Blackface Aragorn and Poke the Monkey
A friend tells me that the following meme has been making rounds on the Leftwing side of social media, regarding the blackface version of Aragorn son of Arathorn appearing in a trading card game.
Ah! How sophomorically clever! How allegedly unanswerable! Mike-drop the mike with a mighty drop of the mike, O thou most rapierest of wits!
As if this race-swap were not a deliberate attempt to de-Westernize and de-Christianize and de-Europeanize all European, Western, and Christian words, images, symbols, and cultural icons, both great and small, from cathedrals to comic books.
The core of Leftism is to deny what one is doing, by claiming victimhood, and accusing the victim of one’s own wrongdoings: in this case, race-hatred.
Alas, only to blank-brained creatures unable to imagine the Aragorn described in the books in which he appears is he a blank white page on which one may scribble any image whim prefers.
From Book I, Chapter Nine: “As Frodo drew near be threw back his hood, showing a shaggy head of dark hair necked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.”
To those of us who understand what words mean, the picture portrayed is not only clear, but vivid. The face is not only stern, but pale. Pale means pale. He is a paleface. Leftists make it a policy to pretend to misunderstand what words mean, coining new terms as needed to hide their meaning.
The second argument in this non-troversy is sometimes proposed that the estate of Tolkien, the legal owners of this intellectual property, granted permission to put Aragorn in blackface. Is this the same estate that granted permission for the The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power ? Enough said.
The primary argument proposed by this meme is that an imaginary character has no set, determined, nor objective appearance, therefore any one with the power to do so my re-imagine or re-depict the character of any race as he sees fit, regardless of motive, without gratitude to the creator, without respect to the audience.
It is the same subjectivist and relativist and power-is-all argument the Left uses to corrupt and subvert everything they corrupt and subvert.
They make the claim that the original has no particular authority, that rules and customs have no force, therefore anything can be vandalized or turned into its opposite. Then they argue that to oppose such cultural vandalization is a sign of mental or moral inferiority. To dislike race-hatred directed against White Boy is to be guilty of race-hatred.
My friend points out that by this same logic, these two characters could and should each be drawn as the other.
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Are these two appearances completely interchangeable? My friend comments wryly: “Yet try and claim that the one on the right is Mickey Mouse and the one on the left is Superman and let’s see how long before Disney or DC let you get away with it. ”
On the other hand, making Superman look like Mickey Mouse has an old and cherished tradition:
So why paint Aragorn of Eriador as an Ethiopian?
The game of “poke the monkey” has two simple rules: you do something deliberately annoying, insulting, & offensive, and then mock the victim when he gets annoyed, insulted, or offended. Find a caged monkey, and poke him through the bars with a stick, jeering at him because the bars prevent him from retaliating. That is one way to play the game.
The other way is to sling a calculated racist insult at White Boy, then laugh and jeer at White Boy for being insulted, under the theory that to be the victim of a racist insult make the victim the racist, not the racists slinging the insult.
The scoring system is simple: you get points no matter what White Boy does.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
