Alan James Strachan for BuzzFlash: Welcome to Mordor, USA. The Lord of the Rings – Mirror of Our Times.
February 23, 2022
By Alan Strachan
Unless you are an Orc, a Ringwraith or the Dark Lord Sauron - or you have been persuaded by the dystopian propaganda disseminated by the Mordor Chamber of Commerce, aka Fox News - there is every reason to suspect that you are not happy about political developments in the United States.
It has been apparent for years that Donald Trump is chasing The Ring of Power. The Ring, as symbol of and vehicle for ultimate power in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, casts an alluring shadow throughout our own earth with its seductive temptations.
Threatening enough is the fact that Trump has been lusting for domination with every neuron of his traumatized psyche. Far worse, however, is that he represents a danger amplified exponentially, joined as he is by legions of obedient minions, of “public servants” turned Ringwraiths, and the shrill exhortations of Faux News shills such as Tucker Carlson. Tucker, who in a past life served as the propaganda minister for Mussolini, has honed his craft in ever more deceitful and damaging ways. To Trump, his largely Republican cohorts, and the growing cadre of Tucker wannabes, trifling concepts such as democracy are irrelevant speedbumps on the road to autocracy.
So seductive is The Ring, so persuasive are Trump and his ilk, that they gleefully have enlisted millions of sycophantic underlings – many of them obedient radicalized Christians (ORCs) – in a lockstep march towards violence.
Trump’s minions are convinced he will save them, when he only ever wants to save himself, at anyone and everyone's expense. You don't make deals with misanthropes like Trump, or Sauron, with whom loyalty is a one-way street. You also simply cannot expect to forfeit personal integrity, honesty, justice, and empathy - all core values of democracy, not to mention Christianity - and expect to emerge with your humanity intact.
So we have now, to our mounting horror, an army – millions of Orcs and Ringwraiths – obsequiously doing the bidding of a dreadfully scarred automaton of anger, sadism, vengefulness and narcissistic self-congratulation.
Anyone allowing themselves to be seduced by the Ring - by sheer lust for power - will become possessed by the dark side of human nature. We have seen this naked lust swell enormously in the public sphere in the past several decades, then expand like a sun gone nova during Trump’s pernicious reign. This degradation has been most notable in the leadership of the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich’s toxic tenure in Congress was a calamitous turning point, instituting a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred warfare with the Democratic party that obliterated democratic norms of decency and cooperation.
It has been downhill from there, with Bush Jr’s presidency a dress rehearsal for Trump’s subsequent bid for permanent power. Although the last fifteen years appear to have softened our recollection of the horrors of Bush’s administration, it should not. We never should forget his attempt to assert a unitary presidency; the illegal, deceitful and disastrous Iraq War (Junior’s sad and destructive attempt to outdo Daddy in the Middle East); the morally appalling embrace of torture as official U.S. policy; the secret embrace of all-encompassing domestic spying; and – of particular relevance with Trump’s failed coup d’etat still ringing in our ears – the floating of the idea that the 2004 elections might have to be cancelled due to terror threats. Bush believed in democracy the way a barracuda believes in mercy. Or in the way Trump, his evil-stepchild, believes in democracy.
Be warned! Lust for the Ring of Power will eat away your soul. You may, perhaps, achieve some degree of sociopathic domination, but the cost is the decimation of your heart, your integrity, your experience of true freedom, and everything that lifts you above the status of a beast of prey ripping out a throat. Like Tolkien’s Nazgul, you will become the walking dead – an invisible wraith condemned to propagating evil.
There are so many exemplars of aspiring Ringwaiths from which to choose, but let us select one – Ted Cruz. At one time Cruz demonstrated a grasp on reality, however tenuous. His best and most honest moment was during his 2016 presidential campaign when he asserted this astute observation about Trump:
“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying … Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing. The man cannot tell the truth, but he combines it with being a narcissist. A narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen. … Everything in Donald’s world is about Donald … Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it … the man is utterly amoral … Donald is a bully … bullies don’t come from strength they come from weakness.”
Trump had attacked both Cruz’s father and his wife, which had led Cruz to hedge on his promise to support whoever became the 2016 Republican presidential nominee. “I am not in the habit of supporting people who attack my wife and attack my father,” said Cruz, who then went on to assert that he had not made “a blanket commitment that if you slander and attack Heidi I'm going to nonetheless go like a servile puppy dog."
Since then we have witnessed Cruz, empty and craven, forego all human decency in his own panting pursuit of the Ring of Power. Forsaking his nanosecond of truth-telling, Cruz has proudly morphed into a lying, amoral, power-hungry sycophant – precisely the pathetically servile puppy dog that he claimed to abhor.
When your utter addiction to The Ring of Power is all you ultimately care about, nothing is beneath you. When nothing is beneath you, democracy is an empty word, your soul is dust, and Mordor – “a dying land … harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life” – your destiny.
Vote Republican – Vote Trump – Vote Mordor.
Mount Doom awaits.
Alan James Strachan Ph.D., is a psychotherapist and co-author of The Lure of the Ring: Power, Addiction and Transcendence in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (https://thelureofthering.com).
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