Bored of the Rings Saturday, November 29, 2003

Finished with the actors' commentary on Two Towers last night. By the end, even Mrs. WTJ was bored enough with those blowhards to append "...with a dick in my ass" to the end of all their sentences. Sean Astin in particular. Actors, as we all know, are goofballs and in love with the sound of their own voices; but Christ can this guy go on. Every fellow actor is "generous," every character's on a "journey," every plot point is "soooooooo significant."

And then there was The World Situation. The luvvies were quick to draw parallels to the real world when it suited their purpose (burning down forests is a no-no, as is sending old men and young boys to fight wars) and quick to deny parallels with it didn't (we should fight people who are trying to destroy us, evil exists, etc.). All in all a waffling performance, and a transparent one. Tolkein, for his part, rigorously denied the books were an allegory for World War II, but I don't think he did that so he could distance himself from Winston Churchill. ("I support our boys in North Africa, of course, and Flanders; but not the blinkered liars at 10 Downing who sent them there.")

Sen. Astin had some good words about how everyone is capable of redemption--eliding the fact that the ten thousand bad guys storming the fort (the main threat in the story) clearly are not capable of it, nor is their boss in tower. The boys also were sure to stress that the idea of "fighting for the good left in the world" didn't mean actually, you know, fighting, but instead involved some sort of abstract contest which, presumably, can be carried on from location shoots and Sunset Boulevard bistros. The idea that "fighting for the good" might entail physical courage--or, indeed, anything beyond speaking through a megaphone to a crowd of fellow thinkers--seems not to have occurred to them. Even though they had just made three movies that touched occasionally on that very point.

The cloak for all this was "Tolkein was not pro-war," a sentiment informed by the Hawkeye Pierce view of arms and the man: War is waged by either heartless technocrats who coolly move men like chesspieces; or by bloodthirsty monsters drunk on ideology and hungry for gore. In this calculation, if you think negotiations have limits and there are some threats that must be answered with force, you obviously want more Verduns and Stalingrads and Okinawas. But that view loses the fact that, for example, the abolitionists solved nothing alone; that the death camps weren't thrown open at the bargaining table; and even, dare I say, that the government-sponsored rapes, imprisoning of children and feeding of political prisoners into wood chippers didn't stop until the tanks rolled into Baghdad.

"Jaw jaw is better than war war," Churchill said; but he was not fool enough to think Hitler could be reasoned with, or sanctioned into oblivion. Peace is wonderful. "Peace in our time" is not.

@ 8:35:00 AM, ,

Look to the East! Friday, November 28, 2003

Holy God, nearly a week with no posts. It's been a rough one. Lots of crash stories to edit, which is to say stories that come in the day they have to be printed, and when I get home and climb into the Mercury capsule that is my desk, no blastoff. Meanwhile, I did a Google search on a minor celebrity and got back enough blogs to scare off Steve McQueen. I give you the Pet Rock of the new millennium.

On the other hand, I've been getting to spend some time with Mrs. WTJ, always welcome, and yesterday we had a swellegant Thanksgiving at my brother-in-law's upstate. Mrs. WTJ's extended family has lots of cousins and kids and second marriages, which means a broad swath of people show up at get-togethers--all sorts of accents and habits and (yum) foods. We ate like we'd just sacked a village.

Yesterday was Norman Rockwell; tomorrow we head to my sister's for Paul Cadmus. Details maybe.

@ 8:47:00 AM, ,