The Democrats have become like Saruman

[Leopolds Ghost]

As Gandalf the ACLU activist rushes to the Senate floor to try and stop FISA legislation
from capturing the Ring of Total Information Awareness, he encounters his old friend and ally Saruman,
who fought with him so many times in the past:

"A new Power is rising. Against it the old allies and policies will not avail us at all. There is no hope left in Elves (Liberalism) or dying Numenor (the New Deal). This then is one choice before you, before us. We may join with that Power. It would be wise, Gandalf. There is hope that way. Its victory is at hand; and there will be rich reward for those that aided it. As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There need not be, there would not be, any real change in our designs, only in our means."

-- Saruman, The Fellowship of the Ring p. 272-73

Gandalf notes the visage itself of his old friend taking new shape. "I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colors, and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue, so that the eye was bewildered." Saruman himself boasts of this recent transcendence, naming himself "Saruman of Many Colors." When Gandalf expresses his own preference for Saruman’s forsaken white vestments, the latter responds with the limitations he sees in the simple hue. "It serves as a beginning...The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."

This condescension for the older and stolid instead of the newer and ostensibly more liberating elicits one of Tolkien’s greatest caveats... Gandalf reminds Saruman that "he that breaks a thing (the 4th Amendment) to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

Tolkien was furious in suggestions from readers that the story was an allegory for the fight against totalitarianism, with Saruman supposedly representing the evils of Communism and the ring, the Atomic Bomb. In a letter, he noted the bleak, Herbert-ian way he would have ended his story had he intended it to be a metaphor for modern Western politics:

"The real war (WWII/Cold War) does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-dur would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."

Tolkien also wrote:

"I am not a 'democrat', if only because 'humility' and equality are spiritual principles corrupted by the attempt to mechanize and formalize them, with the result that we get not universal smallness and humility, but universal greatness and pride, till some Orc gets hold of a ring of power--and then we get and are getting slavery...

"My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate!

"If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people. <…> Anyway the proper study of Man is anything but Man; and the most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men.

"Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. At least it is done only to a small group of men who know who their master is... Grant me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses... And so on down the line. But, of course, the fatal weakness of all that — after all only the fatal weakness of all good natural things in a bad corrupt unnatural world — is that it works and has only worked when all the world is messing along in the same good old inefficient human way. <…> There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal”

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Thanks for putting that here.

Tolkien always was a tough nut. Sometimes he seems to have been the first Neocon, sometimes just another bomb-thrower. I wonder why so many people identify with his conception of things.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. And sometimes he is just doing commentary on his WAR, that is WW I

and of industrial warfare

[Leopolds Ghost]

3. "Not allegory, but applicable to your own situation, whatever it may be" --JRRT