Tomorrow Happens (28 page)

I admit that I do see things a little differently, now. The universal expansion, that we had thought due to a "big bang" is, in fact, at least 50% exacerbated by vessels like ours, riding along on waves of pollution, filling space with more space, making things harder for generations to come.

It is hard for the mind to grasp—so
many
starships. So many that the universe is changing, every day, year, and eon that we continue to go charging around, caring only about ourselves and our immediate gratification. Once upon a time, when everything was much closer, it might have been possible to make do with other forms of transportation. In those days, beings
could
have refrained. If they had, we might not need the BHG drive today. If those earlier wastrels had shown some restraint.

On the other hand, I guess they'll say the same thing about
us
in times to come, when stars and galaxies are barely visible to each other, separated by the vast gulfs that
we
of this era short-sightedly create.

Alas, it is hard to practice self-control when you are young, and so full of a will to see and do things as fast as possible. Besides, everyone
else
is doing it. What difference will our measly contribution make to the mighty expansion of the universe? It's not as if we'd help matters much, if we alone stopped.

Anyway, the engines hum so sweetly. It feels good to cruise along at the redline, spearing the star-bow, pushing the speed limit all the way against the wall.

These days, we hardly glance in that mirror anymore . . . or pause to note the ever-reddening glow.

Naturally, I enjoyed the
Lord of the Rings
trilogy (LOTR) when I first read it as a kid, during its first big boom in the 1960s . . . even though I did it unconventionally, by starting with
The Two Towers
and backfilling as I went along.

Likewise, I may be a bit off-kilter in liking, best of all, the unofficial
companion volume
to LOTR . . . perhaps the funniest literary work ever penned in the English (or any other) language. I refer to the
Harvard Lampoon's
1968 parody, titled "
Bored of the Rings
." Even if you revere and admire Tolkien . . . even if you take LOTR much too seriously . . . you will still find yourself unable to restrain guffaws at the adventures of
Frito
, son of
Dildo
, and his sidekick
Spam
. . . along with
Gimlet
, son of
Groin, Eorache
, daughter of
Eordrum
, and
Arrowroot
, son of
Arrowshirt
, son of
Araplane
. . .

Oh, it's true that many of the jokes refer to 1960s TV commercials. (Here's one hint; there was a jingle that went "Things go better with Coca-Cola.") Still, when the Dwarfish language features phrases like "A Dristan Nazograph!" and when Tom Bombadil comes out as the zonked hippie, Tim Benzedrine, and when Goodgulf runs afoul of the
Ball-hog
dribbling underneath the Mines of Andrea Doria . . . well, there's something timeless and adorable about this work of zonker genius. Any author should be flattered to receive such inspired satire. It means you've arrived.

But let's get serious. Some of what I say below may seem unconventional, provocative, heretical . . . and even self-destructively foolhardy in the face of the pseudo-religious reverence that's accorded to
Lord of the Rings
. So let me start by saying that I consider Tolkien's trilogy to be one of the finest works of literary universe-building, with an internal logic and consistency that's excelled only by his penchant for crafting "lost" dialects. (Long before there was a Klingon Language Institute, expert aficionados—amateurs in the classic sense of the word—were busy translating Shakespeare and the Bible into High Elvish, Dwarfish and other Tolkien-generated tongues.) And yes, LOTR opened the door to a vast popular eruption of heroic fantasy, setting up many others who followed with exacting devotion to his masterful architecture.

Indeed, the popularity of this formula is deeply thought-provoking. Millions of people who live in a time of genuine miracles—in which the grandchildren of peasants may routinely fly through the sky, roam the Internet, and elect leaders who must call them sir or ma'am—slip into delighted wonder at the notion of a wizard hitchhiking a ride from an eagle. Many even find themselves yearning for a society of towering lords and loyal, kowtowing vassals! It demonstrates how resonant such themes must be, deep within us.

Indeed, it makes sense if you remember that, for 99.44% of human existence, flight was a legendary prerogative of demigods. And a man was meaningless out of context with his king. It's only been two hundred years or so—an eyeblink—that "scientific enlightenment" began waging its rebellion against the nearly-universal feudal pattern, a hierarchic system that ruled our ancestors in every land where people had both metallurgy and agriculture. Only in the Eighteenth Century did a new social and intellectual movement finally arise capable of seriously challenging the alliance of warrior lords, priests and secretive magicians.

The effects of this revolution have been momentous, utterly transforming our levels of education, health, liberation and confident diversity. The very
shape
of society changed, from pyramidal, with a narrow elite atop a vast and ignorant peasantry, toward a
diamond
configuration, wherein a comfortable middle class outnumbers the poor. For the very first time, let me emphasize. We can argue endlessly about the detailed accuracy and implications of this analogy, but not over the fact that a profound shift has occurred, driven by a genuine scientific-technical-educational revolution.

And yet, almost from its birth, the enlightenment movement was confronted by an ironic
counter
-revolution, rejecting the very notion of progress. The Romantic Movement (of which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were proud and avowed members) erupted as a rebellion against the rebellion! Calling the scientific worldview "soul-less," they joined Keats and Shelley and most European-trained philosophers, plus a multitude of poets, in spurning the modern emphasis on pragmatic experimentation, production, universal literacy, cooperative enterprise and flattened social orders.

In contrast to these 'sterile' pursuits, Romantics extolled the traditional, the personal, the particular, the subjective and metaphorical.

Consider how this fits with the very
plot
of
Lord of the Rings
, in which the good guys strive to win re-establishment of an older, graceful and "natural" hierarchy against the disturbing, quasi-industrial and vaguely technological ambience of Mordor, with its smokestack imagery and manufactured power-rings that can be used by anybody, not just an elite few. Those man-made wonders are deemed cursed, damning anyone who dares to use them, usurping the rightful powers of their betters. (The high elves.)

The anti-modern imperative has strong resonance, all right. Indeed, some of its criticisms have validity! Without romance, we'd be sorry creatures, indeed.

Still, scientific/progressive society has been known to listen to its critics, now and then. Name one feudal society whose leaders did that. Were any orcs or "dark men" offered coalition cabinet positions in King Aragorn's postwar cabinet, at the end of the Ring War? I think not.

Which brings us to another of the really cool things about fantasy— you can identify with a side that's 100% pure, distilled good and revel as they utterly annihilate foes who
deserve
to be exterminated because they are 100% evil! This may not be politically correct, but then political correctness is really a bastard offspring of egalitarian-scientific enlightenment. Romanticism never made any pretense at equality. It is hyper-discriminatory, by nature.

The urge to crush some demonized enemy resonates deeply within us, dating from ages far earlier than feudalism. Hence, the vicarious thrill we feel over the slaughter of orc foot soldiers at Helm's Deep. Then again as the Ents flatten even more goblin grunts at Saruman's citadel, taking no prisoners, without a thought for all the orphaned orclings and grieving widorcs. And again at Minas Tirith, and again at the Gondor docks and again . . . well, they're only orcs, after all. What fun.

This tendency is taken much further—to an extreme that shows the basic moral problem of romanticism—in a work that was coinci-dentally by the
other
fellow who filmed a version
of Lord of the Rings
, one Ralph Bakshi, whose animated feature called
Wizards
was, in my opinion, just about the most evil thing produced ever since Goebbels ran the Nazi propaganda mill. In
Wizards
, Bakshi contrasts two cultures living on a post-apocalyptic Earth. One consists of pretty, pastoral and traditional pixies or elves, dwelling in a bucolic Wagnerian paradise amid vast open countryside. The other group is a tribe of "mutants"—ugly, earthy, and vaguely technological—who have been savagely repressed by the elves, forced to dwell in a single lightless canyon-ghetto for thousands of years.

Bakshi goes out of his way to emphasize both how pathetically incompetent and cowardly the mutants have been, whenever they have tried to escape, and how immense are the expanses that the pixies might share, if they ever acquired a grain of charity in their hearts. No matter. The narrator explains that the suppression of this hapless minority group is a good thing, for no other reason than a purported difference in their essences, between "good" and "evil." The audience worries when the mutants finally get a leader who inspires them to get some courage. Persuaded by the narrator and the pretty protagonist, viewers actually cheer when the doughty pixie army surrounds the ghetto, launching a pre-emptive strike that annihilates every mutant, down to the last cub.

Now most lovers of Tolkien have always hated Ralph Bakshi. They consider his version of LOTR to be quite wretched. And yet, one can see the commonalities of
theme
. Bakshi may represent the dark side of this "force," but it's based on the same underlying premise.

Let's not ignore, but instead openly acknowledge the underlying racialism and belief in an inherent aristocracy that J.R.R. Tolkien wove into the books, without even much attempt at subtlety. He couldn't help it, coming from the imperialist and class-ridden culture that raised him.

Moreover, the characters whom the reader comes to know best—Frodo, Sam and even the king-in-waiting, Aragorn—are
themselves
not very snooty or racist! The snootiest and most relentlessly aristocratic characters stand off to the wings, like preachy, secretive and patronizing Elron, letting others do the fighting for them . . . bloody elfs. (I'd point out endless parallels with a fellow named Yoda, but that would diverge a bit
too
far!)

Um, was that passage just above iconoclastic and heretical enough for you?

Oh, but in fact J.R.R. Tolkien was
himself
far more critical of the situation portrayed in his universe than any but a few of his myriad readers have chosen to notice! There are moments scattered throughout LOTR when he seems ahead of his time—the 1930s—in warning that romanticism can take the road to genocide. He was disturbed to see the Nazi SS, for instance, embrace many of the same Nordic mythic stories and symbols that he used as source material. (And that I examine in my Wildstorm/DC hardcover graphic novel—
The Life Eaters
.)

In later books, Tolkien even cast an analytical eye upon the elvish hierarchs of his own universe, in much the same way that Isaac Asimov re-evaluated his Second Foundation and meddlesome robots. But those self-critiques never had the widespread readership or influence of the original LOTR.

In the end, neither Tolkien nor his close friend C.S. Lewis could ever cross the gap that a Cambridge don, just down the road, was writing about, at roughly the same time—the infamous "two cultures" gulf that C.P. Snow claimed to find unbridgeable, between the world of science and that of the arts. Try as he might, and even faced with the blatant romantic excesses of Nazism, Tolkien could not escape his own deep conviction that democratic enlightenment was the greater evil. That it would ruin all the beauty he found in aristocratic-mystical hierarchies of the past.

Which is a pity, in light of what happened later, in the final third of the 20th Century, when C.P. Snow's "gap" between two cultures was crossed time and again by unfettered spirits—by technologically-savvy artists and by scientists who love art.

Indeed,
science fiction
bridged the two cultures gap with a superhighway. But that's another story.

Finally, may I offer a little mind-stretching exercise? Let's start by remembering that
history is written by the victors
.

How do we know that Hitler was as bad as we are told? Because we live in a democracy that has given Holocaust deniers plenty of opportunities to make their case, and all they ever come up with is blatant drivel. That's how. We see and hear countless witnesses to the Nazi horrors, conveyed via a media that, for all its faults, is relatively free and competitive. As implausible as the story of deliberate mass genocide might have seemed, in fiction, the reality was undeniably true and worse than anything previously imagined.

Allied propagandists did not have to make up any of it.

Ah, but things were different in kingdoms of old, where one official party line was promulgated and alternative sources of information routinely squelched.
¹
And that's in
every
kingdom, mind you. Go ahead; name one where it didn't happen. (Note how the Norman propagandists went to work on poor old King Harold, even while his body was still cooling after the Battle of Hastings.)