North Star Writers Group

In the epic fantasy Lord of the Rings, a character named Boromir meets a tragic ending. Charged by his father with protecting the people of Gondor, Boromir is anxious. The Dark Lord’s power grows and Gondor’s fighting capabilities decline. Out of fear and desperation, Boromir tries to take the Dark Lord’s evil ring from Frodo the hobbit and dies fighting to protect Frodo’s kin from the evil Urukhai.

Boromir’s fall, repentance, valor and death form one of the most moving sequences of the trilogy. His fate also offers a lesson for the United States today.

The Boromirs of our time, such as U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, are those who frame the conflict in just two choices. Either we go all out, and in so doing violate this nation’s basic principles by torturing terror suspects and conducting illegal wiretapping, or we surrender. These are our only two options, such Boromirs insist. After all, we do have the right to protect ourselves; thus any means of self-defense are fully justified.

Back to the trilogy. While Boromir advocates using the One Ring of Power against the Dark Lord, others disagree. Gandalf the wizard and Elrond Half-elven argue for a third way. They opt to defend themselves and all free beings of Middle-earth by destroying the ring and fighting the Dark Lord’s minions to the best of their ability.

Their reasoning is twofold. The first is strategic deception. The very last thing the enemy, so blinded by his desire for total power and control, would ever expect is for his opponents to forswear the means to become powerful and dominant themselves. In seeking to destroy the ring, their strategy becomes invisible to the Dark Lord until it is too late.

Their second reason is their wisdom. Learning from history instead of ignoring it, Gandalf and Elrond know that most rings of power are inherently evil. The One Ring of Power is the most evil of all. For any of them to wield it would condemn the wearer of that ring to become an evil Dark Lord despite his best intentions. The One Ring itself is inherently evil, and thus has to be destroyed.

“A treacherous weapon is ever a danger to the hand,” Gandalf warns. This argument is right out of the prayer Jesus taught to his disciples: “…lead us not into temptation…” It is also an echo of Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The wise of Middle-earth are well aware of their own limitations and admit to themselves that they are vulnerable to being corrupted by their fear of defeat and the temptation to use an evil yet powerful weapon against their formidable foe. Just as Gandalf and Elrond decline to use the One Ring, they would also not choose torture or illegal spying were they in charge of the United States today. They would wisely fear the corrosive effects of morally indefensible means even to attain a good end.

Such astute reckoning, of course, flies in the face of current and past human history, and is the real reason that the Lord of the Rings is fiction, not reality. Can any of us imagine a nation inventing an ultimate weapon – say, a nuclear bomb – but not using it? Of course not. But thanks to the fantasy window dressing in the Lord of the Rings, we accept the conclusion of wizards and sages without question. Of course, the good peoples of the west must find a way to destroy the One Ring lest it destroy them. Magic indeed.

Not so in the post-9/11 United States. If our Boromirs today had the chance to wield an ultimate weapon like the One Ring of Power, they’d grab and use it in a heartbeat, dooming themselves and the rest of us. Lacking such a handy tool, they rely on more prosaic methods.

Yet the effects of torture and illegal spying, while not much of a spectacle, are no less insidious than those of the One Ring. They are gnawing away at this country‘s moral standing in the world community, causing other nations to distrust us even when we are telling the truth or acting with good intentions. Torture and illegal spying are also undermining the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which set up this country as a republic of laws, not a presidential monarchy.

The road to perdition stretches before us. Is it too late to turn back?

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