Back on the Home Front

Last week Bill Whittle’s piece in the National Review Online, “The Undefended City”, created a lot of interest on the right. It started me thinking about Tolkien’s books and Peter Jackson’s movie and how applicable the myth of Middle Earth is to us today.

Orson Scott Card has rated The Lord of The Rings as the greatest novel of the 20th century. Considering the epic nature and scope of this heroic fantasy, it’s an assertion that has some merit, whether one agrees with it or not. Holding to a high opinion of Tolkien’s masterpiece could cause a person to be critical of Jackson’s LOTR film trilogy. For example, Jackson omits the events of the chapter called “The Scouring of the Shire”. In the book, Saruman was not killed at Isengard, he was allowed to leave. He traveled in company with Grima Wormtongue to the Shire and established control over it through manipulation, corruption, and thuggery. The hobbits were forced to surrender the fruits of their labors to Saruman’s henchmen who then doled out enough to keep the inhabitants alive while keeping the most and the best of everything for themselves, for consumption or enrichment. Some of the hobbits even go over to Saruman’s side for their own benefit.

When Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin return to the Shire, they immediately begin to resist the new order. They organize their fellows and fight back. After all, it was a desire to save the Shire and all that it meant which pushed Frodo and his friends out on the road to Mt. Doom in the first place. They had fought for the Shire all along.

I cannot fault Jackson much as the films, especially The Return of the King, border on being too long anyway. He actually emphasizes the centrality of saving the Shire to the hobbits' motivations on several occasions. I think the return of the hobbit heroes and the conflict in the Shire with its resolution and restoration would make a nice little movie by itself. It could be any hero in any war, returning to the home he had sacrificed to save, only to find it overrun by a nasty little iteration of the evil he had destroyed on a distant front. It could even be you and I, the mythic heroes of our own spiritual quest, forced to deal with finding “Heather Has Two Mommies” being read to our kindergartener.

Tolkien, as he told us plainly, was not writing an allegory, and he was not basing his novel on current events. He was creating myth, using the epic to draw back the veil on the real struggle that goes on, much as Homer did in the Iliad and Odyssey. That readers immediately began to apply this vision to the world they knew tells us he succeeded magnificently.

The restoration of the Shire serves as a transition for us. We move from epic heights to the lowlands of normal, everyday existence. Storied heroes return to the reality of a greatly circumscribed life. The nature of this can be seen in Saruman’s name change. In the Shire, he is known as “Sharkey”. No longer is he the great white wizard, or even a great evil. He is petty and small, doing small, petty things simply to wound righteousness and thwart the good. Yet it is still evil, and if we tolerate it or ignore it, it will corrupt all and continue to spread.

The big battles may get the coverage but it is down here where the issues of life are decided for better or for worse. This is the great error of the left – they seek a strong man to lead; they want power centralized where the elites can most easily influence the decision-making. They want someone else to praise or blame or call to for help. They essentially live in a fantasy world, and it is rather shabby. Glamour is created by illusion. As Artie Shaw – who would know – pointed out, even if you are married to the love goddess, somebody still has to get up and make the coffee. The romanticized version of reality held to by elitists does not hold up in the morning sun.

The conservative -- the classic liberal -- has no desire to see the world botoxed. We are at home with the wrinkles of reality and wisdom. We have fought on the heights and know it is a bad and bloody, but thoroughly necessary business. The tacky, faded cardboard cutout, though life-size, does not deceive us. On the mountain, I may have overcome in the great battle for my soul, but I know I must remain on my guard against the bushwhackers in the valley and be as ready to defeat the small enemy as I was to engage the giant.

A little leaven leavens the whole lump.

Life does not flow down by decree from Washington, D.C., or Barad-dur. Life is lived in Washington, MO and Bag End. America will not be saved by any politician, though it can be and has been seriously damaged by some. America will be saved, preserved and restored by the little people who refuse to despair, but also refuse to wear their chains as if they were jewelry. The battle is the Lord's; the boots on the ground are mine.