Odd how Obama's victory evokes references to Hollywood struggles between
Good and Evil. Here's something else I received this morning from
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/editorsblog
Mordor Brightens; Obama's Challenge -- And Ours
By Robert Weissman
November 5, 2008
Good morning, America. Hello, world.
Yes, the skies over Mordor are now brightening.*
There is an almost palpable, physical sense of relief with the
confirmation that the end of the Bush era is at hand.
And the election of an African American to the highest office in the
land is an act of racial redemption that was almost unimaginable two
years ago.
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* For those not familiar with the reference, Mordor is the realm of the
evil Sauron in J.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
---
Here are some necessary correctives on L. Frank Baum and J.R. Tolkien:
http://www.counterpunch.org/stjohn06262004.html
L. Frank Baum: Racist
Indian-Hating in "The Wizard of Oz"
By THOMAS ST. JOHN
Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) advocated the extermination of the American
Indian in his 1899 fantasy "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz". Baum was an
Irish nationalist newspaper editor, a former resident of Aberdeen in the
old Dakota Indian territory. His sympathies with the village pioneers
caused him to invent the Oz fantasy to justify extermination. All of
Baum's "innocent" symbols clearly represent easily recognizable frontier
landmarks, political realities, and peoples. These symbols were
presented to frontier children, to prepare them for their racially
violent future.
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http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/11/against-tolkien.html
Against Tolkien
Here's a cleaned-up version of the comments I made - or rather excavated
- during the debate I had with Richard Taylor about Lord of the Rings
the other day.
As some of you no doubt realise already, I am not a big fan of JRR
Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings circus. I agree with Michael Moorcock,
who argues in his book Wizardry and Wild Romance that Tolkien's writing
was driven by an obsessive fear that the south of England, aka the
Shire, with its idealised countryside and countryfolk, was about to be
over-run by rough northern blokes (orcs) led by nasty Bolshy
intellectuals (evil wizards) and supported by ungrateful natives in
other parts of the Empire.
The sad thing is that in the space of a few decades the writing of an
embittered old Oxford Don - writing which could originally only be
published by a crank religious outfit - has become a myth that thousands
of people on the other side of the world have assimilated.
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