Welcome to Mordor, USA: The Lord of the Rings - Mirror of Our Times

Unless you are an Orc, a Ringwraith or the Dark Lord Sauron - or you have been persuaded by the dystopian propaganda disseminated by the Mordor Chamber of Commerce, aka Fox News - there is every reason to suspect that you are not happy about political developments in the United States.

It has been apparent for years that Donald Trump is chasing The Ring of Power. The Ring, as symbol of and vehicle for ultimate power in Tolkien's Middle Earth, casts an alluring shadow throughout our own earth with its seductive temptations.

Threatening enough is the fact that Trump has been lusting for domination with every neuron of his traumatized psyche. Far worse, however, is that he represents a danger amplified exponentially, joined as he is by legions of obedient minions, of "public servants" turned Ringwraiths, and the shrill exhortations of Faux News shills such as Tucker Carlson. Tucker, who in a past life served as the propaganda minister for Mussolini, has honed his craft in ever more deceitful and damaging ways. To Trump, his largely Republican cohorts, and the growing cadre of Tucker wannabes, trifling concepts such as democracy are irrelevant speedbumps on the road to autocracy.

So seductive is The Ring, so persuasive are Trump and his ilk, that they gleefully have enlisted millions of sycophantic underlings - many of them obedient radicalized Christians (ORCs) - in a lockstep march towards violence.

Trump's minions are convinced he will save them, when he only ever wants to save himself, at anyone and everyone's expense. You don't make deals with misanthropes like Trump, or Sauron, with whom loyalty is a one-way street. You also simply cannot expect to forfeit personal integrity, honesty, justice, and empathy - all core values of democracy, not to mention Christianity - and expect to emerge with your humanity intact.

So we have now, to our mounting horror, an army - millions of Orcs and Ringwraiths - obsequiously doing the bidding of a dreadfully scarred automaton of anger, sadism, vengefulness and narcissistic self-congratulation.

Anyone allowing themselves to be seduced by the Ring - by sheer lust for power - will become possessed by the dark side of human nature. We have seen this naked lust swell enormously in the public sphere in the past several decades, then expand like a sun gone nova during Trump's pernicious reign. This degradation has been most notable in the leadership of the Republican Party. Newt Gingrich's toxic tenure in Congress was a calamitous turning point, instituting a scorched-earth, no-holds-barred warfare with the Democratic party that obliterated democratic norms of decency and cooperation.

It has been downhill from there, with Bush Jr's presidency a dress rehearsal for Trump's subsequent bid for permanent power. Although the last fifteen years appear to have softened our recollection of the horrors of Bush's administration, it should not. We never should forget his attempt to assert a unitary presidency; the illegal, deceitful and disastrous Iraq War (Junior's sad and destructive attempt to outdo Daddy in the Middle East); the morally appalling embrace of torture as official U.S. policy; the secret embrace of all-encompassing domestic spying; and - of particular relevance with Trump's failed coup d'etat still ringing in our ears - the floating of the idea that the 2004 elections might have to be cancelled due to terror threats. Bush believed in democracy the way a barracuda believes in mercy. Or in the way Trump, his evil-stepchild, believes in democracy.

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