Actually, one of my favorite “there are wizards among us” stories is entitled “El Regalo” (The Gift) by Peter S Beagle (of The Last Unicorn fame.) Part of his anthology The Line Between, Beagle chronicles the misadventures of a 15 year old Korean American girl named Angie and her 8½ year old brother named Marvyn, both of whom come to discover that they have magical powers. In this tantalizing tidbit that is just calling to be expanded to a full length novel, they find themselves pitted against an ancient, malevolent sorceror only known as El Viejo, The Old Man.

The multicultural environs necessarily places this novella in a major metropolitan area. Given my Southern California-centrism, I immediately imagine that this is L.A. (Beagle did write a novel entitled Unicorn Sonata that was set in L.A.) But I suppose this could just as easily be NYC, particularly since Beagle grew up there.

Which leads to why, of all the fantasy series that I’ve read, The Earthsea Cycle exercises such a strong hold on my imagination.

Never mind the wonderful elucidation of the system of Magic, the interweavings of Taoist philosophy, and the beauty and the lyricism of Le Guin’s writing. True, these alone make the series worth reading. But as a person-of-color who aspires to be a writer of speculative fiction, the fact that Ged is a brown guy is awesome.

Pam Noles’ essay on how groundbreaking it was to have a non-white major character pretty much encompasses anything I have to say about the subject, and is far more articulate than anything I could write. But suffice it to say that I was eminently saddened by the Sci-Fi Channel’s wanton rape of Le Guin’s material, of which UKL herself has much to write about: (1) A Whitewashed Earthsea: how the Sci Fi Channel wrecked my books (2) Frankenstein’s Earthsea.

But Earthsea resonates with me and my cultural heritage far more than just due to the coincident skin color. I ought to write UKL some day to ask her if certain concepts were deliberate. Like Ged himself, my parents come from an archipelago. My distant ancestors were all seafarers, some of whom braved the open seas, reaching as far as Madagascar to the west and Easter Island to the east, and some even theorize that they might have actually made it to the South American mainland. And in the beginning of certain Filipino creation stories, just like the creation myth of Earthsea, there was only sea and sky.

The Old Powers recall the indigenous animistic beliefs of Southeast Asia. And even the magic system, where to name something is to bind it, resonates.

(Not that this has anything to do with it, but the concept of the Verdunan, the Division, is key to the final book in the cycle. For some reason, I automatically think of the Ati-Atihan, which is a festival on the isle of Aklan which supposedly commemorates the arrival of the Borneans and their agreement to share the land with the indigenous Ati. And these are probably just false cognates, but what if Ati is related to the word “hati”, which means “half” in some Austronesian languages. Given the typically diminuitive stature of the Ati, does this connote “halfling”? OK, I’ve probably read way too much J.R.R. Tolkien. But getting back to the Verdunan, what if the Ati-Atihan is actually hati-hati’an, meaning “division”, which makes sense if the festival commemorates the partition of the island between the Ati and the Borneans. Anyway.)

In summary, The Earthsea Cycle inspired me to find my own authentic voice with regards to speculative fiction, to leverage my unique cultural background in order to build worlds that have not yet been described. I have yet to actually take pen to paper. And while I lament that there have yet to be any Filipino Americans to brave the genre of science-fiction and fantasy, I know that there are writers out there, some of whom are writing such stories. And I can’t really say much unless I’m going to put in some effort, too.

Because of the release of Deathly Hallows today, I had to catch up and read Half-Blood Prince. One of the reasons why I had decided to put off reading it was because everyone had ruined the “big surprise,” which was the death of Albus Dumbledore.

I suppose the death of the great wizard has been a staple of fantasy for quite a while now, at least ever since Gandalf the Grey plummeted into the trackless depths of Moria, and since Obi-Wan Kenobi met his end from the blade of his former apprentice. (In fact, I almost feel like every fantasy series that has hit the mainstream has been some bizarre hybrid of the ideas of J.R.R. Tolkien and George Lucas: an inconceivably powerful artifact that tethers the Dark Lord to existence in this material plane, a Chosen One meant to restore the balance. But I digress.)

I guess it’s probably just a function of when I read The Lord of the Rings. Even to this day, even though I know that Gandalf the White comes back, I always get a little misty eyed when I read about the Fellowship of the Ring traversing the orc-infested Mines of Moria. I used to feel a little pang of sadness when Obi-Wan Kenobi was cut down by Darth Vader, but unfortunately, George Lucas makes him look decidedly less regal in Episodes I-III that he sort of lost part of his mystique. But when Severus Snape blasts Dumbledore out of the tower, I don’t know, I guess it would’ve been better if I didn’t know.

Still, hands down, the part of The Lord of the Rings that really gets me right there is when Merry has just finished helping Éowyn kill the Witch King of Angmar, and no one seems to notice that he has been deathly injured until Pippin stumbles upon him, and he ends up trying to drag him to the Houses of Healing. Merry ends up asking him, “Are you going to bury me?” and if I’m in the right mood, I can get all teary-eyed.

And now, a spoiler: I just finished Deathly Hallows and Severus Snape’s part in the story was just, wow. He is now definitely my most favorite character in the series, and even though we all know that he’s not the one-dimensional villain that the characters want to believe he is, I was still surprised by how poignant the entirety of his tale is.

If you haven’t yet read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, you should get cracking. The Golden Compass is coming out at the end of the year!

Despite the fact that I’ve been trapped in a world-building exercise for the past 18 years, I completely agree with M John Harrison’s assessment that world-building is unnecessary in order to tell a good story, and that world-building is the pinnacle of uselessness: you are creating a literal description of a world that doesn’t even exist.

I immediately think of Borges’ masterful short story ”Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” which described the madness inherent in invented an imaginary world, and the vast, purposeless scope of such an undertaking which spans generations.

And obviously, there is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Arda, which is in fact an act of universe-building. For most world-building nerds, this is probably the gold standard of worldbuilding. An otaku demands this level of detail, no matter how unnecessary. These are the people who obsess about the lack of continuity in Star Trek or Star Wars, who show up at comic-cons and gainsay the actual creators of various works of fiction. Think of Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” (Oh, I’ve wasted my life.)

The ironic thing is that what makes The Lord of the Rings seem to have so much historical depth is precisely because Tolkien didn’t spell out the whole damn thing. You only get faint glimpses of ruined Gondolin and lost Númenor, of drowned Beleriand and the doom of the Noldor. The tale of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren Erchamion and the story of Eärendil are mentioned only in brief, and are pretty much tangential to the story.

And Tolkien didn’t initially mean for The Hobbit (and by extension, The Lord of the Rings) to even be in the same world as The Silmarillion. It was just a good story he thought of one random day he got bored grading university test papers. Gildor Inglorion and Glorfindel were basically just names he randomly chose (and which continue to plague LotR otakus and continuity-nazis to this very day.) In many instances, he fit the mythology into the story and never really the other way around.

And I think what makes The Silmarillion interesting are the stories that Tolkien never finished writing, and which we get a better look at only by rifling through his notes which are now encompassed by the monolithic History of Middle Earth. I think the appeal in “The Fall of Gondolin” and The Children in Húrin lie in the fact that they’re good stories in and of themselves, and Tolkien didn’t necessarily have to invent the rest of Aman to make them so.

The bottom line is this: you may have an excellent and highly-detailed universe complete with a pantheon of gods and its own version of physics, but if your story sucks, no one will care and you’ve just pretty much wasted your life.

I just occurred to me the superficial similarities between the story of Túrin Turambar and the movie ”The Curse of the Golden Flower”. The most obvious similarity is the incest (Crown Prince Wan isn’t just porking his sister, he’s also doing his stepmother!) but the idea of curses and of gold also resonates. In the movie, the golden chrysanthemum becomes the doomed standard of Prince Jai, while in the story, the golden hoard of Glaurung becomes a curse to Thingol, king of Doriath.

There is also the idea of devotion to one’s mother. Many of the mishaps that befall Túrin are due to his desire to see his mother Morwen again, and Prince Jai’s failed rebellion is waged in an attempt to free his mother from the tyranny of his father. (I suppose echoes of Oedipus necessarily arise.)

There is unrequited love: the love of the elven princess Finduilas for Túrin compared to the Empress’ love of the Crown Prince.

And like all epic stories, there is treachery, suicide, and madness.

And in the end, the bad guys win. (Morgoth in The Children of Húrin, the Emperor in “The Curse of the Golden Flower” although he is not as clear-cut of an antagonist as Morgoth.) The key victims—Húrin, the Empress—get to live (and by key victim, I mean the person on which all the other tragedies in the story hinges)

But “The Curse of the Golden Flower” is not an original story, but is rather based on the play “Thunderstorm” by the acclaimed Chinese writer Cao Yu. The characters are not of imperial lineage, but rather are of the bourgoisie, but the essential plot is comparable, and the unintentional incest and resultant suicide is present.

I’m still slowly working my way through The Lost Tales by J.R.R. Tolkien and edited by his son Christopher. I found the story of the destruction of the great, hidden city of the Elves wonderfully moving—the story in The Lost Tales presents much more detail than the version in The Silmarillion and there are some interesting concepts that Tolkien later removed.

I’ve written about the fact that Tolkien wrote about airships in Middle Earth. In “The Fall of Gondolin”, it looks like the Dark Lord Melko used technology resembling familiar 20th/21st century war machines to attack the city of the Elves. There is a description of a contrivance that kind of sounds like a transport helicopter, disgorging battalions of Orcs from its belly. The dragons also sound kind of mechanical, radiating an unnatural, all-consuming heat, and I can’t help but wonder if the Japanese did not catch on to these details way back when, considering that manga and anime are replete with fantastic airships, and bizarre technologic creations that may never become reality. I immediately think of mecha, and transforming robots, and the like. In later drafts of these stories, dragons become organic creatures, and there are no allusions to things that may or may not be internal combustion engines.

Tolkien’s works can be read as a reaction against the dehumanization inherent in mass production and wholesale mechanized killing, which he witnessed first-hand during WWI, and which became even more magnified during WWII, what with Hitler’s systematic genocide that seems original to the industrial era, and the ferocity of his flying and crawling war machines. Better minds than mine have looked closely at how The Lord of the Rings has a lot to say about the evils of our mechanized exploitation of the environment.

Sadly, Tolkien may be a modern-day Cassandra or Laocoön, prophesying the fall of Western Civilization at the hands of the technology we created. (As much as he protests the allegorical reading of the Ring as a metaphor for nuclear power, this idea is nonetheless quite powerful, and as I am reminded by a bumper sticker, it seems that “Frodo failed. Bush has the Ring.”) The process invented by Henry Ford (who as you may know was a prominent Nazi sympathizer) is profoundly widespread, with mass production still successfully fueling the engines of capitalism, and we’ve even tried to apply these processes to service industries which were not long ago thought to be entirely the exclusive demesne of actual human beings. (When’s the last time you called customer service and didn’t have to deal with a machine?)

The advances in depersonalized mass killing have likewise been striking in the last hundred years. While the intercontinental ballistic missile is perhaps the most feared and most horrific piece of technology ever created thus far, the progress in other realms of wholesale slaughter is also impressive. Just like the invention of the transistor and then the microprocessor has allowed great strides in communication and information technology, so too has miniaturization revolutionized the ability for people to kill lots of other people. It is no longer considered surprising when a single person walks into a place of business with a very portable, very lethal piece of machinery that can easily kill nine or ten people before he/she runs out ammo and/or is killed by the SWAT team. Hand-held personal missile launchers are quite widespread and easy to get a hold of, as the current fiasco in Mesopotamia well demonstrates. And, God help us, the United States is trying to create tactical nukes so that a single soldier can go out into the field and create their own little mushroom clouds.

I say, never mind at looking at how we’re raping the environment—not that the environment isn’t important. But it sort of doesn’t matter if we succeed in wiping each other out via mutually-assured destruction. I can tell you that the environment will be the least of our worries if nuclear winter sets in.

But enough cheerfulness.

What I’m finding interesting about the Lost Tales and the entire History of Middle Earth series is that it creates a distinctly postmodern canon of Tolkien’s work. Despite the fact that Christopher Tolkien explicitly delineates what he considers canon and what he consider apocrypha, the very fact that these alternative drafts are published make them a sort of quasi-canon. Like real history, and real ethnography, the whole body of Tolkien’s published work (the History of Middle Earth included) has inconsistancies and contradictions. Mythologies—like the Bible or the Iliad, for example—frequently have alternative depictions, some in agreement, but others at variance. Even the simple fairy tales that we hear as children have conflicting provenances and contradictory themes, and Walt Disney’s reinterpretations are only one of several. This quality actually makes Middle Earth even more immersive. Reality varies according to what you read.

Which tangentially brings me back to this interesting quote that Kagro X brought up again in a post on the Daily Kos (this context of the post is not necessarily relevant to why it struck me today):

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” —Ron Suskind “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush” New York Times 2004 Oct 17

This is now my impression of post-modernism and post-colonialism. The most pervasive cultural products of our time are basically remixes. After all, look at all the Tolkien knock-offs and homages sitting in the Fantasy section of your book store. We’ve gotten to the point where we can remix reality in real-time and have it stick and carry scholarly wait. It used to be you had to wait until you were dead before people starting adding their own isogeses while deconstructing you and/or your work.

It’s not so much that we keep revising history. This has happened since history existed, because we all know that the winners write all the books. it’s the fact that no only can we re-write history as it’s happening, but we can, in fact, pre-write history.

Which is, as a matter of fact, kind of what Tolkien actually tried to set out in do.

I don’t know how I find these random things, but I stumbled upon Chris Hazard and Ky Kimport’s take on what a Tolkien RPG would look like in the hands of Squaresoft.

In response, I would say that:

• You get your airship from the Shipwright Círdan, who happens to prefer being called Cid. He will also give you Narya, the Ring of Fire, but only if you have Gandalf in your party.
• The final battle sequence will actually consist of destroying Sauron in the Third Age, who takes the form of the Eye. The Nazgûl back him up. Then you travel back in time to the end of the Second Age to defeat Sauron in the Battle of the Last Alliance. After that, you go back earlier in the Second Age where you have to defeat him in Númenor before it sinks under the ocean (yes there is a time limit!). Finally, you go all the way back to the First Age to defeat Sauron, who is teamed up with Thuringwethil the Vampire and Draugluin the Werewolf. Once Sauron is utterly defeated, you are then faced with fighting Glaurung, the father of dragons, Gothmog the Lord of the Balrogs, and finally, Morgoth, the Dark Lord who has about a trillion hit points, and can only be physically damaged by the swords Ringil, Anglachel (but you want to upgrade it to Gurthang when you get a chance), or Anguirel, and also the knife Angrist (although it has to be reforged) You can also use Radagast’s summoning abilities (only the Eagle summon works) or hopefully you have at least one Silmaril, which, like Materia, can be inset into your weapons and give it Morgoth-damaging capabilities.
• Depending on whether or not you look in Galadriel’s Mirror while in Lothlórien, you can unlock the Scouring of the Shire final subquest. This will allow you to keep playing even after you defeat Sauron and Morgoth and unlock Elrond, Galadriel, and Círdan as playable characters. Upon completing this mission, you can unlock the best ending.
• Among the optional characters you can fight (all of whom have maybe at least a quadrillion hit points each) are the twin Blue Wizards who turned evil, Alatar and Pallando, and the penultimate optional battle is Ungoliant who has an octillion hit points, has six different forms, and has the attack “Withering of the Two Trees” which kills all the characters of your party except one, regardless of how many hit points you have, what armor you have equipped, or what magical protection you’ve cast.
• The ultimate optional battle pits you against Neo-Morgoth, who is partly cybernetic, and who has sexdicillion hit points and will take literally 24 hours to beat (not counting breaks) and who will be far more difficult than the actual final battle of the game. On the upside, you should have the Elven Lords at this point, who can all inflict massive amounts of damage thanks to the Rings of Power
• Various optional subquests include the reconquest of Moria, the cleansing of the Barrow Downs, the Colosseum in Umbar, lifting Numenór back out of the ocean, lifting Beleriand back out of the ocean, restoring the Two Trees, finding and clearing Angband, and finding and clearing Utumno
• Valinor becomes accessible if you have a Silmaril
• Like other Final Fantasy games, you can gather certain talismans to summon Elf Lords, Maiar, and Valar to fight for you temporarily.
• Limit breaks/ultimate attacks:
  • Samwise: precision apple throw (instantly fatal), elven-lord charge (attacks multiple foes at once)
  • Frodo: the phial of Galadriel (holy damage to all foes)
  • Merry: the horn of Rohan (summons the Rohirrim to deal damage to all your foes)
  • Pippin: Bullroarer’s attack (instant death by decapitation, leading to a hole-in-one)
  • Aragorn: Flame of the West (fire attack to all foes), Wings of Thorongil (wind attack to all foes), The Light of the Elfstone (holy attack to all foes)
  • Gimli: Axes of Khazad (damage to multiple foes), Durin’s Hammer (massive damage to a single foe)
  • Gandalf: The Flame of Anor (massive holy damage), the Lightning of the Maiar (massive electrical damage), the Hand of the Valar (only available for Gandalf the White, dealing incredibly massive amounts of holy damage)

Stacy Taylor, the host of the KLSD morning radio show, broke down the movie ”300” for me. I was all psyched to watch it, having thoroughly enjoyed ”Sin City” but (1) my dad and my brother watched it without me and (2) Taylor’s deconstruction of it kind of took the wind out of my sails.

Some right wing bloggers talk about how it’s about the defense of one’s home (which is true) and also the defense of one’s liberty (which is probably not so true.) After all, Sparta was a militaristic dictatorship. It was Athens that was a rowdy, querolous democracy, and in reality, they were the guys who eventually ended up decisively repulsing the invading Persian Empire in the Battle of Salamis¹.

Not to say that fighting to your death in defense of the things you love is not a worthy cause. As long as you know what you’re really doing—that you really are fighting for life, liberty, and justice for all—then I’m all for it, but if you’ve been tricked by a lying piece of shit leader to fight a futile war for oil and profit and you still think this is all in the name of “democracy” or “national security”, then I have to say, not so much.

The ironic thing is that most of the people I’ve talked to in the military—the guys who are in the trenches and actually getting shot at—are disgusted by the War in Iraq. They know what their number is, and no one I know actually signed up to shoot and kill people for kicks and giggles. Most people did it, frankly, for financial reasons. Either they got kicked out of their parents’ house, or one or both their parents were criminals—druggies, pedophiles, rapists, you name it, or they realized that working at the local Wal-mart was an obvious dead-end. I’m all for bettering your station in life, and if your only option is to join the military in time of peace, then go to it and get your GI bill. The world can only be better for having more people who understand the nature of service to something greater, and more importantly, more people who are educated. (And, believe me, there are a lot of ways to do this beside military service, although probably not any that have benefits that are as good.)

Now that we’re embroiled in a imperialistic war for oil and profit, the military is not so attractive, and most people who are sane will admit as much. No one wants to get shot for some old white dude living it up like a Saudi, and no one wants to get blown up by an IED end up a quadraplegic, sequestered in some hell-pit full of rats and other vermin.

But, unlike Bush, who had a rich daddy, or Cheney, who had “other priorities”, most folks who are already embroiled in this thing can’t really easily get out of it, especially not with the demented Colonel Cathcart-style, Catch-22-like upping the number of tours you have to do before you’re done, and frankly, I feel sorry for them. Get home safe, guys.

But I can’t help but wax poetic about defeat. The place names that hang most vividly in my mind are the places where civilizations and cultures ended. Futile battles. For some reason, the Battles of Maldon (ending the dominion of the Anglo-Saxons) and of Hastings (ushering in the era of the Norman French and incidentally the beginning point of Modern English) always come to mind, but I also think of the Battles of Bataan and Corregidor, which mark the end of the American Imperial Era in the Philippines, and heralds the eventually near-complete destruction of Manila. In 1941, Manila was the most modern, Westernized city in Asia. In 1945, Manila was the second most devastated Allied city, superseded only by Warsaw.

I think I have subconsciously taken up Tolkien’s concept of “The Long Defeat.”

Actually, I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic; so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’

Certainly, there is an imperialistic, racist, and innately conservative aspect to this idea (which I don’t know one way or the other that Professor Tolkien ever espoused)—the old days were better, and so-called progress is inherently for the worse. “The Long Defeat” is certainly the conception that, for example, inveterate Confederates, and, in general, antagonists of the American Culture War hold on to. It was supposedly better before the Civil War, before the Civil Rights Movement, before people-of-color were considered human beings, before gays and lesbians were allowed to partake of society and not be considered criminals.

But the part of the Long Defeat that I find strikes true is that Evil seems to always have the upper hand. Good only occurs when small, unlooked-for triumphs manage to spark a revolution. The Civil Rights Movement and the 1960’s in general were the work of the common folk, the very people that Tolkien champions:

Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere. — Gandalf the Grey

But, of course, the Empire Strikes Back, and we end up fighting against the on-rushing tide of reactionary forces once again. I think of Hunter S Thompson’s wistful look back to the 1960’s in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…. History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change)… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that…. There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda…. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…. And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

I also think of Christ’s Passion. I actually find it more meaningful if you ignore the triumph of Resurrection—what is important is not that Christ rose from the dead, but that despite the torture, humiliation, and slaughter of Christ, and despite the suppression of the belief of the One God by the Romans, his followers continue to believe, and by the 4th century CE, Christianity is flourishing.

HST’s exposition is really what I mean by the Long Defeat (and is it any surprise that The Lord of the Rings gained such mainstream cultural significance in the 1960’s?) But the key to preventing despair in the face of defeat is explicated succinctly by Gandhi: “Whatever you do is insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

¹I find the Athenian-Spartan alliance against Persia loosely analogous to the US-USSR alliance against the Axis. For example, while the USSR was a totalitarian dictatorship under Stalin, you still had to feel sorry for those guys who had to share rifles and who had to fight tanks hand-to-hand in their attempt to repulse the Germans, and you’d definitely rather have the Soviets win rather than the Nazis. But, while the Soviet resistance against the Axis was certainly necessary in order to defeat the Axis, it was the democratic republic of the United States and the industrial might of our capitalist economy that led to the final downfall of the Axis.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. —Sir Arthur C. Clarke

This is a fitting epigram to my post about Torque, Dust, and Mist. There is yet another magic system from yet another fantasy epic that I must admit is quite intriguing—Robert Jordan’s system of saidin and saidar from The Wheel of Time. Jordan appropriates the ancient symbol of the yin and yang and devises a magic system that segregates according to gender. Saidin is the magic of men, and after the Breaking of the World, it becomes tainted by Shai’tan (also known as the Dark One, although it is just the Arabic Shaitan with an apostrophe in it, and is clearly related to the Hebrew word Satan, that is, Adversary.) Saidar is the magic of women, and in the post-Breaking world, only women are allowed to practice magic. Instead of wizards, we have the Aes Sedai. (I did like the idea of mage and her knight-warder. I reminds of me of something that I can’t quite remember.)

The problems I have with this system of magic, however, is that (1) there does not seem to be any limits to it (2) too many people use the One Power (3) there are actually discrete Dungeons and Dragons-like spells (teleport gates, balefire, healing, etc.) Jordan makes it worse by multiplying the different kinds of magic—in addition to the One Power made up of saidin and saidar, there is also the True Power, derived from the Dark One.

This is in stark contrast to the non-mechanistic magic used in not only Middle-Earth, but also most fairy-tales and myths the world around.

Furthermore, if you’re going to technologize your version of magic, then I think you should go all the way with it and not stop with a half-baked explanation for why things are the way they are. For example, Le Guin gives a mechanism for magic in the world of Earthsea—it is about speaking True Names, and using the language of Creation. Hickman and Weis describe different runic patterns that have intrinsic power in The Deathgate Cycle. In The Wheel of Time, I find it dissatisfying that while Jordan describes channeling, the source of the One Power is not entirely clear, nor does it make any particular sense how the One Power comes manifest with so-called reality. (If, on the other hand, he said something simple, like everything is made of the One Power, then perhaps I might buy it.)

But the unlimited nature of the One Power tends to make things ridiculous. There are at least a hundred named characters who have magical ability (in contrast to the handful in The Lord of the Rings) and the characters rely far too much on it instead of on their own qualities. (Witness how the War of the Ring is won entirely by Sam and Frodo, characters who have no magical power whatsoever, except for maybe that which is bestowed upon them by artifacts—the One Ring itself, Galadriel’s Phial, the swords of Westernesse, etc.)

Maybe it is simply the bias of Western tradition. The Mage has always been a supporting character, and never the hero. Gandalf is an adviser. Merlin is ultimately a subject of the king. While Schmendrick from The Last Unicorn indeed has a personal quest, his main contribution is in catalyzing the actions of the main protagonist, the Unicorn, and of the book’s explicitly named hero, Prince Lir. The Wizard of Oz turns out to be a red-herring (and actually well epitomizes exactly what Arthur C. Clarke meant.) In The Princess Bride, the only character who performs explicit magic is Miracle Max, a minor character. So maybe it’s just this sensibility of mine that rebels against accepting that almost every single character in The Wheel of Time can channel, and the series’ hero is the most powerful Mage in the entire world.

Even in The Earthsea Cycle, which revolves greatly around magic, Ged doesn’t really become a full person until he abandons magic, and most of the action is performed by characters who have no magical powers like Lebennen and Tenar.

(Hmmm. Maybe this is why I’m not totally into Harry Potter. This series also suffers from magic that has no apparent limits, and from having way too many characters who have magical powers.)

The description of a magic system tends to be the crux of a good fantasy novel, and the ones that do it best are those that manage to preserve what it means for something to be magical. The reason why our technology doesn’t awe us anymore (and sometimes I can pull my head out of my ass and recognize just how magical it is to be able to talk over cel networks to anyone in the world, from anywhere in the world, or even how magical it is to be able to fly across the country in mere hours) is that it’s mostly ubiquitous. This definitely removes any sense of magic and awe, no matter how magical something is.

One of the cardinal rules of writing any kind of speculative fiction—whether science fiction or fantasy—is to create a set of rules, like an internal description of your universe’s laws of thermodynamics. Being able to judiciously violate these rules is where you can work in the wonder and awe of magic. If it’s all over the place, then it ceases being magical.

Catch-22, I know.

The evolution of Tolkien’s synthesized mythology of Middle Earth is well documented by his son Christopher Tolkien, who eventually published J.R.R. Tolkien’s notes and various drafts, some of which eventually became incorporated into The Silmarillion

Eventually he broke the explicit linkage between modern history and his newly-wrought mythology, but originally, he had a character of known mythology—Ottor Waefre (also identified with Wihtgils, the father of Hengest and Horsa, the two legendary brothers who led the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England)—enter the realm of faerie, meeting with the Elves of Tol Eress̈̈ëa, the Lonely Island. In The Book of Lost Tales, he is named Eriol by the Elves, and they tell him about the history of Middle Earth from the Creation of the Universe to the War of Wrath against Melkor.

When I was younger, after I had flown through The Hobbit, devoured The Lord of the Rings, and even struggled through The Silmarillion, I found myself longing for more Tolkienesque fantasy. I tried Terry Brooks, and David Eddings, and eventually jumped into Tad Williams and Robert Jordan, but I found the first two quite woeful (despite reading through their various works), and while the last two are definitely interesting and entertaining, they still end up being pale copies of the master. (Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow is a straight-up homage to J.R.R. Tolkien [1][2], with a Middle-Earth-like world and uncanny similarities between the Sithi and the Sindar, the Norns and the Noldor, and the Storm King Ineluki and the King of the Noldor Feänor. And, sure, only The Eye of the World had outright Tolkien allusions, and Robert Jordan eventually moved beyond the master’s shadow, but, frankly, the Old Speech and the various mythologies that he explicates aren’t very deep and imaginative—I will extend this particular critique later.)

I did also partake of the works of Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis—namely The Dragonlance Saga and The Death Gate Cycle. These definitely stray from the Tolkienesque framework, although, nonetheless, Dragonlance is tied closely to Dungeons & Dragons, which is itself derivative of Tolkien. (I never did like the idea of the balance of Good and Evil. It does not feel as natural as the balance of Order and Chaos, nor does it really fit the Taoist dualisms and multiplicities that I dig in Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle. However, I do find myself haunted by the idea of the Cataclysm, and found it intriguing that The War of the Souls trilogy contains similar ideas to the last book of the Earthsea Cycle.) And while The Death Gate Cycle has much that is (sometimes nauseatingly) derivative, there are enough imaginative ideas in it that kept me reading through all seven books. The magic system was one of the most inventive I remember that didn’t seem overtly mechanistic and scientified.

But ultimately, I longed to read more Tolkien, and I randomly read Farmer Giles of Ham and (eventually) Roverandom. But in the meantime, there was the whole History of Middle Earth—Christopher Tolkien’s painstaking chronicles of his father’s notes about the creation of an entire mythology, starting with the stories that became The Silmarillion and going through all the multiple drafts and false starts that eventually culminated in the final version of The Lord of the Rings.

When I was younger, I definitely did not have the patience to wade through this vast, sometimes dry, and always exceedingly detailed work of scholarship. I grasped at the few snippets here and there (for example, there is a chapter from an aborted sequel to The Lord of the Rings, and I found myself entertained by the abandoned drafts where, instead of meeting Strider in Bree, they meet a hobbit named Trotter) but really couldn’t handle reading it from cover to cover.

But for some reason, the idea of slogging through the several thousands of pages of Tolkien’s rough drafts, with his son’s editorial comments interspersed throughout, doesn’t seem like a bad way to spend my free time.

Yes, I know it sounds pathetic.

In contrast to The Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth, where magic remains mysterious and arcane and it is never explained and dissected, there seems to be a tendency to technologize—or at least scientify—magic in more recent works of fantasy. In various worlds, magic is seen as a substance, a commodity, that can be altered, stored, and redistributed.

Chine Miéville conceptualizes at least one form of magic in his world of Bas-Lag as a chaotic mutating force, somewhat akin to nuclear radiation, except that truly magical (but often horrifying) results arise from it. He calls this “torque,” which transparently symbolizes nuclear weaponry (New Crobuzon’s rival Suroch is annihilated by “torque bombs”) but also exists in “natural” form, depicted wonderfully and chillingly in The Iron Council where he takes his protagonists on a journey through the Torque-ridden wasteland known as the Cacotopic Stain.

Phillip Pullman in His Dark Materials calls the substance of magic Dust, which he ties together with the mysterious real-world substance physicists call Dark Matter. In his trilogy, Dust seems to be the repository of sentience, the essence of the soul, and angels are made up entirely of Dust. There are areas of the world that are Dust-filled, whereas the depletion of Dust begets crisis.

Finally, in Final Fantasy XII (and, I suppose, also existing in the its direct predecessory Final Fantasy Tactics), the world of Ivalice is filled with a substance called Mist, the very basis of magic. There are areas called Jagd that are so filled with Mist that other Mist-based technologies cannot function properly (such as airships and scrying magic.) Mist has a similarly property to Torque in that it can turn otherwise ordinary objects and creatures into weird, mutated, magical things with super powers.

Which leads me to the notion that maybe magic could be technologized in the real-world. The concept that probably comes closest is nanotech and the ubiquitous “grey goo”—nano molecules in an unformed state requiring some sort of programming to become actual objects. (Interestingly, since I used the word ubiquitous, I suddenly recall Phillip K Dick’s story Ubik, which actually describes a similar technologized magical substance that functions a little like grey-goo that he calls simply “ubik.”) Simply put, the practice of “magic” involves transmitting instructions to grey goo. With technological and perhaps even genetic manipulation, this could eventually be accomplished by telepathy and telekinesis. Of course, if grey-goo existed, this could be accomplished by existing technology, namely wireless communications. In a world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp—again making me think of Dick’s substance “ubik”), this would make everyone capable of practicing so-called magic.

Two days off in a row is a rare boon, almost a vacation, considering the breakneck schedule I’ve been running on as of late, averaging about 80 hours a week. The downside is that I have to work 12 days in a row, which basically just really sucks. Around day 10 I start getting extremely cranky, and by day 11 I’m ready to bite people. But I can’t do anything about it except call in sick, which is, at times, tempting.

I think perhaps that I have been eating very poorly lately. Which is not to say that I haven’t been eating—to the contrary, I’ve been eating quite a bit of junk food. But I think that’s the thing. The empty calories are starting to get to me. I decided to take a vitamin pill today and felt tons better. Maybe it’s just placebo effect, but I’m beginning to suspect that my steady diet of hospital cafeteria food and drive-through cuisine is quite low on essential nutrients.

I felt like my brain was working a lot better this evening. Like my third eye opened or something. (Yes, that was a cryptic Gnostic reference to Philip K Dick’s VALIS trilogy, but I won’t elaborate on that here.) Ideas flowed a lot better. I’m not as anxious as I’ve been (although I guess I’m still anxious.)

I watched “Pan’s Labyrinth” this afternoon, which was actually quite perfect, if a touch violent. Well, war is violent, and in the end, this is a war movie, set in the waning days of World War II in Spain, with the victorious fascist army mopping up the communists. But it melds the personal with the political and with the fantastic quite marvelously.

What it actually reminded me a lot of is “Mirrormask” which similarly involves a little girl who discovers that she may be a princess (or is at least the döppleganger of a princess) and it occurs to me, how many little girls dream of being princesses? (I think of my sister and her current aspiration of being a revolutionary, and find it fitting into my train of thought, but I digress.) Although the fantasy in “Mirrormask” is an allegory entirely of the personal, whereas in “Pan’s Labyrinth”, it melds together the political and the personal.

In any case, I’ve tangentially touched upon China Miéville’s reworking of the fantasy genre in order to use it as a vehicle for speculative politics. I really dug how he infused New Crobuzon with the gritty political corruption of capitalism and with Marxist sensibilities of impending, although flawed, revolution. Del Toro realizes something similar in “Pan’s Labyrinth” and I don’t think you can dig the movie without fully appreciating the specific political aspect of it. (More of this line of thought is better elucidated by this blog post that summarizes essays regarding Miéville’s Iron Council as well as Miéville’s own responses to these essays.)

The story of the rose and its poisonous thorns appears to represent humanity’s quest for utopia, perhaps even romanticizing Marxism—Marx’s eschatology is supposed to lead to sustainable economies that don’t require exploitation to maintain—the metaphoric eternal life that the rose offers. But instead, no doubt because of human nature, all we get are the thorns—Stalinism, the Cold War, and the sad inability to wean ourselves from the tit of fossil fuel.

But like all fantasy, all myth, we eventually have to ask ourself, is it true? The rose may not give eternal life, after all, although it doesn’t help that we’ve stopped trying for it.

Del Toro seems to point in that direction, though, that it’s not real at all, it’s just the crazed imaginings of a twelve-year old girl who finds herself in the hellish midst of all-out war. But like the Spanish communists fighting Franco’s fascists, the myth keeps us alive, allows us to frame ourselves in terms of nobility and ignominy. This comes out, paradoxically, in the character of General Vidal, who seems to be living with the burden of a family mythology—his father, the perfect soldier who died in battle. Whatever his sadistic impulses, and never mind that he is a fascistic thug, he feels compelled to uphold this mythology, fixated on leaving his son a similar legacy—the broken watch with the time of his death, and his name. And we perhaps gain an inkling that the only way to extirpate the evil created by these kinds of obsessive, impossible, fantastic myths is to destroy the myth entirely, and cut the cord of transmission.

And in the midst of our current dire conflict, with the possibility of conflagarating into World War III as Israel asks for airspace permission in case they need to bomb Iran, and as the wardrums beat ever loudly here in the U.S. despite our populace’s growing disgust for this seemingly meaningless debacle, I can’t help think how fitting these ideas are.

Here we are, some 1400 years since the time of Muhammed, and presumably two millenia since the time of Yesua the Nazarean, and like all myths, there are good parts and bad parts, and it seems that this never-ending war is based solely on the bad parts. Never mind that the majority of Muslims and of Christians actually read their respective sacred scriptures and realize that God finds hatred deplorable. How can you mistake something like “Thou shalt not kill”? There are no exception for self-defense or times of war in the book of Exodus, at least not in the copy that I’ve read.

And it seems like the only way to rid ourselves of this never-ending evil is to obliterate the myth.

(But would we be more content knowing that such a rose exists, even if it nearly impossible to attain, or would we be better off just aiming a missile at the mountain upon which it sits, removing it entirely from all possibility?)

And I think of Vidal’s doomed soldiers, trying to contain a populace full of rebels, where you can’t at all tell who is your ally and who is your enemy, and I immediately think of our soldiers in harms way in the Desert, commanded by blundering idiots who either have no conception of the intricacies of myth, or are perhaps too inured in their embryonic myth of the New American Century.

(Interestingly, one can imagine that the reason why Vidal fails to see the faun is not because he is not really there, but because he is too caught up in his own fascist mythology and can’t help but disbelieve. Similarly, perhaps the reason why W and Cheney continue to fail miserably in this ridiculous imperial war is that their mythologic beliefs disable them too acutely.)

But myth and fantasy is all about one thing, and that is hope. I find it poetic that, despite all the reactionary and unenlightened elements that many leftist critics deplore in Tolkien, his main theme is nonetheless quite relevant, perhaps the last piece of mythology that has survived the backlash against the 1960’s. And it is indeed quite fantastic: that a single individual, faced with the overwhelming power of mastery— enough to rule the entire world—that this individual would seek to sacrifice himself in order that such power may be destroyed, instead of claiming it for himself and making the world in his own image. That this individual would rather that the world moved along its own trajectory, neither defiled by great evil nor reshaped by what interested parties might wrongly call “good.” This is a fantasy, a myth, that is worth carrying on from generation to generation, even though it may never in a million years happen.

I’ve prattled on and on and on about things I barely understand, but perhaps that’s all that moment of epiphany was: the coming together of a hundred million little thoughts into this confused half-formed concept of the intersection of myth, fantasy, and politics. We are, I suppose, at the crux of something big, the consequences of which we can’t even hope to predict.

I suppose I’m still in a phase of mental regression. For the past five weeks or so, ever since my cousin died and I went on vacation, I’ve found myself trying to recreate my childhood. Playing video games. Obsessing about fantasy worlds. Re-exploring Middle Earth. Even screwing around with emulators, trying to play old-school cRPGs from way-back-when. The Bard’s Tale. The Shard of Spring. Final Fantasy I.

I have always fantasized about breaking out of this material plane. Reality has never really done it for me, and I’ve always dreamed about wallowing in fantastic landscapes where magic actually worked, unicorns and dragons existed, and a nobody like me could actually make or break the world. Call it quixoticism. Call it mental illness. Who knows?

But, as always, my thoughts turn to the master himself, good ol’ J.R.R. Tolkien, who mined the mythologies of England, Germany, and Scandanivia and wonderfully synthesized it all to create a new mythology for a post-modern world.

It is said that Tolkien created Middle Earth because he felt that the modern English state had no authentic indigenous mythology, because the modern English state was really a hodge-podge culmination of the various waves of cultures that had come and conquered England and then in turn were conquered themselves. The Celts. The Romans. The Anglo-Saxons. The Vikings. The Normans.

In college I found myself yearning for a similar synthesis of for a Filipino mythology, or, I suppose, more accurately, a Filipino-American mythology. In the same way, Filipino culture is a palimpest of waves of colonization. The Ati. The Igorot. The Malay. The Arabs. The Spanish. The Americans. The Japanese. And in a way that is dissimilar to England (perhaps), it exists in a semi-fragmented state. The Philippines is an abstract colonial construct made real only through revolution, one that has never been allowed to completely succeed (and despite political independence, the Philippines still retains a client relationship to the American Empire.) And so the disparate tribal territories almost seem like more natural divisions. The Tagalogs. The Visayans. The Ilocanos. The Igorot. The Moro.

And it was a revelation when I came to understand that the Austronesian people of South East Asia share a common culture, and a common mythology. In the same way that England, Germany, and Scandinavia are connected, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the aborigines of Taiwan, the Micronesians, and the Polynesians are also connected.

I also owe an intellectual debt of gratitude to Ursula K. Le Guin, whose work seems to have taken root in my subconscious. Is it mere coincidence that Earthsea is an archipelago, populated by brown-skinned people whose way of life revolves around the forces of nature and the balance of energy? Ged is necessarily my favorite archmage.

But I find myself struggling to make manifest this new world that lives in the inside of my head, using it to make the various aspects of my life, my history manifest in a way such that mere description would be lacking. I realize the Tolkien disliked allegory. Le Guin is more free with adding a touch of politics to her work. Nonetheless, their first aim seems to always have been to tell a good story, and I’m not sure if I could assemble a plot even if pre-fabricated pieces were given to me with IKEA-like instructions.

What I have, mostly, is a map. And maybe a fragmented history, and a nebulous creation mythology. And I suppose there is this temptation to try to peg my time and space into this phantasmagoria, and try to make it “representative” of my life as a brown male born into a country that I can’t feel is completely my own, with an entirely different world tugging at my heartstrings, making me dream of ancestral roots in the “homeland.”

I can only make it represent me, and I guess that’s ultimately what it’s about. Telling my story, letting you see the world as I see it, refactored and reamalgamated. In this post-modern world everything that is worth doing has been done already, and all we can do is rearrange the pieces, and maybe incrementally mutate things here and there. I suppose there is always the magical realization that the sum is always greater than its parts. Despite Tolkien being more of a classicist and a throwback to a bygone age, his creation of Middle Earth nonetheless echoes a post-modern methodology and aesthetic, without which I’m not sure it would’ve flourished as well as it has. (Various critics will call him reactionary, but I think that is an overly facile reading.)

All this mental masturbation leads me to something that I found extremely interesting about Tolkien’s unfinished works. I was flipping through The Lost Road at the Borders the other day and read about one of Tolkien’s first ideas about the fall of Númenor and the breaking of the world. The part that he kept was that the Blessed Realm of Aman was rent from the earth and lifted into the upper sky, so that it was impossible to journey to it by sea. And despite this intervention by the Eru, the exiled Númenorians continued to try to reach Aman by constructing flying ships, still failing.

I realize that flight had been invented already by the time Tolkien had written all this, but I can’t help but think about the mythical airships that are iconic of the Final Fantasy series, and while Tolkien eventually axed most of this from his cannonical mythology, he did keep the Vingelot and Eärendil’s flight into the skies.

Which leads me to the curious coincidence (or is it?) found in Hayao Miyazaki’s excellent animated film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky.” The heroine of the film is from a place called Gondoa. When I watched Disney’s English dub version of the film, I kept thinking that the characters were saying Gondor.

Middle Earth and airships. I dig it.

If it’s the last thing I do, I will at least finish a Tolkien-clone novel. Screw being a famous writer. Hell, screw being an artist. If the best thing I ever finish is mere fanfic, so be it.

Now I’m a big fan of rewriting and reinterpreting mythology and fantasy. My initial ambition as a college freshman was to take Southeast Asian myths and rewrite them in the vein of Western European myths. I’m totally into China Miéville’s subversion of the fantasy genre and using it to explore the sometimes faulty assumptions we make about capitalism and Western Civ. I really liked Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead, which is a version of Beowulf told from a quite-unexpected viewpoint, and even liked the movie that it became, “The 13th Warrior”. I sometimes think that this is what underlay my childhood obsesssion with Disney animated films. I grew up listening ad nauseam to the soundtrack of Disney’s “Robin Hood” where Robin Hood and Maid Marian are foxes, Little John is a bear, and King John and his brother Richard the Lion-Hearted are literally lions. (“Oo de lally!”) I was enchanted by “The Little Mermaid” and especially “Beauty and the Beast.” One of my more recent ambitions is to write a novel based on Middle Earth after it has been completely industrialized and paved over, dealing with issues of urban sprawl, pollution, and global capitalism. As for a more small scale project, I’m trying to write a story that is really “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “The Hobbit” mashed-up together and set on a nanotechnology-permeated, post-Roman Empire-like society.

But for some reason, when it first came out, I never really got into Gregory Maguire’s book Wicked, nor his various re-writings of Western European classic fairy tales. It isn’t until now that I recognize Wicked for what it is: the story of the Wicked Witch of the West recast as a revolutionary, demonized by the Powers That Be. Kind of like Che Guevarra, except a woman, green-skinned, and in a mythical universe.

I kind of want to watch the musical now.

If only I could go to London and watch Idina Menzel in the starring role.

And this song:

So if you care to find me
Look to the western sky!
As someone told me lately:
“Ev’ryone deserves the chance to fly!”
And if I’m flying solo
At least I’m flying free
To those who’d ground me
Take a message back from me
Tell them how I am
Defying gravity
I’m flying high
Defying gravity
And soon I’ll match them in renown
—”Defying Gravity” from “Wicked”

I think the book in The Chronicles of Narnia that left the strongest impression on me was The Magician’s Nephew[site by Keith Webb][on wikipedia]. The setting that I remember most strongly is the ruined and blasted world of Charn, destroyed by the White Witch Jadis by using magic that seems strongly allegorical to nuclear weaponry. I was struck by how the monarchy of Charn started off being benevolent and wise, then became corrupted and evil, eventually spawning the monstrosity that is the White Witch. I also remember the hue of redness encompassing Charn. (Was C.S. Lewis trying to evoke medieval visions of Hell?) What was interesting to me was the explanation for this reddish light—Charn’s sun is a red giant star. While this could’ve just been an idiosyncrasy of this particular world, it actually evoked in me the idea that the civilization of Charn had existed so long that their formerly sun-like star had exhausted its nuclear fuel and was beginning to cool and expand. For some reason (although this is apparently not the reason for its destruction), this also reminds me of the destruction of the planet of Krypton, but that is neither here nor there.

In a work that is so theologically-based, specifically, Christianity-based, it is hard not to think about theological issues, and the idea that popped into my head is the question as to whether corruption is an inevitability without saving grace.

Now the laws of thermodynamics tells us that disorder ever increases, so it would seem that in fact, this is the natural way of things. And yet, human life, and life in general, seems to belie this basic law, and points to the fact that thermodynamics is, at its base, a statistical argument, and cannot easily predict local effects or the ultimate fate of an open system. It cannot be denied that some branches of evolution have led to more and more complex ordered organisms. While we we cannot ever prove that we evolved from primordial slime forming the first prokaryotic cell, we know for a fact that we all start out as a single eukaryotic cell in the womb (or in an egg in some organisms.) We also have a lot of evidence that mitochondria are descended from prokaryotes. In the long run, yes, it is still an increase of disorder because our complexity comes at the price of the creation of our waste products which are incredibly disordered.

My point, however, is that it would seem that it is inevitable that people can start off good and noble, and over the years and the generations, they will definitely be evil and base. Lewis’ commentary on the monarchs of Charn outline this idea and apply it to government, and I can’t help but immediately apply this to the decay of the American Republic.

The interesting thing is the idea of error-correction. This is part and parcel of our modern information culture and economy. The brilliance of the Internet is based significantly on the idea of error-correction. Error-correction mostly prevents the inevitable corruption of ordered information (although we all know nothing is perfect) and better than 99 times out of 100, things turn out O.K. Life itself is pretty good at error-correction—the replication of DNA is wonderfully faithful, although clearly there are errors that are made. (And yet errors are the basis of evolution and increasing complexity and order.)

I think one of the unique things about the American Republic is its basis in a potentially self-correcting document—the Constitution. But, more immediately, the checks and balances established by the Constitution are also error-correcting.

The reason why the Republic is in such crisis is that the Bush administration and their adherents are greatly intent on (1) dismantling these checks and balances and (2) destroying the Constitution. Once these error-correcting mechanisms are disabled, we put ourselves on the fast-track of inevitable corruption, evil, and atrocities and crimes against humanity (and while Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are bad enough, you can be assured that things are bound to get much, much worse. With error-correction disabled in DNA replication, what you inevitably get is cancer. And I tend to think about Empire this way. Empire is analogous to cancer—eventually fatal to its host in the end.

So, if you wanted to be unnecessarily mystical, you can think of error-correction (and selection pressure) as the Hand of God. God® and His Saving Grace™ are the only way to prevent the inevitable corruption and decay of the universe, and the only way to actually increase local complexity and order.

(And by stretching some metaphors, Bush and his cronies are necessarily agents of Satan, who are interested in disabling error-correction.)