The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

"The world is changing," intones Saruman before his crystal ball. The scene is from The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, released on December 19, 2001, soon to be twenty years ago, though it feels like it has been around forever.

The change Saruman announces is not an observation but a desire, a product of his own unrelenting will. For those unfamiliar with Tolkien's books, we don't know why Saruman wants the world to change, only that change is not good but evil -- an evil designed to wipe out Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men. Only Orks are welcome in this changed world, and one wonders why?

I have never read the Tolkien trilogy (I read The Hobbit when I was eleven), so I wonder how much attention Tolkien gives to Orks and Ork culture in his books. Presumably a lot, given his interest in history. But what are these Orks if not workers and soldiers, mostly male-like (the one instance where a female-like Ork appears is on the battlefield, and is of a higher rank). As for Ork ambitions, they seem limited to following orders -- mining metals, making mega-Orks, going to battle. In the two or three scenes where Orks are amongst themselves, they sip gruel, bicker, fight each other -- over stuff.

The first Lord of the Rings book was published in the summer of 1954, a year-and-a-half after the death of Joseph Stalin. Did Tolkien have Stalin and his alleged dictatorship of the proletariat in my mind when he thought up Saruman and his Orks? As for his Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits and Men, all belong to a feudal mode of production. Somewhere between the two, in the evolutionary middle, is a liberal democracy that had yet to be invented, implemented.

Among the changes in my lifetime is a liberal democracy that has lost the ability to present itself as the antithesis of evil while at the same time doing evil things under the guise of freedom and liberty (neoliberalism), usually in the service of that one-percent who control most of the world's wealth. People are wise to call bullshit on it, but what is the alternative? Trumpism? Putinism? Chinese state capitalism? In the Black Panther franchise, subjects are happy under a king. Same too of Tolkien's subjects. Is there a middle anymore? In anything? A Middle Earth, as it were?