Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Santorum Gets Tolkien Analogy Wrong

Rick justifies Bush's Iraqi fiasco with the following reasoning:
"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else... It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."
First things first. I discussed the real Tolkien analogy for the Bush administration here. It is the idea that one can engage in evil to do good. This is Bush's consequentialist logic for embracing torture, the idea that it is necessary to save lives. But, as Tolkien would say, this is akin to trying to use the ring of power against the Dark Lord. The One Ring is evil, and corrupts all who wield it. That is the lesson Santorum needs to draw, himself being an advocate of using the Ring.

But what to make of what he actually said? It's a little bizarre. It would be as if the alliance in the Lord of the Rings attempted to save Minas Tirith and Gondor by bringing down the wrath of Sauron on some far away realm, completely indifferent to the lives of the people who live in that realm. Santorum is supposed to be a Catholic. Is he seriously implying that the lives of some are worth more than the lives of others? Then again, this gels well with his consequentialist reasoning, and the Santorums of times past justified the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on precisely these grounds.

No comments: