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By Jason Walters
“A Dwarf on sojourn in the Shire would probably go to a lot of dinner parties where pompous boring Hobbits would hold forth like this. This Dwarf would view the whole thing as entertainment. He would know that he could always go back out into the real world, so much vaster and more complex than these Hobbits imagined, and slay a few Trolls and remind himself of what really mattered.”
-Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
Many of us here on the Left Coast have become familiar with the fantasy race known as “Hobbits” from either watching Peter Jackson’s recently released celluloid epic “Lord of The Rings” films or, for those few of us in California who can still read, more rarely from the less famous original J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy of the same name. They are an amusingly self-important, domestic folk of short stature who don’t wear shoes, smoke enormous amounts of mysterious pipe tobacco, and generally spend most of their days poking their noses into their neighbor’s business. For a Hobbit the word “adventure” generally means an especially spicy sauce has found its way into the evening menu. Their entire view of the world, indeed the entirety of the world itself, consists of their tiny, insular community filled entirely with people exactly like themselves. Any unwelcome visitors from the outside are considered disreputable, if not downright dangerous, while all news from beyond the borders of their tiny realm, known quaintly as the Shire, is generally ignored or spoken of only in hushed, fugitive whispers.
When they aren’t avoiding manual labor, peering over their neighbors’ fences, or threatening to call the constable on one another, Hobbits spend an inordinate amount of time throwing elaborate parties whose only purpose is to create a venue where the wee folk can impress one other with feats of outrageous self-importance. These parties generally lead to the sort of frenzied, uncoordinated dancing which can only be produced when hordes of overweight, barefooted midget Caucasians have consumed an immoderate amount of locally produced beer.... which in turn leads to a sort of unseemly canoodling which it is far better not to comment upon.
Beyond the Hobbits’ smug, isolated realm of bourgeoisie comfort lies a big wide world filled with various races of beings, both malign as well as benign. There are, for example, the whiskered mountain Dwarves who are gruffly good natured (yet frighteningly well armed), the tall, serious Humans who farm the seemingly endless plains to the east, and the patient, long-suffering Elves who just want to be left alone in their forest retreats. These groups have invited their smaller cousins to join a council of goodly races which is attempting to confront the menacing evil of the Eastern nation of Mordor, where hordes of scimitar wielding Orcs are being forged into a mighty army by a shadowy religious leader named Sauron, who seems intent on gathering together enough powerful weapons to bring the Western world to its knees.
Unfortunately, the Hobbits don’t really understand that a world exists, except in some abstract manner, outside of their realm’s borders at all and, in any case, they can’t actually tell the difference between their friends and their enemies. Maybe things would be safer if the Dwarves weren’t allowed to own weapons and, hey, why are those warmongering Elves always threatening those poor impoverished Orcs anyway? This Sauron character doesn’t seem to be much of a threat to anyone outside of his own country; tales of his evil are obviously greatly exaggerated. In any case, they only have the Humans’ word that he’s doing anything wrong there at all – they’ve probably paid off all of those refugees streaming over the border. The real enemy, the Hobbits conclude, isn’t Mordor at all; it’s that warmongering council! In protest, hordes of angry little people spill out into the streets all over the Shire, their tiny impotent voices squeaking angrily into the night....
Somewhere in distant Mordor, an evil, shadowy figure flanked by his equally sinister advisors peers into his crystal ball and laughs.
I will draw a merciful curtain of prose on this ugly scene for your benefit; though as a resident of Berkeley I cannot, unfortunately, do the same for myself. Like many dysfunctional, aromatically impaired people, I read, or even occasionally write, fantasy fiction for pleasure and not for social commentary. Yet every decade or so when I crack open those musty, water-stained tomes which are my copies of Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, I do so out of a sense of spiritual dedication more than a longing for entertainment. For I am a nerd, a geek, a man who still plays Dungeons and Dragons at age 35, who collects comic books, and who even writes for a role playing game company now and then. No thin veneer of hipsterism can ever change this single, simple fact. No silly facial hair, nor piercings of the genitalia, nor motorcycles ridden, nor even skirts chased will ever really make me into what I am not. Namely, cool. So, much as a good Christian must turn to the Bible if he is to thoroughly ground himself in his faith, I must periodically revisit the masterwork that has made possible the likes of Beastmaster, Bill Gates, Xena the Warrior Princes, and Harry Potter novels. It is a deep, dark compulsion to understand ones roots, ones place in the universe as it were, that can no more be resisted than a salmon can resist the urge to swim up the streams of the Oregon coastline to spawn.... though I am pleased to say that I have never been eaten by a bear, or at least not yet.
There is an undeniable urge for those of us who enjoy going to conventions where the likes of (if you are a nerd) superstars John Rhys-Davies (Gimli the Dwarf) and Warwick Davis (remember Willow?) slum about, to see the world through the eyes of a fantasy role playing game character: that person is obviously Lawful Neutral, or this person is obviously failed their charisma roll, or even the dreaded wow she sure is good looking.... just like an elf! As this is not the sort of talk designed to get one invited to dinner parties, let alone on dates, for most of us it exists as a soothing, never-voiced internal dialog. Of course now and again more brave (or perhaps simply foolhardy) souls choose to break an unwritten code of silence and come public with their intensely unhip alter ego. For example, in Russia the Tolkienists (I kid you not) have created an evangelical religion out of old J.R.R.’s musings which is large enough to suffer state persecution.... not that it’s traditionally all that difficult to get oppressed in Russia. Closer to home, famed cyberpunk author Neal Sephenson, an obvious nerd, has “outed” himself through his alter ego Randy Waterhouse in his now legendary work Cryptonomicon. A programmer whose failed marriage has trapped him in the irritating world of Californian academia, Randy had developed a satisfying secret philosophy that enables him to interact with the various creatures one finds there. “Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war-ax for a while to go sojourning in the Shire,” Waterhouse muses, “had actually done a lot for Randy’s peace of mind over the years.” I suspect that even incredibly hip tough guy actor Vin Diesel, who has recently admitted to playing Dungeons and Dragons during an interview with Eonline’s Anderson Jones, must spend 90% of his time feeling like an ogre who is doomed to circumnavigate gibbering Hollywood goblins each and every day of his life.
There have been a variety of high quality academic papers written on the psychology of Tolkien’s work, generally focusing on its Jungian qualities (don’t worry; this isn’t one of them). Indeed, it’s a fact that the esteemed Oxford Don was fascinated by Jung’s various theories: spiritual archetypes, the journey into the unconscious, the anima and animus, the shadow side of the human personality, and so forth. Endless tomes by far wiser (and infinitely more sequestered) folks than myself have been written on how Frodo is the Self, Galadriel is the Anima, Gollum is the Shadow, and blah blah blah. Yet I think that all of that sublime, overly complex analysis really misses the thrust of Tolkien’s trilogy. It’s not about the synthesis of the individual. Lord of the Rings is about war. More specifically, it’s a warning to the Western Democratic world, in fable form, about what happens when good people ignore obvious, menacing evil because, hey, it can’t hurt us here, right?
Its not to hard to figure out that, within the context of the books, the Hobbits are intended to represent Tolkien’s fellow Englishmen: a petty, provincial people who’s hearts are, nevertheless, in the right place. The other races are also fairly easy to pinpoint: the Dwarves are the Scottish, the Elves are the French, and the Humans, with their flawed capacity for both good and evil, are undoubtedly we Americans. While it is may at first seem an oversimplification to say that the Orcs and other evil creatures are Germans, it’s important to remember that Tolkien served as a foot soldier in the god awful trenches of the First World War; not exactly the sort of environment designed to endear you to your enemies. While it may seem implausible (no, make that impossible) that the French could embody any of the virtuous traits exhibited by Tolkien’s Elves, it’s important to remember that our Gallic, uh, “friends” did fight very bravely in the Great War, losing over a million men in their desperate struggle to hold back the guys in pointy helmets. The Don saw this with his own two eyes and it could hardly have failed to make an impression.
In our modern world the affluent pampered residents of the warm coast of California have actually managed to achieve a mind boggling feat of life-imitating-art-imitating-life: we have become more like Hobbits than the Englishmen which inspired them ever were. The British of Neville Chamberlain’s era felt secure, protected from continental wars by their forbidding English Channel.... until the rude awakening which was the Battle of Britain thrust them into the modern era. In the same manner, when one looks up at those wealthy residences of Marin or Berkeley, those mini-mansions snugly dug into the hillsides like so many Hobbit Holes, one can almost hear their inhabitants sipping cups of hand steamed café latte while thinking to themselves My! That sure is a big ocean! Good thing nothing can touch us over here in California. Whew!
Intellectually this same liberal, pampered, and self-indulgent upper class understands that, abstractly, little nuclear Elvis Kim Jong II of North Korea could sling a couple of hundred megatons of radioactive death their way – but on a gut level, where it counts, they can no longer visualize a world where their morning power walks in the dog park could ever actually be interrupted. They have lived for so long under the cool shadow of peace and prosperity that they can’t grasp in a meaningful way the hard reality which is war and poverty, a truth which Tolkien’s work desperately attempts to acquaint us with. They also cannot truly understand the reality of what Saddam Hussein’s now mercifully defunct Iraq was like because they live in a word where acid baths, state rapists, children’s prisons, daily torture, and constant executions are possible only as unwelcome, abstract ideas which only exist when the likes of Colin Powell or Donald Rumsfeld point them out. As soon as that accusing finger moves away, however, POOF! the entire unpleasant matter no longer exists.... and it’s time to go wine tasting in Napa.
Berkeley can no longer conceptualize Mordor because no one in Berkeley has ever experienced it. Take, for example, my neighbor whom we shall call “Kim” for privacy’s sake, a creature whose life has seldom taken her far from the rarified, rigidly controlled academic land of patchouli oil and Birkenstocks. On March 20, 2003 having come home from a long, stressful, and not very satisfying day of work in the often maligned private sector, I found myself at long last lounging carefree in my Lazy Boy while watching Fox News on my extremely decedent Panasonic 47-Inch high-definition television. As I munched my way through a bag of Barbara’s Cheese Puff Bakes while drinking a four pack of imported Belgian Hoegaarden White (in true decadent capitalist American consumer style) Operation Shock and Awe began playing itself out in glorious night-vision green across the afore mentioned screen. Yet before I could make any real value judgment, moral or aesthetic, about a military operation that was being sold to the general public like some kind of crazy Quake 3 demo, Kim barged into my home like Kramer from the Jerry Seinfeld show.
Now I don’t have to tell you what Kim was REALLY after.... namely, my Cheese Puffs. Her crazy vegan husband would probably subject her to weeks of passive/ aggressive emotional abuse if he knew, but now and again she sneaks over to my house for a little.... dairy. Milk, cheese, cream, you name it. Kim craves dairy with the same hollow-eyed fierceness that an AA drunk craves a $30 bottle of bourbon. When one is unfortunate enough to dine with Kim at any of the rather dairy-intensive restaurants in Berkeley’s Gourmet Ghetto her desire hangs heavy in the air, almost palatable, giving your meal a desperate atmosphere similar to that of an expensive strip club frequented by married 40 year old men.
Yet I digress.
Kim peered at the screen, which at the time showed what I believe to be a missile destroying the Iraqi Republican Guard’s command and control center, turned to me with a look of anguish and said “Oh, the poor children!” Now, obviously, Kim isn’t a bad person. She means well. After all, she’s an educator who indoctrinates her second grade elementary school class of what will, undoubtedly, one day become highly dysfunctional adults with the sort of misguided leftist passion normally reserved for members of PETA or the Socialist Workers Party (only, unfortunately, we pay her salary instead of the North Koreans). Highly neurotic, unable to function outside of a co-dependent relationship, and completely programmed by a bitter, Vietnam Era, Baby Boomer, semi-Marxist academia, she genuinely believes that America, and especially its military, are by nature child murderers. Ergo anything the military is doing, no matter how open or well documented by an impartial (or even hostile) press, immediately equates to preschools being blown up right and left. In short, she is an archetypical product of Urban California: a NeoHobbit.
Normally I would have attempted, quite futilely I might add, to point out the obvious holes in her “Oh, the poor children!” argument; partly because it happens to be wrong but mainly because I hate it when people of any political persuasion use children as their excuse for pushing some sort of loathsome oppressive agenda. But in this case I had already consumed two rather large, tasty, and I might add highly alcoholic beverages.... and I’m a mean, if lightweight, drunk. So I countered with a simple “Yeah, well, what about the Kurdish children?”
It’s no real secret, even here in Berkeley, that Saddam Hussein and his despicable crew murdered more innocent Kurds than I’ve had hot meals. Even so, most of the New Hobbits find it morally expedient to ignore the oppression of groups who are outside of their pantheon of cherished causes. Their usual reaction to such a glib statement about a relatively unknown group is a shrug, followed by a mumbled statement along the lines of “yeah, well, someone’s always getting oppressed, aren’t they?” Which, while certainly true, is pretty hard to take from a person whom only five minutes before was lecturing you sanctimoniously about how drinking your chosen brand of coffee makes you as much an oppressor of Columbian peasants as the evil multinational corporations that have enslaved them. Or, for that matter, how consuming cheese makes you little more than a Nazi animal torturer.
To her credit Kim neither shrugged nor muttered. Instead, she sort of shrunk into herself, placed her flattened palms on either side of her head like blinds on a draft horse, and looking down at the ground muttered “I know, I know - horrible, horrible.” Which, of course, it is. Yet the remarkable thing about Kim’s behavior is the physical manifestation of her inability to cope with a reality that threatens to be much larger and more complex than her rigid NeoHobbit indoctrination allows for. In the convoluted world of California’s Hobbits, and despite all evidence to the contrary, it is their own democratically elected president who is a murdering, warmongering fascist instead of the.... well, murdering, warmongering fascist whom he deposed. Saddam Hussein and his crazy crew of supervillains like Chemical Ali, Dr. Germ, and Missileman are simply too far away, both physically as well as metaphorically, to be perceived as any sort of threat. Keep in mind that this attitude is held by some of the wealthiest, best educated, most technologically savvy people in the world. Korean manufactured ICBM’s anybody? Look down at the ground. Small nuke linked to a GPS in a cargo container? Look down at the ground. Easily transported biological agent? Look down at the ground. SARS? Look down at the ground.... really hard.
Of course all of this has happened before in England, where the great Winston Churchill was routinely branded as a warmonger and a madman for pointing out the twin dangers of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. In the backs of their tiny minds, the Hobbits of that time firmly believed that their channel some 32 miles across at its closest point would protect them from Hitler or, if the unthinkable happened, from Stalin. In the backs of their equally tiny minds, the NeoHobbits of our time firmly believe that the Pacific Ocean, which has become little more that a vast watery highway for thousands of supertankers and which is crisscrossed by dozens of commercial airliners each day, will protect them from the totalitarian lunatics of the East both near and far. They believe this in spite of the fact that the technology to deliver war, in all of its brutality, to the streets of Berkeley or Hollywood has existed for nearly fifty years and in spite of the fact that the Iranians and North Koreans have on several occasions promised to deliver it.
Similarly, even as the heroes of Tolkien’s trilogy are out in the wider world attempting in various ways to combat the evil that threatens their home, the kinsfolk who inhabit it still prefer to remain ignorant. So when those same heroes return, they don’t find the beloved, pastoral family farms of their memories, but instead a wasteland blackened by combat and inhabited by a half starved, feral population. For when, for the sake of comfort, you turn a blind eye to evil, be it the wizard Sauron, a military dictator, a second generation communist autocrat, or even a clique of fanatical religious tyrants, the hand of war shall invariably reach out and touch you regardless of how high minded your rhetoric or noble your poet’s soul.
Even after the events of September 11th, the March 11th Madrid attacks, and the tragic massacre of Russian children in Beslan, the NeoHobbits of California refuse to believe in the reality of the very world they live in; a reality brutally apparent to their equally urbane young counterparts in Tehran, not to mention black tribesmen in the Sudan.... if you can find any now that the “religion of peace” has done its thing. It is a reality that they ignore personally at peril to themselves, and politically at peril to their more sensible fellow countrymen. Like ostriches sticking their heads in the sand to protect themselves from an approaching pack of jackals, Urban Californians have practically hung a sign from their well-fed posteriors.
And that sign reads “lunch!”### |