Sarah Palin and the Hobbits

Interesting how the Wall Street Journal commentary referring to
Tea Partiers as hobbits caught on after John McCain repeated it. Re:
hobbits — Joseph Campbell wrote that myths reveal the deepest
psychological passages of a people. The Lord of the Rings, by
Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, might be the most important myth of
transition in modern times for the English-speaking people. I know a
psychologist in Israel who says so. Because what the hobbits did was
take the ring of power from golem and destroy both ring and golem. This
can be seen in context of Rabbi Loeb of Prague’s great myth which
introduced golem at the beginning of the modern age; golem the symbolic
figure of rising unlimited power; golem the shadow which blocked the
path of God and nature. The destruction of the ring and the golem
allowed the world to be born again. Worth noting that the warrior
Aragorn was not able to do that. Only the common people, the people of
the earth, the hobbits, were.

McCain expressed a kind of alienation from the rising times; that
something was happening … again … and he doesn’t know what it is.
But those pesky Tea Partiers were certainly behind it.

George Will, on the other hand, has a remarkably good grasp. In his Saturday column, “Declaration of Independents,” he thoughtfully reviews a new book, The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: “These incurably upbeat journalists with Reason magazine believe that not even government, try as it will, can prevent onrushing social improvement.”

The hobbits took their inspiration from Gillespie and Welch and for the longest time they were the only ones who listened.

“America is moving in the libertarians’ direction not because they have won an argument but because government and the sectors it dominates have made themselves ludicrous. This has, however, opened minds to the libertarians’ argument,” writes Will.

But his Washington Post colleague, Kathleen Parker, is not so gracious: “Take names. Remember them,” she says. (Frodo, Bilbo, Samwise? Hard to forget.) “The behavior of certain Republicans who call themselves Tea Party conservatives makes them the most destructive posse of misguided ‘patriots’ we’ve seen in recent memory.”

And where do they get their crazy ideas? Look no further than Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, where she warned freshmen about contested primaries and urged them to “remember us ‘little people’ who believed in them,” donated to their campaigns and “spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes.”

Primaries. Now that is a dangerous idea. And that “little people” thing Palin talks about is obviously coded reference to those hobbits. So I guess she must be Galadriel, Lady of the Woods.

The Founders often compared fledgling America to Rome and recently the analogy has expanded to include Los Angeles and Athens. These are correct approximations of Europe’s prehistory or framework. But it was the brave Gauls in the center that gave the millennia their actual life force and history. And that is what we see rising here with the hobbits and their Galadriel; America’s center awakening to its destiny.