LOTR Movie "analogies" ?

[pegkerr]

An "interpretation" of the Lord of the Rings movies which is, perhaps, not surprising, but intensely gag-producing. For me, at least.

Okay, why mince words? Probably the most incredibly offensive I've ever seen. I would hope it would have been for Tolkien, too, who loathed allegory.

*Choke*

Comments

[splagxna.livejournal.com]

it's the sort of thing that makes me want to put my fist through the monitor. rrrrrrargh, i wish i had someone to throttle over that!

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Who are the other characters? Merry And Pippin are Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity fighting little battles along the way with humor and courage.

[sobs loudly]

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

*gak*

Someone send that writer a copy of Outfoxed, STAT.

[oneminutemonkey.livejournal.com]

That person is on fucking crack. Grrr.

[psychic-serpent.livejournal.com]

That is pretty bad. I'd like to think it's being done tongue in cheek, but I don't get that impression. (And Republicans have no sense of humor, anyway.)

This is really the ridiculous part, out of a host of ridiculous parts:

Who are the other characters? Merry And Pippin are Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity fighting little battles along the way with humor and courage.

Um, WHAT? When did Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hanity ever show one ounce of courage about ANYTHING? (Let alone humor.) And on top of that, Merry and Pippin and the Ents were a massive tract in favor of environmentalism decades before it became sexy, and Rush is about the most anti-environmentalist right wing talker there is. He has tried to claim that there are more square miles of forest in this country now than when the Declaration of Independence was signed. Um, not on the same soil, bub. There were thirteen colonies then; there are fifty states now. The way these idiots will bend any statistics to their needs is just too galling; equating Rush with anyone remotely environmentalist is just plain STUPID.

And the idiot woman doesn't know the difference between "than" and "then." [/writing pet peeve rant]

[littlecatfeet.livejournal.com]

And the idiot woman doesn't know the difference between "than" and "then." [/writing pet peeve rant]

The idiot woman doesn't even know the difference between "patients" and "patience." Kind of funny, actually, in context.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I really can't get that worked up about her misuse of homonyms when the analogy itself makes me ***FROTH AT THE MOUTH***

[littlecatfeet.livejournal.com]

To be perfectly honest, my brain's outrage function just completely shut off by the time she compared George Bush to Aragorn because he's so gorgeous.

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

Nor does she grasp the differences between 'your' and 'you're.' (And she seems to have some problems with commas, too.)

To me poor grammar and spelling is evidence of an ignorant, untrained mind. What does she know about politics? She can't even write properly. To me the saddest part of that whole ridiculous essay is tail end where she identifies herself as a writer.

[vass]

And Republicans have no sense of humor, anyway.

I know some Republicans who have.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

EEEEUUUUWWWW. I quite reading at the mention of Mortenson. Ick ick ick.

MKK

[jemyl.livejournal.com]

OK, what English teacher gave the assignment to find a "modern" movie and compare it to today's political scene?

I got as far as the fourth paragraph and decided it had to be someone's homework assignment. I also decided that I didn't want to continue reading it until I have had the opportunity to view the movies. I bought the DVD's and the are set for the next thunderstorm when the satellite goes out. Yes, I realize that the satellite only goes out for a few minutes, and it is the only way to get the movies on instead of sports for Bill, the only way without a hand fight and bed moving tantrum, that is.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Dear heavens, Peg, where did you find this?!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Through was a link to it that was posted at The One Ring.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

I read it aloud to the household, to much eyerolling.

[harpie84.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much. Must.get.brain.bleach.NOW.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Where can I get one of those road signs?

B

[harpie84.livejournal.com]

The icon was made by iconsbywingfoot. As far as getting a real one, your guess is as good as mine :-)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

That can't possibly be real. It's simply too over-the-top idiotic.

B

[ravenspb.livejournal.com]

Try reading Ann Coulter sometime. She seems utterly sincere stating pretty much the same things.

[ravenspb.livejournal.com]

I'm not so much offened as astounded. This is just one more example of "We can state our opinions because we are right. You can't because you are unpatriotic." To apply that concept to Lord of the Rings or any other type of non-contemporary fiction is demented and obsessive.

[maribou]

Okay, I couldn't get past the first paragraph because I was sitting here running the "MATT DRUDGE *SO* DOES NOT GET TO BE CALLED AN ENT" tape over and over in my brain and I didn't want any more of that kind of horrors. Eugh.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Tolkein might have disdained allegory, but his work was fairly tinged by the events of his lifetime. That said...this woman's attempt at allegory is....laughably bad. Or it would be if it weren't so sadly ironic.

I told my BF about the Dixie Chicks and Sean Penn being Grima Wormtongue--he'd been lying in bed, while I checked the interweb from my laptop--and he sat up straight and said, "Wouldn't it be the other way around? There were people loyal to the country that stood up to Grima, and he tried to have them kicked out or imprisoned."

My biggest snort was when she indicated that the death of liberalism and socialism would give rise to "peaceful living". So....yeah....who wanted this war in the first place? Who has one of the largest standing armies in the world? All those pacificist hippie liberals are standing in the way of peaceful living!

Second biggest snort: Gollum is the Liberal media who, in the end defeat their own purpose by exposing their inability to tell the truth, to the point of believing their own twisted lies, and as we all know, lies are exposed eventually. I trust you can see the irony.


My biggest wince was her referring to Sam as "praying Christians around the world".

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Another observation on how her analogy falls apart. I noticed it as I was trying to journal this:

The Ring of Power, as you no doubt will have guessed, represents liberalism and socialism. (Yes, of course. Because it was liberal hippies that boarded planes and flew them into the world trade centers, thus attacking Gondor--I mean, America. Not conservative fundamentalist Muslims. You can't say that Mordor attacking Gondor is terrorism, and then equate the Ring of Power to socialism and liberalism.)

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

It's been days, and I haven't been able to get this out of my head. Forget the idiotic LOTR parallels, and think about what she's saying, what she believes. In my head she's a normal woman, with a family, and maybe with a job. She's not a radical. She's not traditionally political. Maybe she's religious, but not overly so.

How in the world have we gotten ourselves into a world where this person, and the millions like her, believe this kind of crap? And how to we get outselves out of it?

Solve this question, and you'll have done society a great goodness.

B

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's been rankling with me, too. Absolutely, I agree with you. I look at an entry like this, and like K., I start to feel real despair for my country. How can people believe stuff like this?

On the other hand, I can't entirely ignore the LOTR parallels (I agree they are idiotic), because I think she's doing exactly what George Bush is doing, and thus providing a great working example of why Tolkien loathed allegory.

It's so tempting to mangle a story like Tolkien's to fit the Procrustean bed of your favored interpretation, but in doing so, you miss the really challenging and complex examination Tolkien was making of the subject of evil.

Now George W. Bush loves to talk about evil. He sees himself as the cowboy facing down the outlaws in the dusty street at high noon, as the shining knight, defending America against the hoardes of darkness. To George W. Bush, the scary Other is always an orc--subhuman, obviously a minion of the forces of darkness, and they hate us, because, well, that's what orcs do. It's their very nature. They're evil.

What he fails to grasp--and what this woman's "interpretation" illustrates so--well, not beautifully, but thoroughly--is that Tolkien's story is totally corrupted if you don't understand that the greatest threat to the mission to destroy the Ring came from within the hero himself. The threat is not the Ring as liberalism and socialism, dammit. It's that Frodo carries his own destruction within himself in the temptation to give into it. He would take the step in the wrong direction, Gandalf says, "from the desire to do good," reasoning that the end justifies the means. (Think of the Patriot Act.)

Understand, now, I'm not one of those who believes that American's deserved September 11 or brought it upon themselves. In no way could we ever have deserved what happened to us. But I balk at doing what this woman and George Bush want to do--to insist that all the darkness is outside us and none of it is within us. George W. Bush recognizes no darkness within himself. He is absolutely unable to see it.

And he wonders why the rest of the world hates us for all the "good" we have done in Iraq.

[Upon re-reading this comment, I'm not sure that I made my point at all. I was perhaps a little too tired to drink that wine at dinner, and filling out pages and pages of those stupid school forms has made me cranky. But I'll still send this on its way and hope you will be tolerant enough of me to forgive if this comment seems hopelessly muddled.]

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

This is the line I can't get out of my head: "...Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hanity fighting little battles along the way with humor and courage."

I simply can't fathom how anyone can have that opinion of those people. Even if you believe in traditional Republican, or even Conservative, values, those two are nothing more than bile-spewing hate mongers.

I agree with Daid Neiwert that they are the people most responsible for the mainstreaming of the new American facist movement.

B

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Fascinating. Thanks for the link!