Lord of The Rings re visited…

As trialled at the open mic session at Bristolcon 2014…

MIDDLE EARTH RE ASSESSED….

Let’s think about Middle Earth… a month after The Battle of Five Armies…

King Dain is in his office, looking at his desk. ‘I wanted to be King Under The Mountain, not King under the mountain of bloody paperwork.’
Gandalf’s no good to Dain: as soon as the photographers had gone, he was off to the next photo opportunity! Gandalf… no wonder he was called The Grey. Four books, and he never visits a hairdresser, the laundrette or has a bath. His underwear must be… unless he goes wizard commando, which doesn’t bear thinking about. In fact, when his line manager wanted to promote Gandalf, he first had to hire a Balrog to drag Gandalf into deep water to get clean…

And doesn’t poor Sauron get a bad press? He loses a finger and ends up with just one red eye following an industrial accident, next thing G4S have given him a work placement in the devolved region of Mordor after he passes the ATOS Disability Working Test. What does he find when he gets to Middle Earth?

The country is being run by an uneasy coalition of Elves – a rich self-centered group whose only concern is their narrow self interest; and The Men of The West: the ineffectual remains of a foreign aristocratic refugees who seized power with the aid of the all-seeing, all-hearing Palantir: or as we would call them, GCHQ and the NSA. And everyone else is living on subsistence incomes whilst the rural crime rate is going up, and the infrastructure of roads and bridges is collapsing for lack of maintenance investment outside of the capital.

And they said Tolkien was a Fantasy writer, when he was just predicting the future…

So being a proper Keynsian economist, Sauron uses his resources to expand the farms in the east of Mordor to make his region self sufficient in food; improves the roads for passage of goods and people; and uses State Aid to open factories and workshops to relieve the chronic unemployment of the indigenous Orc population. He powers the whole operation with the clean Geo Thermal energy from Mount Doom.

Instead of rewarding him, the Adam Smith Free Marketeers of the Coalition have him overthrown and then hire a Spin Doctor to trash his reputation. As Kermit said, it’s not easy being Green…

Photo from the Dealer’s Hall at Bristolcon, taken by my friend Sophie E Tallis.

The Banned Underground will next be appearing at Novacon44 convention in Nottingham, November 14-16 2014. Come and say hello!

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