(The link is courtesy of Aeon Skoble on Liberty and Power, who got it from Fark.)

Among the wits who brought you such straight-to-DVD cinematic masterpieces as FahrenHYPE 9/11 (which is advertised as a rationalization for your preconceived conclusions about Michael Moore) and Celsius 41.11, this, apparently, is the sort of thing that passes for sophisticated satire:

Fellowship 9/11

. . .

Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helms Deep. With his characteristic humor and dogged commitment to uncovering — or if necessary fabricating — the facts, Moore considers the reign of the son of Arathorn and where it has led us. He looks at how — and why — Aragorn and his inner circle avoided pursuing the Saruman connection to Helms Deep, despite the fact that 9 out of every 10 Orcs that attacked the castle were actually Uruk-hai who were spawned in and financed by Isengard.

… and the film goes on like that.

Fighting the War on Evil

Now, I don’t have any problem with a good send-up of Michael Moore; but as satire, this is as artless as a MAD Magazine comic, and ends up making warhawks look an awful lot sillier than Michael Moore.

If George Bush were personally going into battle to lead the fight against a massive assault already launched against all the strongholds of the civilized world, by monstrous armies of vile, inhuman goblins, directed by undead great lords of men, and bent to the unholy will of a supernatural Dark Lord who desires nothing less than the complete desolation and domination of the whole Earth, then I don’t doubt that Michael Moore would not have had quite the same objections to Mr. Bush or to his policies.

Misunderstandings of Tolkien’s work abound.

Do warhawks actually think of the war against Iraq like this? As much you might be inclined to say, Come off it, it’s just a stupid joke, the fact is that much of their rhetoric outside of this silly little film seems to indicate that they honest-to-God do. And if they do, it would be very funny–except for all the people who have died because of such childish conceptions of the world.

J.R.R. Tolkien, for his part, put it this way:

The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its process or its conclusion. If it had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron; he would not have been annihilated but enslaved, and Barad-d?@c3;bb;r would not have been destroyed but occupied. Saruman, failing to get possession of the Ring, would in the confusion and treacheries of the time have found in Mordor the missing links in his own researches into Ring-lore, and before long he would have made a Great Ring of his own with which to challenge the self-styled Ruler of Middle-earth. In that conflict, both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves.

. . .

An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.

–Foreword to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings

And this way:

Life in camp seems not to have changed at all, and what makes it so exasperating is the fact that all its worse features are unnecessary, and due to human stupidity which (as planners refuse to see) is always magnified indefinitely by organization. . . . However it is, humans being what they are, quite inevitable, and the only cure (short of universal Conversion), is not to have wars — nor planning, nor organization, nor regimentation.

–from a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 6 May 1944, Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #66

Watching Bush overcompensate during the second debate, I couldn’t help but think of another famous debate, which I think pretty much sums up the whole Bush debate strategy against Kerry:

(Bugs Bunny is standing on stage, imitating Theodore Roosevelt)

Bugs Bunny: I speak softly, but I carry a big stick!

(Yosemite Sam storms the stage, pushing Bugs Bunny away from the mic, with a plank in his hand)

Yosemite Sam (screaming): Well, I speak LOOOOOOOUD, and I carry a BIIIIIIIIIIGGER stick! And I use it, too!

(Sam thwacks Bugs Bunny with the plank)

— Ballot Box Bunny, 1951

Come to think of it, maybe there’s a metaphor there for the cognitive style of the Bush re-election campaign as a whole.

Further reading

The talking-points buzzword from the Republicans following the debate was dominated (I heard Republican campaign zombies repeat the claim that Bush dominated the debate three or four times in a row in the space of fifteen minutes). Of course, the point of a debate is to get at the truth, not to dominate, but the press strategy was pretty clearly tuned ahead of time to Bush’s strategy of overcompensating for last week’s meandering performance. In any case, for actual commentary on the content of the debate, you might want to check out feministe’s morning-after fact check or Cleis’s live-updated post).

Vote early, vote often: enjoy the electronic voting experience with an online Florida Election Ballot.

I have returned from six weeks of teaching Logic to gifted junior high and high school students in upstate New York. Yes, if you read the New Yorker, it was that nerd camp–although it’s hard to say, from reading the article, how much of a picture you’ll actually get of what happens (it seems more interested in giving a gawking impressionistic portrait of tricks that really smart adolescents can do–rather than giving an idea of what it’s like at the camp, or taking up an argument on some of the serious ethical and educational dilemmas that a program like CTY raises. The online interview with the author, Burkhard Bilger is actually much better in some ways than the article that appeared in print.) This is one of those things that I’ll hopefully be getting to shortly. In the meantime, though, there’s still plenty to do:

1. Finish unpacking and clean up around the house
2. Finish grading post-tests and send them off to the overlords in Baltimore
3. Apply for substitute teaching jobs in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor
4. Post articles to the weblog about two or three things I’ve been meaning to post about for the past 6 weeks
5. Visit the fam in Auburn. Possibly do a bit of paid petitioning for the Libertarian Party while in Alabama.
6. Prepare applications for graduate school. Try not to gnaw my gnails down to the knuckle.
7. Post articles to the weblog about 5,000,000 things or so that I’ve been meaning to post about for the past 6 weeks
8. Finish reading Toward a Feminist Theory of the State and some other stuff. Work with Roderick on a co-authored paper on libertarianism and radical feminism for the APA Eastern Division.
9. Smash patriarchy
10. … and the State.

Cheers, all! I’m glad to be back, and you should be hearing from me again soon.

Some of you may already know that I’m going to be heading off to upstate New York this week, for a six week stint of TAing a Logic class for gifted junior high and high school students. (If you didn’t, well, now you do.) I’m in the process of preparing some comments in response to the (excellent, thoughtful) responses to my recent post Why We Marched, on abortion, law, democracy, and the courts. The short version is that I’m still right and the objections elucidate important issues but don’t derail my point. For the longer version, however, you’ll have to wait a few days, while I prepare to move and take the long Greyhound bus ride to New York (as usual, Rad Geek rolls in style).

See you soon!