Watching the current White House and its various lackeys/minions/catspaws attempt to wrestle with “memes,” as an artistic format, has been a little bit like watching a dog try to aim and fire a machine gun: Bizarre, darkly amusing in a sick sort of way, and ultimately likely to end in tragedy. We’ve been tracking, for instance, the Trump administration’s recent embrace of Halo—truly, the hottest gaming property of 2005—in its latest stab at convincing the nation’s gym teachers and gym teacher-minded folk that working for ICE would be a cool thing to do. Now, the Department Of Homeland Security’s efforts to screenshot-post its way to popularity have spread to encompass The Lord Of The Rings, too, posting an online recruitment ad pulled from Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers.
Now, we have to take a second and acknowledge here that the political and philosophical battlefields surrounding J.R.R. Tolkien and Lord Of The Rings are insanely complicated. (And have only been muddied further by Jackson’s films, which simplify some of Tolkien’s more nuanced ideas about morality by doing things like excising one of his most important chapters in favor of more time spent on big, setpiece battles between good and evil.) Whole books have been written about how Tolkien’s Catholic conservatism, his contempt for bullies, his “guy born in 1892” takes on race, his overall disdain for any of the trappings of modernity, etc., add up to a fantasy universe that both the left-wing and the right-wing have seen themselves in, and tried to take exuberant grip of, over the years. (For instance: Both Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance are massive Tolkien fans, and have both “honored” the Professor by naming tech and investment companies—which he likely would have loathed to the very core of his being—after words he invented.) None of which makes it any less gross to see poor Dominic Monaghan get his face plastered on a virtual ICE recruitment poster trying to sell the idea that America is some idyllic Shire, in desperate need of protection via an army of masked goons who live in mortal fear of inflatable frogs.
Of course, the irritation is, presumably, part of the point: Laying claim to fictional heroes who can’t do inconvenient things like tell ICE to go fuck itself when it invokes them is an easy way to both annoy people who are pretty sure Merry and Pippin would look at the various bullies and cowards currently populating the administration for like five seconds before telling them to go kick rocks, and to convey some clout into the minds of those who are convinced that fielding an army of masked thugs dragging people out of their homes makes themselves “the good guys” in this looming “great battle of our time” that they’re all apparently obsessed with. DHS media reps have previously stated that the new ads are a deliberate pivot to trying to target the things that Vance was really into when he was like 16, specifically, saying, “We will reach people where they are with content they can relate to and understand, whether that be Halo, Pokémon, Lord of the Rings, or any other medium.”
