One Ring to Rule Them All and In The Darkness Bind Them

Over the past week or so I have been re-visiting Tolkien for the first time in more than fifteen years. And one theme that has emerged so strongly this time through is the irresistible temptation to seize and employ the ring, the very embodiment of corrupted and worldly power, in order to achieve worthy ends or even ultimate goods.

Tolkien's message here is unequivocal: the ring cannot be used thus. Indeed it inevitably corrupts those who would so employ it. And the more noble the aims and the greater the power, the greater the fall. Or to use Phillip Selznick's wonderful quip: "power co-opts and absolute power co-opts absolutely." Those who would use the ring as a tool for good become tools for evil.

With this in mind, I stumbled upon Bill Moyers' wonderful little video essay on Barrack Obama's seeming abandonment of the poor and vulnerable:




Here he quotes a line from Obama's Dreams from my Father about power and indeed about grasping the ring:

I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail” and “bring it back like Promethean fire.

Indeed.

The entire sense of this presidency is that while the promise was that progress would grasp power, instead power has grasped progress, as Tolkien would say, to the peril of us all.

One More Reason to Move to a Cave

An "interesting" piece on the New Yorker site this morning, showing how Obama will stand or fall on the votes of fewer than a million "less informed" voters in a handful of swing states. This is where advances in the science of politics have taken us. We can accurately identify the small groups of swing voters who determine elections, and by targeting vast resources at this small and intellectually challenged group, can largely shape that vote. The argument in brief?

The undecideds, . . . “are rather less knowledgeable about politics, and much more likely to say they follow news and public affairs ‘only now and then’ or ‘hardly at all.’ (Almost 40 percent are unsure which party currently has more members in the House of Representatives, and another 20 percent wrongly answered that it was the Democrats.)”

In other words, this incredibly powerful sliver of the population is both suggestible and none to bright. As Rachel Maddow likes to say: what could possibly go wrong?

The fate of the world is in the hands of a small minority gun-toting climate deniers who think that Elvis is still working at that Taco Bell in Des Moines.

Cave, anyone?