Controversies Too Stupid to Waste Much Time On - There are a handful:

Bill Frist's pencils. Much has been written about this one, god knows why. Remember when Mencken said "A belly laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms?" It was for occasions like this.

Patty Murray, traitor. Murray is a dumbass and has the liberal Democrat's inveterate faith in economic intervention anywhere, at home or abroad. Thus she imagines that Bin Laden must be building "day care centers" because she herself would like to build day care centers. But the conservative attempt to puff up routine big government encomia (more foreign aid will make us secure!) into the next thing to aid and comfort to the enemy is a) a transparent attempt to gin up any controversy whatsoever around a Democrat in the aftermath of Lott-ergate, b) absurd and c) despicable. Tony Adragna points out that the gist of Murray's remarks accords with statements made by President Bush himself months earlier.

Robert Byrd's "white nigger" remarks. Yeah yeah, Byrd's an ex-Klansman and a pork-barrel artiste. But he left the Klan, didn't he? His blitherings a couple of years ago about how there are "white niggers" was just a ham-handed attempt by an old guy to come to terms with his changed understanding of the world. Anyone who hasn't heard people of Byrd's age - people of good will if imperfect adjustment - make similar statements in almost the same language simply doesn't talk to many people. The irony is that Byrd was trying to say he understands that the sort of racism he used to subscribe to is wrong. There was never anything to this controversy but partisan hooey.

Bill Frist's "Marion Barry" remarks. Again, too stupid for words. Barry was the deserving poster boy for a particular kind of bad urban government and people have pointed out that Frist's opponent was chair of the District Affairs Committee when the remark was made. This is straight "town mouse versus country mouse" stuff, the oldest and most enduring political divide known.

Everybody's a Cynic - Your Talking Dog all but declares that since more violence and terror will benefit both the Likud campaign and the thugs who still control Palestinian strategy and tactics, that there will be more violence and terror in the run-up to the Israeli elections. Why do I say everybody's a cynic? Because I think he's right.

TD thinks Likud is in actual trouble

. . . so look carefully at other developments affecting Likud, such as the resignation of Moshe "Musa" Alperon from the Likud Party; as you will recall, Mr. Alperon has reputedly been involved in criminal activities, and has been involved in questionable campaign activities leading to an investigation that involves high ranking Likud figures; there is also an investigation of MK Haim Katz on Likud vote buying allegations. And there is this story of a general malaise in the Likud Party. Man, if the LOYALISTS are not so sure about Likud, what about the rank and file citizenry?

but you know how these New York liberals underestimate the chances of right wing candidates - Nixon, Reagan, Giuliani, Sharon?

Remedial Greek - Strangely, classicist Victor Davis Hanson seems to forget the whole hubris thing when his attention turns to the present day:

Something strange is happening, as if all the old conventional wisdom proves daily insolvent. Each hour Saudi Arabia appears a more untenable ally, panicky as the light of truth shines into its deepest recesses. The Arab street sinks more and more into irrelevance, as lunatic as it is impotent; its anti-American hatred is to be welcomed rather than feared, given what it presently represents: gender apartheid, religious intolerance, tribalism, and anti-Semitism. Middle Eastern leaders may shake fingers and talk tough, but they have no moral credibility and still less power — and, like former Eastern European Communist hacks, are likely to become the flotsam and jetsam in a tidal wave of change.

Hey, what could go wrong!

People Unclear on the Concept - Tapped, part of an intra-left blogger brawl about race and the Democratic Party agenda that involves Atrios and Hesiod among others, asks

But then, inevitably, we come to the question of what's acceptable non-racist policy from a conservative or a Republican. (If you think it's impossible to be a conservative or a Republican without being racist, you might as well stop reading here.)

Okay, not completely unclear on the concept. Because I suspect Atrios and many of his followers haven't the slightest inclination to concede that there is an "acceptable" conservatism. He and his confreres seem to be pursuing a pretty scorched-earth partisanship. And the reader comments to his posts makes me wonder if Atrios is really "the left wing Instapundit" or if his site is on its way to becoming a Democratic Party version of Little Green Footballs.

Notes from Under the Christmas Tree - Reactions to the good stuff I got for Christmas:

Fellowship of the R - okay, enough Tolkien talk for awhile. Mrs. Offering actually bought the collector gift edition or whatever it's called, the one with the bigass bookends, because it was the only version of the extended-edition DVD in stock. But I have nothing to add on the topic. See items and links below.

Spiderman DVD - Whee! Looking forward to seeing how good the bonus material is. Haven't done so yet.

Fables graphic novel - This rocks. It reprints issues 1-5 of a Vertigo comics series written by Bill Willingham about fairy tale characters and their underground society in New York City. The Adversary has conquered the homelands. Now King Cole is the mayor of Fabletown, his executive assistant, Snow White, actually runs the place while Bigby "Big Bad" Wolf is pretty much the Fabletown sheriff. In the first storyline, Snow White's sister, Rose Red, turns up missing, maybe murdered. Is it Bluebeard, her fiance? Her boyfriend Jack (of beanstalk fame)? Bonus for libertarians: King Cole's government lacks the authority to tax!

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay - You have to love a pulitzer prizewinning novel whose afterword ends with a thanks to Jack "King" Kirby for influencing everything the author ever wrote. Like Colby Cosh, who seems to have gotten the same book for Christmas, I'm finding that it actually lives up to its reputation so far. (I'm early in part two.)

CDs - Buddy and Julie Miller's first official CD as a duo and Buddy's most recent solo CD, Midnight and Lonesome. This is real hillbilly music, albeit by two people who spent time in an acid rock band. They're part of the Steve Earle-Emmylou Harris-Lucinda Williams mafia. Curiously, almost all the songs on Buddy's solo album are written by Julie. She also wrote almost all the duet record material. Fabulous stuff. If I could afford the bandwidth and the possible legal woes I'd make the mp3 of their duet on "Away in a Manger" available too.

I also got Johnny Cash's American Recordings III and IV - yes, it was an Americana Christmas here at the Highclearing.com World Headquarters. Cash's voice is weaker on IV than on III. III also has his cover of U2's "One," which is pretty darn good.

UPDATE: I forgot to link the link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, which I regret. Certainly I should have linked to Colby and meant to. In fact, I woke up this morning wondering, did I forget to link to Colby Cosh in the first version of this item, because that is a major violation of blogger etiquette, even if not linking to Colby were a product of absent-mindedness rather than malice. Not only do I try not to do that sort of thing, but I would certainly never want to do it to Colby Cosh, whom I admire for practically everything except his execrable taste in music. Happily, blogging lets us correct these errors. (Rumor is it would even work for Gary Farber.)

Speaking of Bruce Baugh, his site has an example of what happens when a real writer gets ahold of a real topic - why it's so much harder to write about happiness than unhappiness.

Oops, Missed citing this Aziz Poonawalla essay on Tolkien's method

The essence of allegory is a homomorphism - a one-to-one mapping. The Ring is nuclear power. Sauron is Hitler. Hobbits are the English. Aragorn is Churchill. The disdain that Tolkien had for this kind of decimation of themes to mere analogy is clear in the Foreword, because it takes something timeless and forces it into a very limited temporal window. This destroys the lessons and utility of the themes themselves.

The true themes of LOTR, which are applicable to any time, are these, to name just a few: We are our own worst enemy. Evil within must be defeated before the evil without. Death. The simple heroism of ordinary people. The Pandora's box of technology. The necessity of wisdom. The vulnerability of the wise . . .

and his extended-edition Fellowship DVD review;

and Stephen Chapman's DVD review;

and Bruce Baugh's with-spoilers review of Two Towers and without-spoilers version. Excerpt:

As I remarked below, there are changes made for the film that I wish had not been made, and which sometimes interfered with my enjoyment. But since seeing TTT I've talked and chatted online and exchanged mail with friends who haven't read Tolkien, and asked them about their reactions. I have fun sometimes drawing on what I learned in historical-methods classes about phrasing questions in neutral ways and the like, because I really like knowing what others think apart from whatever I might be able to manipulate them into saying.

The reactions are quite consistent from my not-yet-trilogy-reading friends. And...they're really pretty much the same as the ones I have to the books . . .

Bruce's conclusion: Peter Jackson really has gotten Tolkien onto the screen, the essence of the thing, however much fans may quibble with the details.

More of the Rings - Good to great writing elsewhere about Tolkien, Towers, fantasy and meaning. Diana Moon posts (substantial) "impressions" to Letter from Gotham. Some of them are at serious variance with mine. She brings up interesting questions about the Christianity of Tolkien's trilogy or lack thereof:

Lastly, I was struck by the utter absence of Christianity in these adaptations and I wonder if that is the case with the books as well. The film was very violent; even the scenes that were not violent were pregnant with the possibilities of violence: the violence of nature, and of men both. This is not a criticism. Nature is violent. Human beings are violent. It's the job of artists to point this out. But in Christianity there is always the flickering possibility of redemption through belief in Christ. In this film, I don't see such possibilities. And I'm not sure whether this is a perversion of Tolkien's message or an accurate representation of it.

I should let a real Tolkien scholar handle this one, or a real Christian. (Eve? Care to oblige?) It's true that the Christian religion itself is absent from the books. We all know of Tolkien's famous disparagement of allegory too, and the Ring doesn't fit any neat retelling formula. Since I'm a blogger, and thus incapable of leaving matters to the more qualified, I'll wager that the Christian quality of the saga inheres in the centrality of abnegation to the storyline. The One Ring represents Temptation and power of a particularly worldly kind, the kind that must be not only resisted but foreclosed. The ring tempts its wielders to make themselves into gods. The Catholicism perhaps lies in the importance of mediating Authority. There is a unitary truth (Ring bad, among other things) known to wise interpreters. Gandalf and Elrond are right. They are reliable guides for the ignorant. It's not for Frodo to have a direct apperception of the truth about the Ring, to form his own relationship to and opinion of it. It's for Frodo to understand what Gandalf conveys and to freely recognize and accept the obligation this implicitly lays on him.

People who have read the books more than once can surely do better than this.

Meanwhile, Avedon Carol is hosting a brilliant colloquy on the uses and misuses of fantasy as a guide to politics on the Sideshow. The capstone is a long letter from a Mr. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, which is too good not to quote:

The better a story, the more likely it is that people are going to elicit a wide range of readings from it. Glenn Reynolds reads the "King of the Golden Hall" chapter of THE TWO TOWERS as a reminder that sometimes it's necessary to stand and fight. Well, sometimes it is. For me, the moral center of THE LORD OF THE RINGS is Gandalf's advice to Frodo: "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends." Cue Saturday Night Live routine: "Stop! You're both right!" Eric Tam says this sort of thing demonstrates that "such hermeneutics can cut many ways." I daresay this is true. But it accords oddly with his claim that moral simplemindedness is an essential characteristic of fantasy.

On Seablogger, Alan Sullivan is writing a whole series of essays about Tolkien, starting with a personal recollection of his long love of the trilogy that touches on both Christianity and politics. More are promised.

Sticking to politics, Tolkien and the Present Moment for a moment, Antoine Clarke seems to me to get it perfectly in this Samizdata item.

Tolkien would possibly see as more complicated: the US acting perhaps like the doomed kingdom of Numenor. The US military hegemony as analogous to Galadriel taking the One Ring:

[Sam Speaks]
"But if you'll pardon my speaking out, I think my master was right. I wish you'd take his Ring. You'd put things to rights. You'd stop them digging up the gaffer and turning him adrift. You'd make some folks pay for their dirty work."

[Galadriel replies]
"I would" she said. "That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas! We will not speak more of it. Let us go!"

. . .

The US empire to come is unlikely to be as restrained as the British Empire, because of the socialist ethos of state imposed education, and crusades such as ridding the Third World of cheap (child) labour, the War on Drugs, the War on Tax Evasion, trying to impose a worldwide age of sexual consent, banning alcohol before 21, but making it almost compulsory thereafter, the imposition of American patent law worldwide, and of course, global weapons control.

In other words, although US global supremacy starts better than the Soviet dream of a worldwide Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it could end up the same...

And he quotes Galadriel again:

"That is how it would begin. But it would not stop with that, alas!"

And in the not-to-be-missed category, this Straight Dope Message Board thread that Teresa Nielsen Hayden found, which starts with "What if Ernest Hemingway had written LOTR" and spirals into increasingly brilliant insanity. TNH's own lengthy excerpt item on the Straight Dope thread has 83 comments as I type this. They are themselves sure to be worth several laughs.

Previews of Coming Attractions - Coming Tuesday, Unqualified Successes 2002! - this site's annual awards presentation. New categories. New winners for old categories. Surprises galore. (I'm assuming . . . ) Last year's winners are here.

A Fanboy's Notes: Essay Topic - Compare: Samwise Gamgee from LOTR and Iran Deckard, wife of android hunter Rick, in Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

A Fanboy's Notes: The Two Towers - Just got back. This is the quickie reaction. More may come later.

No, it's not as good as the first one. Part of this is Trilogy Middle Syndrome. Part of it is that the script is less surefooted - Sam's voiceover speech during the twin battles at Helm's Deep and Isengard falls off the Edge of Grandeur into the Abyss of Corn, and the coy metafictional discussion about stories between Sam and Frodo at the end strikes me as, well, a gratuitous fanboy touch. (For all I know it's in the book and faithful as hell. Too bad.) Everyone in my group also felt that the assault on Isengard was staged and shot in such a way as to make the ents look too small. Ents should be big fucking majestic things.

The biggest problem is Frodo. As a character, Frodo is largely done after the first movie - by the end of it, he's made such decisions as are his to make: to put himself through hell for the sake of others; to dare ruin and death, foresaking comfort; to sacrifice even such protection as he was vouchsafed for their sake and the sake of his quest (excepting Sam, whom he can't shake). What made the first movie work, as I argued last year, is that it got across how much it hurt to be Frodo. But now we know that. The decisive movement hereafter belongs to Sam, and we're still on the way to that. Peter Jackson and his script collaborators seem to intend Sam's speech at the end of TT to point the way for us - it's just not done as well.

Frodo's role from the end of the first book/movie on is to subside. There may be subtleties that another actor than Elijah Wood could bring to his descent. But Frodo is already on his way to becoming object rather than subject, the wishbone Sam and Gollum try between them.

Gollum! Yes, every bit as good as I had read and heard. Everything from the movement to the voice to the script is perfect here. It's so good I find myself genuinely sad the little bastard isn't going to make it.

The battle at Helm's Deep was quite fine. Quite as good as Branagh's Agincourt in Henry V? Eh. But up there. I wasn't disappointed.

Still very much looking forward to the third movie. Biggest problem there: I got the special edition DVD for Christmas and Mrs. Offering and I watched it last night as a refresher. So after part one last night and part two tonight, I fully expect to see Return of the King tomorrow. So far.

Season's Greetings - Happy New Shirts at Work Day, Loyal Readers!

And a Child Shall . . . - You know how they say it's not Christmas until your toddler has painted herself, her crib and whatever can be reached from the crib with her own poop? Well it's Christmas now!

And a Merry one to all. Peace on Earth. Good will too.

Foreshadowing, Your Key to Quality Literature as they said in Bloom County. Now, I want you to think of two things from the Gospels. First, the Last Supper, which is the basis for the Eucharist. Take of this bread and eat, for this is my body. Take of this wine and drink, for this is my blood.

Then think about what a manger is.

It's a Miracle - I've lived in the Washington DC area for just over a quarter-century and I can not remember a single white Christmas before tonight. God bless us, every one!

Game Night at Victor Davis Hanson's House - Eric Mauro says that he was inspired by Gene Callahan's "Lessons of History" essay to draw this cartoon.

Joe Strummer is Dead - One of the two heads of the Clash monster (with Mick Jones), Strummer died of a heart attack at his farmhouse in southwestern England yesterday. Here's CNN's story.

"You were silly like us," Auden wrote in his elegy for Yeats. "Your gift survived it all." That will surely do for Strummer. He had the substantially dumb politics of the 70s-era euroradical. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and spat it out after seeing the Sex Pistols. The Clash was a political band, and it mixed its "good" positions - opposition to the drug war, anti-racism - with the usual dumb ones like Marxist wealth redistribution and a fondness for left-wing dictators. At the same time, they were the rare leftie band that made at least gestures in the direction of true moral equivalence politically. (The "moral equivalence" against which neoconservatives rave was never really equivalence at all. It was a rhetorical sleight-of-hand in which the sins of the East were justified by the sins of the West but the failings of the West were somehow not justified by the failings of the East.) "Washington Bullets," a song decrying foreign intervention, contained the lines

If you can find an Afghan rebel that the Moscow bullets missed
Ask him what he thinks of voting Communist

The same song found room to critique China's arms trade and even to praise Jimmy Carter for letting Anastasio Somoza fall.

The Clash were honest with themselves even when they were wrong. In "Safe European Home," the ferocious kickoff to the ferocious Give 'Em Enough Rope LP, young radicals (the band) go to Jamaica only to find that it doesn't live up to their fantasies, nor do they themselves:

I went to the place
where every white face
was an invitation to robbery
Now I'm sitting here
in my safe European home

And the music! There was such a thing as punk rock. It was like a waterspout erupting under your feet and coursing up through you and out the top. The Clash had it down. They lost me with Sandinista, which many Clash fans loved, but which I found endlessly noodling. Too much dub, not enough reggae. A prog rock album as far as I was concerned, with about one and a half records worth of material meandering over three discs. Combat Rock was something perilously close to that vexed term, a sellout.

But there were months after the release of London Calling in 1979 when it seemed pointless to play any other record. Give 'Em Enough Rope was a shorter, louder masterpiece too. Joe Strummer was a big part of it all. I haven't heard to much of his recent music (as Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros) but you can watch a 1999 concert at Prime Ticket.

I owe the man.

Clausewitz Had It Backward - I think it was Joe Haldeman who first suggested this, that actually, politics was the continuation of war by other means, not war the continuation of politics. The US government's Iraq policy would appear to bear that out. Right now the media is full of speculation about when (in some naive quarters, if) the war with Iraq will begin. But not only have we been at war with Iraq for months now, as this useful item by pro-war blogger Donald Sensing, a former paratrooper, makes clear, we've actually been at war for a dozen years. Whatever 34,000 sorties a year is, it's not peace. Nor is a sanctions policy that a rational observer would conclude the US never intended to be lifted short of regime change, regardless of cooperation or lack thereof with the UN inspections program. It may be wise policy or foolish policy. What it isn't is peaceful policy.

There's a phrase people sometimes use - I occasionally use it myself - but it's wildly misleading: "Gulf War I." As distinct from what happens next month. But it implies that "Gulf War I" ended at some point, which it didn't, really. It was continued by other means for awhile. No one outside the United States is fooled by this. We mustn't be either. Even if you favor this war you should understand how long you've been waging it.