Conservatives Needed

And, you know, there is no such thing as society. 

There are individual men and women, and there are families.  

           —  The Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher

Tory Prime Minister, United Kingdom, 
31 October 1987

            I've been mulling over the headline in my local newspaper, The Ventura County Star, for 13 April 2017, "Local group kicks off in bid to empower conservatives" and recalled Aldous Huxley's comment in his preface to the 1946 re-issue of Brave New World, "For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives […]."

            Huxley overstates, but he had a point about much of the 20^th century, one still relevant today.

            Conservatives reject the general statements "Change is good"/"Thrive on Change" and insist that change is inevitable and often necessary but "Continuity is good" as well, and "If it's not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change."

            Conservatives insist on people as both individuals and members of societies and on "the continuity of the generations," where each generation is obligated to past generations and to posterity.

            So, what are the great generators of change? Three are revolution, war, and capitalism. A real conservative is suspicious of all three. Others may praise "creative destruction"; real conservatives count the costs of revolutions, wars, and capitalism.

            What are individuals' duties to society? They include contributing our fair share. And society's duties to posterity? Those including bequeathing our descendants a sound economic system, a livable world, and natural resources for them to use.

            American conservatives face complexities since American tradition includes strong individualism, capitalism, revolution, and a religious mix with a lot of radical ideals on social justice that would make necessary many changes.

            Some things though, are easy: conservatives should be for socially responsible environmental conservation and socially responsible public expenditures and budgets.

            And since even the easy things are difficult for so many, it's understandable that there are few genuine conservatives. 

* * *

ADDENDUM:

            Conservatives serve another useful purpose in balancing liberals and radicals on how they "image" society and government. Since the Enlightenment, what became the Left (for a while) saw the world in mechanistic terms whereas conservatives favored organic. If you talk of "checks and balances," you're picturing a mechanism — and mechanisms can be tinkered with. If you talk of "the body politic" and "head of state" and "members of society," you're thinking more biologically — and however careful you need to be tinkering with mechanisms, you need to be a whole lot more careful trying to tinker with living things.

            So conservatives traditionally have held a kind of ecological view, where "Everything is connected to everything else" and (therefore) "You can't change just one thing." Even with machines but more so with organisms, it's hard to tell the final results of any change. With a drug, "There aren't 'side effects'; there are a range of possible effects, some of which you may not want." Even so, thinking in images of organisms keeps one cautious about change. With machines, indeed, "If it ain't broke, don't 'fix' it"; but less is at stake than with an organism, where messing up may result in death.

            

PERSONAL STATEMENT:

            I see myself as a variety of conservative; many of my readers will see me on the Left. And we're correct: (1) See below. (2) In a nice irony, 19th-c.-style Radicals are part of the recent Right; as often as not, for a variety of reasons, American old-style conservatives are on the Left. And America needs more of us old-fashioned fogies. 

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," 1848, chapter 1

A Good Reason to Vote for Donald Trump

         A fellow member of our local Democratic Club said that he'd yet to hear an intelligent argument for voting for Donald Trump. Well, I heard one, from an older woman of, apparently, working-class or lower-middle-class background. It went like this: "I'm a conservative. I vote for the conservative party — and if that jackass is leading this mule-train, well I'm on for the ride."

         Now, people pushing radical changes shouldn't call themselves conservatives, but I get her point, and it looks more and more like she made an intelligent choice in voting for Trump. Instead of the usual bait-and-switch of Republican politics that Thomas Frank talked about in What's the Matter with Kansas (2004), Trump may've offered her some solid chum. She will get economic "conservatism" of the rampant capitalist variety, plus, eventually, with any luck for her, a Supreme Court that will chip away at abortion rights — and maybe overturn Roe v. Wade. Etc., depending on the Supreme Court's calendar and opportunities. She won't get a wall on the Mexican border nor truly massive roundups of Mexican nationals on US territory — but she may not care much about such issues: obviously she displayed a healthy skepticism about "that jackass" running for President.

         She will get cutbacks in socialistic programs like the "social safety net" and a comfortable jingoism in domestic politics. Abroad, she may get that jingoism combined with old-fashioned right-wing isolationism, in uneasy balance with movement toward cooperation and perhaps alliance with such reactionary regimes as those of the latest version of the Russian Empire and, of all places, the Philippines.

         Plus, possibly, she will see a rapprochement with the Nationalist Chinese that would delight old China Hands, and striking out against obstreperous Muslims and such remaining godless Communists as those in Cuba.

         Her support of Trump helped bring about a regime that will screw over a lot of Americans, greatly harm the environment, and help destabilize a fragile world order — but in terms of choosing effective means to achieve her ends, her choice makes sense and, in amoral terms, was almost brilliant.

Gay Marriage, Civil Rights, & High School Dress Codes (28 March 2013)

`That's it!'' Jerry exulted, smashing 

his fist into his palm and wincing. 

 ``That's it! Don't you see what that means? 

For the very first time in the eons-old 

history of the universe the civilized, 

intelligent races are banding together against evil, 

to combat it wherever it is found. A band of brothers, 

fighting together, dedicated to the pursuit of 

 liberty, equality and fraternity.''

``I wouldn't exactly phrase it that way,'' 

Lord Prrsi commented. ``I would rather say w

e are fighting for the maintenance of the 

class system and the continuancy of 

special privileges for the few.''

Harry Harrison, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers 

 

 I will cheerfully admit to being occasionally an asshole, but I don't like to be thought totally weird or totally insensitive. So I'll start with a quick story on a background principle: to wit, that people can behave as effective political agents without being conscious of what they're doing.

          The quick story has me lobbying in the Illinois General Assembly for the Graduate Student Association of the University of Illinois at Urbana, during the "Troubles" of, primarily, 1970-71. What I was lobbying on isn't important here, but just that I got to observe the Illinois General Assembly doing its thing in a period (a) of great stress and (b) when they had a fairly decent reputation for competence.

         The Illinois General Assembly had its corrupt politicians — "Best gol-darn legislature money can buy," as the joke had it — but, as US State legislatures went, it wasn't bad.

         And the Illinois Gen. Ass., as I observed it, had some pretty stupid people as members, and a couple or three borderline loons.

         What struck me, in one of those low-key epiphanies, was that the people who elected most of the dummies and the two looney-tunes had done all right by themselves: those elected officials would do what their hard-Right-to-reactionary constituents and, say, benefactors, wanted.

         They would "Do the right thing," in the views of their supporters, without particularly understanding what it was they were doing. "Doin' What Comes Natur'lly," they'd do the Right-wing thing loyally and consistently.

         So when I say that something is a smart move, that doesn't require the people doing it to be smart; if a policy functions to support larger political ends, that doesn't mean that the people implementing the policy intend those ends — or even think of any consequences beyond the utterly immediate.

         OK?

         So let's look at high school dress codes and more blatant acts of over-control and even petty harassment by Those In Authority. Mark Twain wrote, "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards." There's little I'll argue with Mark Twain about and (allowing for hyperbole) certainly not with that assertion — but I will insist that dress codes and petty harassments can be, politically, smart moves.

         These are hot-button issues with the kids and their parents, and arguing them and resisting them takes time and effort. Usually The Powers That Be win in these kerfuffles, and if they don't, so what? In a liberal system, the faculty still sets the curriculum, and The Powers That Be — the principals, school boards, superintendents, and the State — still make all the most important decisions — and they mess around with curricula if they take a mind to.

         In Jerry Farber's formulation on the college level, "The faculty and administrators decide what courses will be offered; the students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen." Or the students get to choose to wear their hair long, or short, or get tattoos and/or piercing and perhaps wear T-shirts, maybe even T-shirts with risqué slogans.

         Keep the kids and parents arguing over dress codes and haircuts and Zero Tolerance for whatever, and they won't bother you about the budget and salaries for top administrators. They won't get down to such basics as who gets what, and from whom: they won't get around to contesting just who runs, and possibly profiting most from, The System, in this case some school system.

         Similarly with gay marriage and, more generally, civil rights, especially for American Blacks and, relatedly, for women, and other traditionally marginalized groups. And also similarly with "the Culture Wars" and "social issues" very generally.

         Gay marriage definitely, and to some extent voting rights, are basically conservative issues in the sense that the people demanding a share of The System want, mostly, a share of the existing system — and if Those In Authority accede to their demands it will, in the long run, help preserve the system. At least expanding the set of people invested in the System will help preserve the system in its larger outlines.

         Letting gays marry increases the number of married people, especially, potentially, the number of married young men. Conservatives want young people married and domesticated, especially people of the otherwise rambunctious male persuasion: married men with mortgages, and maybe kids, cause less trouble than the single men, and this law of social order will, I am sure, apply also to domesticated guys who are gay.

         And conservatives ultimately want minorities and — often an overlapping set — recent immigrants assimilated into The System and therefore tending to support the system, as opposed to, say, getting out on the street and blowing things up or burning things down or trying to shoot such symbols of Authority as cops or firefighters. If you want to preserve the System, you need people to buy into the System, which means getting them, eventually, to participate in the system.

         Still, it is a smart political move for conservatives to figuratively dig in and, later, when forced to move out of the bunker, drag their feet. It is prudent for conservatives to change slowly if at all on social issues, even if conservatives fairly soon find themselves on various losing sides.

         First off, something politicians recognize — e.g., much of the Republican Party ca. 2008 f.: Where minority people are poor, giving them political clout will get them to elect people who might serve their interests a bit more than those of the rich, so proficient red-neck Machiavellians do well in the short term to suppress the votes of, say, poor Blacks.

         And they do very well to make a big deal over gay marriage, drug use, and this month's scare about cultural degeneration.

         Like dress codes in high school, such moves distract.

         As long as the peasants are arguing gay marriage, we're not talking seriously about to what extent the State should be involved in marriage at all; we're not talking about the Greater and Lesser Arcana of the US tax code and whether or not, or to what degree, the tax code favors the married in any combination.

         As long as the peasants are arguing about who gets to marry whom — or the older issue of who's putting what to whom where — we're not talking much about who gets what in an economic system that is moving rapidly toward concentrating American wealth at the top.

         So long as Blacks, the poor, the young, and the lower-class elderly have to fight to vote, they're not using their votes — or rowdier political action — to get a better cut.

         And African-Americans arguing about gay marriage or abortion or contraception sure as hell aren't talking about what "Forty acres and a mule" would mean in today's terms: If you figured in compound interest on the value of "forty acres and a mule" for a century and a half or so, the US of A may owe a lot of Black people serious money.

         If people are talking about allowing gays to marry — and we obviously should be since gays have a right to marry — we aren't having radical discussions about marriage as such.

         If people are trying just to get the vote, they aren't getting rambunctious over reparations (about which surviving American Indians might also have a thing or two to do, although allowing them to fleece the innumerate and pathologically optimistic through gambling operations is a good first step).

         You may know some Right-wing Republicans who aren't too bright. You may watch on TV gatherings of US-style "conservatives" and conclude that a fair number of them are two or three cans short of a six-pack — but they can still make moves that are, as moves, very clever.

         Gays should have the right to marry; private militias and individual kooks shouldn't find it easy to stockpile military-grade weaponry. And consenting adults wanting to damage our bodies and damn our souls should be allowed to do so, so long as we keep the noise down, the blinds drawn, and try not to annoy the neighbors. OK?

         But so long as we Americans argue about our current "hot-button" social issues, we're not getting down to business on whether or not the State in the 21^st century should be deeply involved in marriage period. We're not talking about really radical possibilities for families — two adults may be at least one too few to raise kids effectively; we're not talking about whether reparations to the descendants of slaves or massacre victims would be a good idea and, if so, how best to manage reparations.

         And — however much some of our fellow citizens are screaming "Socialism" — we certainly aren't arguing robustly enough or seriously enough about strengthening the Republic by ensuring more equitable distribution of wealth.

         Kids need to exercise their political skills and sense of fairness by protesting dress codes and the petty tyrannies of the schools. Until they and their parents have some serious say in, say, budgeting, however, it's only exercise: proper play for children but far from serious politics.


         We Americans need to resolve our "social policy" issues. The really tough issues are who gets what and who is going to sacrifice what to make the American economic game fair. As someone only in part a conservative, I want us to get past those social policy issues quickly and get down to business.

Old-Fashioned Conservatives and New-Right Radicals (1 Sept. 2013)

            I think it was some time in the 1970s, and I was in Oxford, Ohio, early in my career as a teacher at Miami University. In any event, there was a strike in Hamilton, Ohio, and some College Republicans from Miami U were driven over to Hamilton in an armored truck and worked as strike breakers. According to an interview in The Miami Student, the student newspapers, the College Repubs mostly saw their ride and their work as fun, something of a lark.

            I mentioned this story to a conservative colleague in my department, and he said something like, "Miami students scabbed … for entertainment?" I said that I didn't think they needed money, so, yeah, for entertainment and to make an ideological point.

            He kind of shuddered and said, "You don't do that …. I mean, maybe if you have to put food on the table, but you don't scab for kicks or to make a point. It's not decent."

            Indeed.

            My colleague was an old-fashioned kind of conservative, with a strong sense of decency, a working-class background, and — whatever his complaints about unions — "scab" and "to scab" as part of his active vocabulary. Our larking, strikebreaking, scabbing students were something neither he nor I had encountered before.

            Later in my career, I was a senior faculty representative to Miami U's Student Affairs Council and kind of an informal parliamentarian. One new student member of Council moved and his buddy seconded a motion to reconstitute Council's membership. They moved to replace in the student delegation the Vice President for Minority Affairs of Associated Student Government with the Vice President for Communication. They thought it would make a neater organizational chart having the ASG liaison officer on SAC rather than the ASG VP for Minority Affairs.

            The Chairman of Council was the highly effective — as in "iron-fisted" — University "Vice President for Student Affairs and Dean of Students," and Consigliere for Enforcement (my formulation) for the University President. The Chair turned to me and said, "Can we do that?" I thought for a moment and replied, "Well, Student Affairs Council lacks power to actually do very much, so we'd be advising the Trustees to impose on Student Government a change in the ASG constitution and by-laws. We can advise that; it's just that the Trustees as a matter of principle don't have the authority to order such a change — no outsiders can change a group's constitution or by-laws — and as a matter of politics, it would be, let's say, imprudent." Whoo, boy, would it have been imprudent! They'd have looked tyrannical over a relative trifle, and racist, since the word "minority" at Miami University meant Black, and we were notorious for having very, very few minority students. "So, yes, we can advise the Trustees to act inappropriately, but they will probably politely ignore us or send the recommendation back with a rebuke."

            The Chair turned to the President of ASG and unofficial head of the student delegation. "Does ASG want us to make this change?" he asked. The Student Body President said "No!" very emphatically, adding that the proposal had come to ASG from the two movers, and ASG had voted it down. Indeed, the idea had received just about no support except from these two guys and some allies from a group that had sprung up on campus recently, and with a lot of money. (A reporter for The Miami Student was convinced the student group was shilling for some rich big-wigs in Ohio politics, but he couldn't prove it and get the story published. The reporter thought the highly traditional Miami Student was about to get challenged by the Midwestern foreshadowing of The Dartmouth Review.)

            The two young men repeated that replacing the student VP for Minority Affairs with the VP for Communication would be logical and make for a cleaner ASG table of organization and a more coherent student delegation.

            And then, significantly, one of my older colleagues spoke up: an Asian-American Christian conservative from the Department of History.

            Assuming but not calling attention to the irony, this historian pointed out that his two younger colleagues on Council had a point about the abstract logic of tables of organization but left out a crucial factor, or at least a crucial factor for conservatives. Whatever the soundness of their arguments in terms of abstract logic, their predecessors in Associated Student Government hadn't been stupid, and there were historical reasons why ASG had as part of their delegation their VP for Minority Affairs, historical reasons that were still valid. As a principle of parliamentary procedure, the burden of proof lies with those wishing to change things, and as a principle of traditional conservatism, "Unless it's necessary to change things, it is necessary not to change things."

            These two guys from the Right of the College Republicans — remnants of the YAFers and precursors of Tea Party Youth — were engaging in the sort of abstract, historically ignorant — and proud of it!— futzing around with organization that drives traditional conservatives up the wall. They were engaging in this exercise not to actually get something done but to stir up racial issues and to appeal to some outside audience. This pissed off pretty much everyone else on Council, including our energetically authoritarian Chair.

            The motion had been made and seconded, and received in its favor the votes of the mover and seconder and failed, miserably ....

            Except, of course, the motion undoubtedly succeeded with its intended audience, who were not the Miami University people who would vote on it. The reporter for The Miami Student never did identify the sponsors of our New Right activists, but the circumstantial evidence is that they were alive and powerful in places like Cincinnati, Canton, and the Ohio General Assembly.

            My historian colleague was respectable Old-Old-Right Conservative, in the tradition of Edmund Burke; the two punks on Council were the new version, and what we are seeing more of today: wise-ass theorists, with impressive financial backing, guys who don't care much about tradition or history or, in a lot of cases, morality, decency, or just plain manners. These were the Miami U version of what Randy Newman identified (let's say through a synecdoche and the imperatives of rime), as "college men from LSU / Went in dumb — came out dumb too": far too refined to be "rednecks / […] keeping the niggers down," but willing to earn brownie points, and money, by trying to ensure that minority students wouldn't be guaranteed a voice on a Council, in a seat open to, and sometimes taken by, straight WASP or WASC males.

            (As a priest explained to me, there was no contradiction that Miami University, like many public universities, has a plurality of Catholics and is still WASPish: many MU students were WASCs, White Catholics, sufficiently assimilated and homogenized that for all practical purposes, they're WASPs.)

            I envy the energy and cockiness of these New Right students, especially the ones who'd risk getting their asses kicked as scabs. I envy their certainty. But these folk are cocky and certain mostly, I suspect, because they're privileged, because they've never encountered a problem Mom and Dad and family connections and wealth couldn't get them out of. And they have their theories (God, do they have their theories!) often enough — like, for a while, Miami alum Paul Ryan — out of Ayn Rand.

            So let us praise old conservatives, such as my two colleagues, and let us be very, very suspicious about the new varieties passing themselves off as conservatives. The New Right punks, female as well as male, have their theories and their rich supporters, and they want to push things around — and willing to push people around; they call themselves conservatives, but in their actions they repeat the worst mistakes and habits of radicals. 

Marriages: Comic, Tragic, Mixed, and/or Gay — and HOBBIT [2]: The Movie {21 Dec. 2013}

           I'm aware of the danger of a necessarily ignorant outsider writing about people's deepest concerns and beliefs, so please forgive me if I make any mistakes on the intricacies of the world and peoples of J. R. R. Tolkien. I studied with care his seminal — yea, downright ovular — Beowulf essay, "The Monsters and the Critics," but I never got beyond just reading Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit or seeing any of the movies more than once. Still, I just saw Peter Jackson's The Hobbit [2]: The Desolation of Smaug (2013), and I have some comments about a movie that may be of some political importance — the movie that is, not my much-less-advertised comments.

            To start with, as a short person who fetched what gentility I have from American land-grant universities, I was very happy to see a film featuring Dwarves and find it of interest that in Jackson's movie (though certainly not in The Hobbit), Kili, a Dwarf — if a young, well-connected, relatively tall, relatively clean-cut and decent-looking one — can have a chance with Tauriel, an Elven female of intelligence, skill, beauty, and some influence, even if lower caste: a Sylvan, or Wood-, Elf, rather than one of the High ones, which means she won't get very far in a love for Legolas Greenleaf, son of Thranduil, the head-elf among the Elvish military aristocracy we see in the movie.

            Anyway, there's chemistry, as they say, between Tauriel and Kili, and the set-up for a love triangle of Tauriel, Kili, and Legolas. The Tauriel-Legolas leg of the triangle would be pretty standard, with a "heavy father" character standing between young lovers of slightly different caste and class, but cinematically "white bread." Among Tolkien fans in parts of the world where caste systems are still alive and virulent, the conflicts in a Tauriel/Legolas relationship could resonate strongly; for most viewers — eh! The Elven relationship here is pretty much well-off urban royalty (male Legolas) vs. more rural gentility (female Tauriel), and whether it's a standard issue rom-com, or Romeo and Juliet (an Italian romantic comedy that goes really wrong) — been there, seen that.

            The possibility of an Elf/Dwarf mating, however, is intriguing in terms of biology to start with, and beyond that politics both past and very much present. 

            On the biology proper, though — kinky-porn-flick opportunities aside — the question is, Are the Dwarves and Elves of Middle Earth closely enough related to allow fertile matings, and if the mating was reproductively successful, would the offspring be sterile hybrids ("mules") or fertile? Or would it be a point of a future movie that their chances for offspring would be in question?

            Traditional romantic comedy moves toward a new and better world coalescing around a central heterosexual couple, either getting married or exiting toward a wedding. If it's a Shakespearean rom-com, that'll be one central couple plus about as many others as mathematically possible, plus maybe music and a dance. "Comedy" comes from komos, which means revel — a drunken revel — and in their romantic versions, comedies move toward weddings and a celebration of fertility. As Benedick says in Much Ado About Nothing, with much irony but truly, "the world must be peopled" (2.3).

            If we move toward a happy ending, with the union of Elf-female and Dwarf-male, we may celebrate union and social integration and all that, but not fertility, not unless a Personage of Great Authority on such matters certifies that you can cross successfully Elves and Dwarves (possibly resulting in Hobbits or Vulcans; I will defer to the fans here). If we move toward tragedy — and killing off major characters may become fashionable — we will mourn the sundering of a union or potential union that, again, might be infertile.

            One much-mocked reactionary argument against gay marriage is that man-on-man (sic) unions will lead to man-on-dog matings and other abominations. The more serious argument is that same-sex marriages are infertile. But what happens if an audience is rooting for an Elf-on-Dwarf relationship ("cowgirl" style in the porn version), or mourns the loss of a Dwarf/Elf union? Either way we could be affirming the goodness of "the marriage of true minds" but copulation between two bodies that either may be sterile in its results or, if the script says so, is definitely sterile. We might well reject man-on-dog relationships and pony-on-girl — and we should, given issues of informed consent and age of consent — but if we accept an Elf/Dwarf marriage with no possibility of reproduction, we are, in a very indirect, figurative way, quite directly confronting and undermining two of the underlying fears about gay marriage.

            In terms of other politics …. Well, I just read A Very Brief Introduction to the Silk Road, and I'm re-listening to a book about the Spartans. Between the two of them, I got thinking about the Elves as a military aristocracy that doesn't require horses; a wellborn Elf is not necessarily a knightly cavalier (chevalier, caballero) — but they definitely do archery. Again, a question for the experts: Is this because Elves are reflection of the Welsh, who perfected the long bow? Also, or alternatively, are Elves archers in part because however much the Elves we see in Hobbit are confining themselves, their history was woodland, and horses aren't that useful in forest warfare — but bows can be?

            From the Spartans through the Anglo-Saxon thanes to an incredibly thickheaded French aristocracy during their 100-Years War with England, aristocrats could come down on one side or the other about horses, but real men, true warriors/heroes/aethelings viewed bows as cowardly. Indeed, royal and noble and genteel Frenchmen seemed convinced that a peasants' weapon like the bow — or an infantry weapon like the pike — couldn't possibly prevail against glorious armored knights on horseback, a conviction that contributed strongly to those glorious armored knights on horseback getting slaughtered at the Battles of Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415). So it's interesting to see Elves as archers and hear them on occasion speak a language that to my ears sounds Welsh. A military aristocracy with brains could be, like the Spartans, a formidable force, especially if, unlike the Spartans, the Elves don't have to worry about revolts from slaves whose labor supports the military that oppresses and exploits those slaves.

            If the Elves are Welsh-ish aristocrats who can get by without horses, the Dwarves are more my people: Dwarves as infantry. In fighting on foot, Dwarves are like Anglo-Saxon warriors, or one stereotype for Anglo-Saxon warriors anyway, except the Dwarves are so ungenteel as to have civilian lives where they actually make things and deal with money. A gentleman might be poor, but he's not "in trade"! Thanes and aethelings and earls and warriors/heroes/men —Old English could conflate that last set of terms — real men don't make stuff; they destroy it. In traditional terms, the Dwarves are ignoble in their industry. That we like them and that Peter Jackson has made a popular movie featuring them, may help fantasy fans, and others, rethink definitions and evaluations of "noble."


            So I'll join the folk cheering on Tauriel and Kili and wishing Legolas well on his way to Lord of the Rings. Just being a woman-like being of non-Queenly power makes Tauriel a progressive addition to the conservative world of Tolkien's high fantasy. If Tauriel she goes for love and/or sex with Kili (or a female Elf to be introduced later), she'll have really broken new ground in Middle Earth: human society of today as well as once upon a time and long, long ago.