The Balrog reached the bridge. Gandalf stood in the middle of the span, leaning on the staff in his left hand, but in his other hand Glamdring gleamed, cold and white. His enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings. It raised the whip, and the thongs whined and cracked. Fire came from its nostrils. But Gandalf stood firm.

‘You cannot not pass,’ he said.

― The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

I was reminded of this great passage in Tolkien’s work in a conversation with a friend.  This came while thinking about passing on some excerpts of a recent interview with the Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy.  Chris Murphy was interviewed on Sept. 15 by Anand Giridharadas of The Ink newsletter.  Murphy’s words speak for themselves. No further commentary is needed.  If you’d like to read the full interview, CLICK HERE.

I think it’s interesting that, as violent as America is around the revolution, we don’t start to become a global outlier of violence until the slave population explodes. There’s a ton of violence in America in the 1600s and 1700s, but from the data we can glean, it looks like America’s homicide rate doesn’t start to go into the stratosphere until we have so many enslaved Americans that violence is the defining feature of the American economy.

We decided to take a shortcut to economic prominence. We decided to use epidemic levels of violence to enslave an entire race of people to create cheap goods that we could send worldwide. It was a choice we made, but the choice required us to brutally subjugate millions of people in this country. It ended up making violence an acceptable mechanism to maintain economic and social order.

I think we can acknowledge the unconscionable flaws at America’s founding while still recognizing that these two ideas — a government based upon the self-determination of a people, and a multicultural society in which everybody gets to be an American but also retain part of their heritage — those are off-the-wall ideas. We should accept that we are always in the process of getting better and getting closer to actually realizing them.

I think the police in America grow up amidst a culture that celebrates violence. We celebrate it on TV and in the movies. We celebrate it in the conduct of our foreign policy. We celebrate it in the way that we have fetishized firearms. Police grow up in this context in which, for centuries, Americans have been taught that violence is a mechanism to order society.

Yes. I don’t see any way to fix what is wrong with this country without acknowledging that we have money spread in an unsustainable way. You can’t ultimately run an economy with this small number of people having access to this amount of wealth. Now, you can transfer that wealth from generation to generation. If there are billions upon billions of dollars transferred from one generation to another and are unavailable to folks who are trying to make their fortune from nothing, then we’ve just ripped the guts out of America.

I hesitate to give somebody (Biden) advice who’s up by several points in the polls. Let me say this as a general critique or a piece of general advice for the Democratic Party. I think there has got to be more people willing to call out this president as a killer. I don’t understand why we don’t see the writing on the wall. There are nearly 200,000 Americans dead. We could be living with the consequences of this for generations. We still normalize the idea that the president can get away with willingly and purposefully refusing to do anything meaningful about the virus, and, in fact, taking steps that he knows will get more people killed.

Democrats, we believe in subtleties. We don’t believe in good and evil. We believe in relativity. That needs to change.

I believe this 100 percent. We need to recognize that 0.1 percent of humans have lived in a democratic society for the last thousand years, and that’s no coincidence. We should remember that there’s almost nothing else in our life which matters that we run by democratic vote.

… We should recognize that it’s miraculous that we’ve chosen to run the government through a democratic vote. We sometimes act as if this is inevitable or that it’s here to stay. There’s nothing in world history, and there’s nothing within the context of how we organize the rest of our lives, to tell you that this is permanent. 

We should remember that you’ve got to work like hell to protect what we have and improve it. You’ve got to stomp down on anybody who tries to poke massive holes in it like this president’s doing.

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Now for music!  With our situation in mind, something ironic seems fitting.  This is one of the most loved of the old rock ballads.

What-the-hell do those lyrics mean we find ourselves asking….

I suggest this.  Life and history are quite apart from reason, no matter what we’d like to think.  Beneath and through the Miller’s tale, and all of our tales, Nature and past events exercise their impress upon everything.  Not only her face, but everything else turns — “a whiter shade of pale.”

She said, ‘There is no reason’
And the truth is plain to see
But I wandered through my playing cards
And would not let her be….