Quarantine Diary #17 3/30/2020

Why are people (lots of them) on Facebook posting photos of landscapes? The instructions say one should post a picture of a landscape one took somewhere, one should not say where that place is, and no people should be included, especially not the posting-person.  

Why? I don’t get it. I don’t mind but I really don’t get how this connects to anything.

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A friend’s husband’s company had a virtual meeting this morning about the future of their company. Things are changing but not shutting down. They will still have income and insurance.  Thought you might like to know.  

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Len and I have been watching the Hobbit and Lord of the Ring movies. There are six movies; each about three hours long, and we started weeks ago. We’d never watched them before (raising kids takes a lot of time). It seemed like this might be a good time to watch movies about being gallant and brave.

So far we’ve watched four of the six films, we still have two DVD’s that I borrowed from the library before it closed. Boy, a lot of drama goes into finding the ring, keeping the ring, taking the ring back to the fire from whence it came in order to set Middle Earth free from greed and violence. 

Bilbo Baggins is the hobbit; he is the only one who can carry, keep, or deal with the Ring. He is inoculated from the ravages of power because he has a home, a shire, friends, a garden, and pleasant things to cook and eat.

I hope it is true that bravest people are not about fury, power, weapons, and violence. I hope we mild ones who love our shires and pals will be the ones to endure. It’s the story most of us choose to we believe even when it isn’t the story that seems to be happening around us.

In the 1980’s I interviewed a Salvadoran nun about the dangers and challenges of her ministry in civil war-torn El Salvador, a war greatly funded by the US “protecting” American business interests in Central America.  Towards the end of the interview my toddler woke from her nap and came downstairs by herself.

The nun’s face lit up. I said it was almost our daughter’s birthday. She asked how we would celebrate and was fascinated by whatever I was answering.

The woman had lived and served through incredible loss and violence, yet what she wanted to talk about was my little one’s birthday party. I was curious and asked how kids’ birthdays are celebrated in El Salvador.

She explained that no matter how poor or under siege a village was, folks tried to have chicken, something sweet, and some balloons or garland, “because every child must be celebrated, don’t you think?”

I think that is what the Hobbit stories are about.

Know what you are fighting for.

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My take-aways on the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit series:

Weinstein produced the LOTR series. peter Jackson did not audition Mira Sorvino or Ashley Judd for LOTR parts because the Weinstein brothers told him they were “temperamental.” He sued to get profits from the Hobbit series that he did not produce. You can google it if you want to know more. 

So hindsight is the clearest vision, right?  But watching the spectacular, clever, macho stories feels oddly boring much of the time. Way too many battles. Way too much spectacular death.

And the female roles feel mostly like frames for the male characters.

When they say the ends justify the means, maybe we look again? How does unholy power create a story about holy power? 

Still, under the multi-million-dollar froth and gore, there is a story of imperialistic greed that sours the planet. The way through grief, loss, and struggle is this. Gandalf, who generally understands what’s going on, and Bilbo, who rarely does, and all the valiant or screwball characters in between – they push ahead together. Wisdom, spirituality, pluck and luck mean something.

I do love this line. “Sorry Gandalf. You have got yourself the wrong hobbit.”

Except he doesn’t. He has exactly the right Hobbit.