Tolkien’s birthday was Jan 3. I always turn to Tolkien when I want insight into fundamental truths.
The case we are most familiar with is that of Sauron, the Lord of the Rings. He never makes an appearance in the books, by the way, it’s all inference or his manifestation of his presence as a flaming eye. As a character in the LOTR, he doesn’t really play a big part. But he’s a major character in Tolkien’s origin story, the Silmarillion.
Sauron was a Maia. That’s like an angel in service to an angel of higher rank, a vala. In his case, he became a servant of the most powerful higher angel, Morgoth. Morgoth turned out to be a destructive entity driven by frustration and anger that he couldn’t be god. The other Valar conquered Morgoth on a couple of occasions but they tended to be forgiving and after a thousand or so years, they figured he’d learned his lesson and let him out of their prison. Eventually, he was punished forever for his monstrous acts and blew away but not before his destructive force changed the world forever.
After Morgoth was finally gone, Sauron just kept on being bad. His trick was in taking different forms, sometimes attractive and charming forms. In one instance he was brought as a prisoner to Numenor, the island of the descendants of heroic men. But he started to plant ideas in the king’s head about the immortality of the land of the Valar that men were not allowed to visit. The king became angry and aggrieved. Why shouldn’t his race of people also have immortality? So he broke the rules, sailed to Valinor and Numenor was destroyed as punishment. Sauron sailed away just as the island went under to set up shop in Middle Earth.
He went through a couple of other manifestations and always there was a group of people who listened to him and were persuaded to do what he wanted. Eventually, his physical manifestation dwindled to that of a fiery eye. It didn’t stop the malevolence.
The point is that there are a lot of people in our country who have been completely enthralled by Trump. He figured out what each of them wanted, power, money, fame, superiority, vengeance and promised that to them. There was a lot of wishful thinking about how things were going to be perfect like the good old days. And through those people, he has exercised his malevolence.
By the way, do you want to know what drives a malevolent narcissist like Trump up a wall? Indifference. It’s better for him if we hate and fear him than be indifferent to him. That’s why he’s so dangerous right now. He’s about to become irrelevant.
His insurrectionists tried to destroy our government and killed and injured people in the meantime. It was a culmination of many years of persuasion and lies. And where was trump when that happened? Was he in the vanguard leading the charge? No, he was celebrating from the comfort of the White House. Nice trick getting others to carry out your dirty work. When he’s done with his paramilitary forces and fans, after they’ve been arrested and their lives have been ruined, he’ll discard them.
The reason why we need to impeach him is so that he can never hold office again. He will be in a prison of infamy, devolving info that crazy uncle who won’t shut up. His social media will need to be monitored for the rest of his life. We will need to be vigilant.
If we don’t make it impossible for him to run again, he’ll keep the lie going indefinitely and his followers will try to get him elected again. Or the malevolence will take a different shape. Maybe a woman next time. She’ll look different but the tactics will be the same. Lies, wishful thinking, future faking, broken promises, self-dealing and a trail of destruction.
If we don’t learn from Trump, if we don’t finally hold him accountable, if we don’t use him as an example and punish the insurrectionists, the next manifestation will pick up where Trump left off.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
I am quite impressed by your recollection of the Tolkien mythos, I guess would be the right term. I learned more about it here than I had gleaned from the entire first movie!
I wish I could think that convicting Trump would destroy the organism which could otherwise morph. But there are many so-called Republicans who are almost as dangerous. Maybe Trump is more dangerous, because like “Lonesome Rhodes” In “A Face In the Crowd,” he had the ability to convince the Deplorables that he was on their side. But I think that anybody would do for them. We saw them in the House today: Jordan, Scalise, Gohmert, Stefanik, Biggs .And then there are the smoother versions in the Senate. So I think that while it is important to repudiate Trump, it is absolutely necessary to somehow win many elections, national and local, to dislodge some of these people.
Was the Bush era, with DeLay, Gingrich, Armey, Cheney, Gonzalez, that much better? Bush was not a psychopath or a misanthrope, but they were steadily dismantling the government, packing the courts, and destroying the environment. At this point, any Republican who wins is a terrible threat. Imagine if McConnell somehow ran the country. No vulgarity, now blatant misogyny, just repressiveness and corporate dictatorship. Most of these predated Trump as any kind of political figure; and certainly the Tea Party was a clear manifestation of what is now sometimes called Trumpism. So I think that Trump is just an outgrowth of this. albeit a rather unique and grotesque one. The Republican most likely to have gotten the nomination in 2016, had Trump not been set up by Russia and some rich donors to run, was Ted Cruz.
IIRC, Sauron did not blithely sail away from Numenor before the hammer fell. Rather, he was caught in the ruin of Numenor. Being a Maia, he survived, but he could never assume a pleasant-seeming form again; he had no charisma left, only intimidation.
Of course, you are right.
Note: Medium only gives you four free member-only articles per month.
QAnon Woke Up The Real Deep State, by Nicholas Grossman
(Stupid QAnon…)
https://arcdigital.media/qanon-woke-up-the-real-deep-state-72bbfcb79488
TL;DR: If you are one of the terrorists or their sympathizers:
Run. Very Fast. Right Now.
“Run. Very Fast. Right Now.”
That will only buy them a temporary reprieve. They’ll be looking over their shoulders for the rest of their lives. The various security agencies are patient and have a *very* long reach.
Yeah, as they say “Osama bin Laden could not be reached for comment.”