“Selfish!” I said to Titmarsh, whose reaction caught me by surprise, for one doesn’t always think before speaking.
“Over what?” he said, his face shocked. I realized my error.
“No, no, no,” cried the Authorial Rabbit. “The subject. Not the object, i.e., anyone.” Thinking I could use a bit of mild humour to get us back on track, appeal to his grammar erudition.
He chuckled, a noise that suggested bronchial issues.
“What I was getting at was how selfish begets selfish.”
“Begets, begats, beguine,” sang Titmarsh, a bright light in civilization’s darkness.
“Let’s do say I called you selfish,” I went on, hopeful my interlocutor would ride with me. “What would be your reaction, or rather, a normal reaction?”
“For a bumptious character such as myself, it would be to fight back, hurl an insult, something about ears.”
The AR practiced the 4-7-8 breathing system recommended by Dr. Andrew Weil. “Exactly. Encounter low, you go low. Lower.”
“Such is the way,” chanted my esteemed friend.
“Take neo-liberalism.”
“Thank you.”
“Its modus operandi was/is to protect markets from the people, the government, rather than protect people from markets. It was, in effect, going low writ large. Strike at the vulnerable.”
“Which has resulted in most of us getting poorer and a few of them getting obscenely richer.”
“The species is always ready to fight, and fight even when the fighting generates worse results.”
“For example . . . “
“I reference the Orcs in a country ostensibly harbouring a democracy.”
“Orcs. Back again in the Rings of Power.”
The AT nodded, fondled his aforementioned ears. “In Middle Earth, you have good people — elves, humans, hairy pre-hobbits, wizards — some of them, granted, with bad habits: OCD, etc. You have the very bad people, the Saurons. You have the people on the edge in any group, possibly ready to turn good or bad depending on circumstances. And you have the Orcs, the creatures embodying Bad in a big way at a common folks’ level.”
“Those faces. Slaughtering Orcs by the hundreds, thousands. Rather tiresome,” commented Titmarsh. “You’re watching the series, instalment by instalment. I wonder whether we’ll have to wait for a year for resolution the way we did with the Lord of the Rings?”
“It is all a romantic view of history,” as one writer put it, I can’t remember who,” said I.
“Romantic? Those Orcs?”
“Well, in the sense there’s a yearning within the tales, Tolkien’s vision, for a better world in the face of the grinding horror of this one.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. The stories do display true friendships, love, a desire to make the better world, and the likelihood of a happy ending, even if bad things will come again.”
The AR thought of his friendship with Titmarsh, his love for the DIK. “In our world, the guys who privatize hospitals, prisons, who cut pensions and unemployment benefits, make health care hard or impossible to get, increase the inequity between the rich and regular people, it is to them the disadvantaged turn to get them out of the messes the same guys have made. Why is that? How can that be?”
“Begets begats begins.”
“Exactly. Get people angry and fearful and they respond well to angry leaders, are ready to go lower with leaders who will take them there.”
“And so?”
“Maybe we need wizards. Or at least awareness.”
“Which by our conversation, we are working on.”
“My dear friend, let there be many conversations.”
To which Titmarsh smiled and shook my paw.
J. B. Thompson 