The Mouth of Sauron or, Donald Trump Analyzes Lord of the Rings

One of the Black Nume… Num… wait, I gotta Wiki it. Again. Hold on.

Black Númenóreans. There. Cut and pasted. Those guys. One of them was just a nasty number, and when the Armies of the Beautiful Hair — no, wait, that’s just Legolas — when the armies of the good guys come up to the Black Gate and out comes this sort of person with this ultimately creepy cutaway mouth and over-exposed teeth (I think his lips have been removed), which he knows to be grotesque and disquieting — and explains that lo, Sauron’s not interested in negotiations. He’s just not. No Twinkies at the conference table, no bagels, no table. It’s a “We’ll smash you,” kind of situation and since Sauron is pretty much all-seeing and knowing and has a quite powerful gang o’smelly things, and various nasties in his command, there’s not really any room for debate. We will crush you and taunts them with the suffering of their friend, pulling out the instantly distinguishable Elven armor of Frodo and tossing at his pals.

I want to flatly admit here that honestly — years ago I would sashay on over to that rabbit hole of English literature, the Encyclopedia of Arda. I know enough to know there is no end of depth to Tolkien’s work and it stands singularly above all others. As Uncle Stevie King said in On Writing: our attempts at writing fantasy is every writer’s attempt to recapture what they felt when they read Lord of the Rings for the first time. It is master. And if you’ve ever explored it at all, you know that all characters minor and minuscule have extensive relations, backstories and histories. All of us seem to know one Tolkien expert that just seems to know it all. I know three: my husband, my friend James at church, and my friend Father David Zampino, who choose Marquette University simply because they housed Tolkien’s papers and lectured extensively on the role of theology in Tolkien’s writing. I admire their understanding and as individuals, they being men of propriety and tact.

Perhaps we could get Donald Trump to read Lord of the Rings. Whaddya think? Dollars to donuts he’d be like a rather uneducated friend of mine who went with my ex-husband and his best friend (both Tolkien fans) to see Fellowship of the Ring. “That’s it?!?” He flabbergasted. “I’m not seeing the rest of these! What about the ring?!” How can you explain it to someone like that, right? That’d be Trump. Next week, we’d hear him saying how he’d build bigger badder eagles to just leap over three books of striving, choice making, insight, and build a bigger wall around Mordor to keep ’em out, as is someone hadn’t thought of that already. “Although that eye thing is pretty cool. I gotta get me one of those.”

Let’s say that I’m pretty convinced that the subtly of it all would escape him. Like the fact that it was pretty darn important that the hobbits and pals struggled to let go of power and evil which was the point: they chose to give up what could have made everything really, really, E-Z bake easy. That it’s not so simple as buying a ticket on Eagle Air and dumping it off. Pride and the struggle with it was the point. Humility does not dwell on the easy, it acknowledges the power in pushing the glass back, setting the ax down, and engaging the real work to overcome the wrongs in this world. The Mouth of Sauron nor his master could comprehend that the victory, ultimately, was in Frodo’s heart, Sam’s hands, and not much else.

So why’s Trump — squeaking on about women’s periods, etc. — have so much pull? I cringe here in the Free State of Jones every time I see a Trump bumper sticker. I know, however, his appeal. He speaks plain, he gets things done, he builds, he builds, he builds. All of the evidence points otherwise, but hey! He says what he thinks! No, he says what he thinks you want to say. There’s a difference.

He is the Mouth of Sauron. He speaks for the basest consumptions in all of us: instantaneous judgement and solutions. Sauron, given time, would have filled every screen in Middle Earth with leggy blondes reading copy and whatever gave him more power. How is Trump any different? Yes, I’m aware Sauron is a fictional character. How is Trump any different?

The mouth — lipless, rude, encircled by runes and supremely confident in his superiority does what no one else can do — he speaks for the masses. He speaks for the army behind him and to certain defeat. He does not censor. Trump’s appeal works pretty much the same. He represents the most debased common peril of the crowd — a lack of diplomacy and tact. Why should he need it? Why not taunt his foes with whatever debased, unchecked lie he wants to tell? Because he can. Because he’s backed up by anger, hate, and debased sentiments. He is the essence of the mentality of the mob, all of whom collectively stand in judgement, dismissive of the entire struggle and the subtleties therein who simply want to “hop on those eagles” and fly it in, easy. Drop and go. Keep all your short fingers, folks.

A love of Trump, in my opinion, is overwhelmingly a vote for the knee-jerk bourgeois, the lipless liar in the end, one can only hope will lose his voice. We are least served to be told only what we want to hear. And if we take a tally of the toxic souls in our lives, past or present, it is those of who would not check themselves, said what they thought most effective, and never looked at the long picture.

We can only hope Strider will show up.

Hope.