went so far as to lampoon its title character’s lack of athleticism, having him retrieve from his pocket, the self-help book Everest in Easy Stages and, upon discovering it to be written mostly in Tibetan, Teach Yourself Tibetan.

This kind of masculine heroism, centred in superior knowledge, self-control and cleverness had once been the ideal form of “manliness” in the English-speaking world, as compellingly argued by Gail Bederman in Manliness and Civilization. Back when colonizing and “civilizing” the “darker races” was the job, the manly hero of Rudyard Kipling’s world was not unlike the Doctor. The Englishman or American who carried the “white man’s burden,” had to, by necessity, distinguish his manliness from the “primitive masculinity” he allegedly opposed. Indeed, societies whose theories of masculinity were most congruent with this exaltation of restraint, were those most lightly colonized by the English and Americans, the Kingdom of Hawaii and India’s Hindu principalities outside the formal British Raj.
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But, the nineteenth-century drew to a close, concern over declining birth rates or “race suicide” and the rise of Tarzan comics made effete young men like Teddy Roosevelt re-make their refined manliness into a less restrained, more violent masculinity.

Yet, in the English tradition, the ideal of the dandy hero did not die such a quick death, in part because of conscription. There was not just a cultural need to see the continuation of the dandy hero ideal into the twentieth century, but a politicized national interest. Characters like Biggles, the under-aged gentleman-hero of the RAF occupied a contradictory and frequently-lampooned role in British pop culture, increasingly incongruent with the appetite- driven, violent masculinity of the likes of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, the heroes who epitomized twentieth-century manliness.

What allowed Biggles to survive through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, as the Second World War, and attendant conscription, receded from the public mind was the fact that, in the Biggles comics, the war never really ended. Because he was defending the home front, the women and children of England, his masculinity, while quirky, could remain undisputed. Wartime masculinity was more capacious and diverse because it could be clearly unified around the defense of England’s territory and non-combatants against the forces of autocracy or fascism. There was a teleology to masculinity: it was the nature that existed in men that motivated and enabled them to defend the non-combatants at home. If they could not be masculine by virtue of their nature, dandies could be so by what they accomplished: the defense of the home front.

And so we come full circle to Doctor Who, the show that captured a nation’s imagination in 1964 by creating a space-age monster that perfectly symbolized totalitarianism: the Daleks, from whom the Doctor is forced to defend his granddaughter Susan and her teacher, Barbara Wright. Fundamentally, Doctor Who kept the ideal of the dandy hero alive in the same way Biggles did, by demonstrating his masculinity teleologically (by succeeding in his defense of women and children) and relationally (because this could be enacted through his observed protector relationship to a woman and/or child). Because a dandy was no longer intrinsically manly, his masculinity (and hence heroism – this is a patriarchy, after all) had to be telegraphed in this way. The dandy-hero defended the home front (i.e. women, girls and boys) from the totalitarian forces of continental Eurasia (Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Sontarans, Rutans, Axons, etc.) The asexual relationship between the Doctor and the endless parade of pornographic archetype companions (leather-clad savage, stewardess, micro-skirted professor, ditzy secretary, etc.) served to underline their minority relative to the centuries-old Time Lord and, hence, his role as their protector.

As time wore on and we became a people whose contemporary political and cultural struggles came to revolve more around Stonewall and less around the Holocaust, the queer reading of Doctor Who became a more obvious one. And, for more and more viewers, it became a proto-Will and Grace. The companions came to stand in less for the women and children of wartime England and more as the beard or “fag hag” of the gay, male hero, the asexuality of the relationship conditioned less by the woman’s putative minority and more by the man’s queerness.

But this transition ultimately deprived the show of its underlying dramatic tension. As the memory of fascism receded, audience members were not on the edge of their seats, nor, as many fans remember their younger selves, peering out from behind the sofa, to see if fascism incarnate would succeed in its evil design and land on England’s metaphorical shores. The show, by the 1980s, had become a parody of itself (a parody that I personally loved!), with a cult following of gay men, sexually inept geeks and hard-core sci-fi aficionados.

Without the women of the home front to protect, there could be no compelling dandy hero and hence, no mainstream audience.

It is with this understanding that I will visit how it is that the tension and drama that old Doctor Who gradually lost have somehow been restored in the new series, how a dandy hero, who is queerer than ever, is once again a compelling television character. In the second half, I will suggest that this is, once again, centred in relational gender dynamics and our perceptions of the most sinister threats to the virtue and safety of women and children in Anglo society.

Hope in the Age of Nazg: Rediscovering Tolkien’s Themes Through a Ninth-century Text

JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth is generally understood to have been substantially inspired by the author’s long career as a medievalist at Oxford University and was explicit about the ways in which he borrowed heavily from medieval names, myths and historical figures. Aragorn, as imperial restorer, was Charlemagne; “Mardil the Steward,” founder of the lineage of Denethor, clearly referenced the emperor’s grandfather, Charles Martel. Sometimes, Tolkien seemed almost over-the-top in the relish with which he made his world an idealized, enchanted recapitulation of European history, as with his description of the siege of Gondor being all but directly lifted from Edward Gibbon’s narration of the siege of Byzantium in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, right down to the feared siege engine and its projectiles.

Especially central to Tolkien’s medieval source material is the Carolingian dynasty, the first Holy Roman Emperors and attempted restorers of ancient Rome. The choice by Martel, steward to the Merovingian Emperors, to depose their lineage and substitute his own, is one that Tolkien judges harshly and credits as a key factor in the downfall of the West. He expresses this criticism in Mardil the Steward making the opposite choice when the line of Gondor’s kings failed, instead founding the line of ruling stewards who governed in anticipation of the return of the true king. Because Tolkien’s references are made to isolated moments and individuals, his uncharacteristic direct admission that Aragorn, whose line descends from the true kings and not the stewards, is analogous to Charlemagne—both being imperial restorers—is unproblematic. His judgement of the partition of the Holy Roman Empire in the Treaty of Verdun (843) is similarly heavy-handed, with Arnor (corresponding to the HRE, as distinct from Gondor, which represents the Byzantine Empire) being fatefully partitioned into the three kingdoms of Rhudaur (corresponding to the Kingdom of Louis the German), Arthedain (the kingdom of Charles the Bald) and Cardolan (the kingdom of Lothar); this partitioning, Tolkien states, resulted in the dissolution of Arnor into “petty realms and lordships,” in the precise words Gibbon uses to narrate their ultimate fate.

It is surprising, then, that so little attention has been directed to other Carolingian sources in deciphering the rich and complex world of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In the case of the four ages of the world, with which I deal here, the lacuna may be credited, at least in part, to the existence of ready-made four- and five- age schemas in a variety of mythologies with which Tolkien was acquainted, such as in Hesiod’s Works and Days.

This was my view until I encountered an apocryphal document known as the Vision of Charlemagne. As historian Paul Dutton notes, even more than other medieval European societies, subjects of the Carolingian Empire tended to articulate social and political criticism in a fraught political environment by recounting real and alleged dreams. So it was that in approximately 870, an unknown individual, likely seeking to curry favour with the oldest and most stable of the Carolingian monarchs, Louis the German, penned an account of a lost document, allegedly written by the emperor Charlemagne himself, sometime between 806 and 813. In the Vision, the emperor is presented with a sword with an inscription organizing present and future events into four periods: 1. RAHT, 2. RADOLEIBA, 3. NASG and 4. ENTI. Situating Charlemagne in the first period when “there is abundance of material success,” these periods or ages are then described as follows:

“RAHT, that is, abundance of all things… RADOLEIBA… will be fulfilled in the times of my sons [when] there will no longer be such a great abundance… and certain peoples, now subdued, will break away… When… those sons have died and their sons have begun… to govern, NASG will exist, which was inscribed in the third place. For the sake of filthy lucre, they will… oppress travelers and pilgrims… have no sense of modesty… collect riches with great disorder and dishonour… But what was written at the point of the sword, ENTI, that is the end, can be understood in two ways. Either it signifies the end of the world or the end of our line.”

The similarity of the word “nasg” to Tolkien’s cognate for the rings of power “nazg,” (“ash nazg,” meaning the one ring, “nazgul” meaning the ring wraiths, etc.), grows only more striking to the observer the greater one’s prior efforts to locate this word or anything like it elsewhere. It appears that “nasg” was a term made by the anonymous ninth-century author that languished in obscuring for more than a thousand years before being picked up by Tolkien, the prodigious reader of medieval Germanic texts in their original language. As far as I can tell, it just doesn’t show up anywhere else.

Then, of course, is the simple fact that the first three ages bear such a striking resemblance to the Tolkien schema, especially as it relates to the elves, with the world growing less abundant and more depleted with each age, with both the land and people growing both less fecund and less virtuous with each passing epoch. The little-narrated second age of Middle Earth fits especially easily with the literal sons of First Age elvish heroes, such as Elros, founding new kingdoms in a still-bountiful but declining world, in which human kingdoms gradually break away from the elves and their exalted human allies. The third age, specifically described as the age of the rings of power by Tolkien, is one of accelerated decline as avarice, pettiness and vanity drive the free peoples of Middle Earth to ruin. The triumph of evil in Tolkien’s age of Nazg or the Carolingian age of NASG is one made possible by greed and divisiveness, traits the rings fashioned by the Dark Lord Sauron were designed to amplify in those who wore them.

In the third age, the power of evil does not wax so much as the power of good wanes until there is a final crisis that threatens to plunge the whole world into a final darkness, from which it will never emerge. The division of the realms of Elendil, the human High King of the second age and Gil-galad, the elvish High King into separate, smaller kingdoms marks the beginning the third age, a fate wrought when Elendil’s son Isildur chose not to destroy Sauron’s one ring but instead to take it for himself and make it an heirloom of his kingdom. This similarly parallels the Vision which dates nasg to the Treaty of Verdun, when the Carolingian realm was divided and “Lothar, Pepin and Louis began to extend nasg for themselves throughout the neglected kingdom.” Indeed, this theme of neglect and disuse suffuses Tolkien’s writings about the failures of the Third Age as cities like Fornost, Annúminas and Osigiliath fall into ruin.
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But it is actually the point of divergence between Vision and Lord of the Rings that makes it a key to understanding the fundamental themes in LOTR and more than just an antiquarian curiosity, allowing us greater clarity on Tolkien’s larger project as both medievalist and novelist. Ultimately, the question LOTR, as distinct from the Hobbit or Silmarillion, asks is “what if people had risen to the occasion instead?” Gondor’s ruling stewards, the line of Mardil, are his answer to this question as it relates to the Carolingian dynasty using their power as Mayors of the Palace, to usurp the Frankish throne. What, he asks, would have happened if they had awaited the return of the true Merovingian king? Similarly, he asks, what if the Germanic peoples had heeded the pleas of the last Byzantine Emperor and their ancient alliance and ridden south to break the Ottoman siege of Constantinople, as the Rohirrim did during the Siege of Gondor? Not all of these hypothetical questions make us comfortable; Tolkien also asks how much better Europe would have been ruled if the great ancient houses had remained racially pure and not allowed their lineages to be “mingled with the blood of lesser men”? Indeed, what if all the white-skinned peoples of Europe had united to defend Constantinople against the dark-skinned Saharan Africans (the thinly-disguised Haradrim) and the Turkish Seljuks of Rum (the equally obvious people of Rhûn)?

But whatever late Victorian racism Tolkien mobilized in his writing, ultimately, Lord of the Rings is a fairly direct commentary on his view of the importance of hope and selflessness at key turning points history. Writing in the first half of the twentieth century, when structuralist historiographies were on the rise, whether through Marxism, Malthusianism, Whiggism or Social Darwinism, not just in universities but in popular consciousness, Tolkien used his trilogy to say what he could not as a scholar of medieval history: that evil triumphs not because of immutable structural factors but because people lose hope. In one of his few forays the politics of his day, the foreword to the 1954 edition of LOTR pushes back against claims that his novels allegorized the Second World War, remarking that if they did, the Council of Elrond would certainly have chosen to use Sauron’s ring of power, the axiomatically evil “one ring” to defeat him.

In recent years, these seemingly conservative views, at least as they pertain to the history of the Carolingian Empire have been borne-out. It appears that the belief that their empire would fall, termed “consciousness of decline” became a powerful force, independent of material factors that produced fragmentation and collapse in early medieval France. Just as Denethor, the penultimate ruling steward loses hope and commits suicide, nearly causeing Gondor to fall, because he cannot imagine that the Rohirrim really are riding to the rescue to break the siege, it appears that the pessimism in Vision was part of the set of social forces that really did make “enti” come to pass, just as the document foretold. And so, when we read Tolkien’s appendices to Return of the King in which he narrates the Fourth Age of Middle Earth, we encounter a curious alternate early modernity, a hyper-monarchical, harmonious, pastoral, literate, anti-industrial pseudo-Europe, one too humble and virtuous to defy the will of God and permit anyone but the elect to take ship and sail across the ocean to the unknown sacred lands of the West.

As Tolkien says in his abbreviated synopsis or recapitulation of LOTR in the final chapter of the Silmarillion, it is the character of Gandalf who is explicitly revealed to be the true hero of the Third Age. As the author’s Christ-figure, a hypostatic being who is resurrected halfway through the story, he is revealed to be this hero because his power, assisted by Narya, one of the three unsullied rings of power, is to kindle hope in the hearts of mortals, causing ordinary people to undertake world-changing acts of extraordinary bravery. This bravery, he suggests, is anchored in humility because, in the words of Gandalf, “help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter,” as pointed a response as any to the historical determinists who surrounded him.

Much as I love his books and have a special place in my heart for them, I don’t find Tolkien’s particular alternate utopia compelling or his racism easy to tolerate, despite it being unexceptional bordering on unavoidable in his time. Nevertheless, I think there is real value in ignoring his obfuscations and denials that his books were as precisely referential as they clearly are and, instead, engaging thematically with Lord of the Rings by looking at times past and present and asking “what if people rose to the occasion and acted with unexpected hope and courage even in the face of long-foretold and certain doom?”

Stuart Parker isn’t just a failed politician and seasonally employed academic; he remains a committed geek too.