Musing on "Rings" Parallels
By SEAN HANNON

February 14, 2004

 The 2004 presidential election season is upon us, and never has the outcome of an election carried with it the burden of our country’s fate or even survival as this one does. Whenever a person views events as cataclysmic as that - and I do - there arises a need for some humorous distancing just to stay healthy and sane. Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” has often been a lifesaving tonic for me. And lately, I’ve given my imagination over to drawing playful parallels between our dire situation and the cinematic contest recently played out in Middle Earth.

 The Rings saga begins in the Shire. One of the first things that tickled me was the thought that if Shire hobbits voted, they would do it exactly like the folk in Iowa. A boisterous caucus fits the hobbit personality and temperament to a tee. With a grin, my reverie continued...

 The evil wizard Saruman despoiled his lands and hacked down ancient trees, and our own treacherous stewards of the environment do the same to ours: poisoning our air, our water and our land. Their latest threat to cut a destructive swath through the last temperate rainforest in the Pacific Northwest may yet awaken the sleeping Ents among us.

 The Eye of Sauron, glaring from atop the tower of Barad-Dur, bears an eerie resemblance to another all-seeing eye atop a pyramid - the symbol of providence on our currency - made bloodshot red by massive corporate scandals, global greed and fiscal corruption.

 The Dark Lord of Mordor erred just as much as Karl Rove the strategist in counting on the disunity of his opponents. How could they have imagined that effete liberal Elves, conservative blue-collar Dwarves, and pacifist Hobbits, not to mention the Men from the North and South, so highly suspicious of each other, could band together and present such an organized fellowship to challenge the enemy?

 And finally, who is Frodo? Who, in this playful scenario of mine, is the unguessed-at savior of our own time? Just as the evil Sauron never dreamt that a lowly hobbit could bring him crashing down, perhaps our Frodo is that one quiet, unobtrusive American who has voted Republican all his life, standing alone in the voting booth facing the Cracks of Doom, and who for one fleeting moment sees what Bush never thought he’d see, and does what Bush never suspected he’d do, and casts that ring of power, fear and greed down into the abyss.

 As Gandolph said, “There never was much hope. Just a fool’s hope.”  But as we all know in our heart... Frodo lives.