awakelast night i cranked up the heater in the living room and watched lord of the rings and then some old tex avery cartoons. had some difficulty shutting up my unceasing inner dialog on god, fascism, and the dialectic during lotr. it is never as easy as simply watching a movie either.
mainly i thought it interesting that the ring was, well, shaped like a ring which is to me the inaugurating gesture of exclusion which the dialectic undertakes in seeking to impose order. obviously the story is something of a reaction to fascism and i recognized that when i read it as an adolescent but the striking thing to me this time around was the way in which no particular moral order was called in to combat the fascist organization behind the one ring. instead we get elves and hobbits and wizards and men, all with various occult and nonoccult powers. something of an anarchy.
anyway of course my compulsion was to try to figure out where the god i grew up with fit into this story and he kept ending up a fascist which my inner church ladies did not like one bit but they couldn't argue otherwise. order in the form of a love which will oversee the torment of billions of excluded souls just can't come out looking very humane.
the tex avery cartoons did not elicit any such musings. this is why i love cartoons.
