Chomsky & Zinn on LOTR

If you want a laugh at the expense of the revisionist left, check out McSweeney's unused commentary on The Return of the King, with Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Quite funny... here's an exerpt:

CHOMSKY: By the looks of it, these proto-Hobbits, Déagol and Sméagol, seem to enjoy modest pursuits such as fishing, laughing, wrestling.
ZINN: Choking, biting.
CHOMSKY: Which is an understandable reaction to the sudden appearance of excess wealth in a subsistence economy. The ring may not be magical, but it is made of gold.
ZINN: It's true. One shiny trinket is tossed into these creatures' lives and immediately you see the malodorous aftereffects of economic inequality, which is enacted here on a disturbingly intimate scale.
CHOMSKY: If the story ended here after Sméagol strangles Déagol, I think we'd have a really brilliant—almost Dreiserian—economic critique...

CHOMSKY: Have you noticed that there are few consonants in any of these names? What we see—or perhaps I should say, "What we hear"—is a kind of linguistic hierarchy.
ZINN: Between that of an Orcish name such as Grishnák and a Mannish name such as Eowyn, you mean?
CHOMSKY: Eowyn is hardly a name at all—it's just a series of dipthongs. When the Elves or wizards or their deluded human pawns have consonants in their names at all, they're mostly alveolar approximants or labiodental fricatives. Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas.
ZINN: Whereas the Orcs—
CHOMSKY: They get saddled with clotted sequences of nasals, velar plosives, and occasional palato-alveolar affricates. It's quite extraordinary. The abstract vowels in the overlords' names are clearly being valued at the expense of the more earthly consonants...

ZINN: We've been accused of being Orc apologists. I don't think that's fair.
CHOMSKY: I admire their pluck and I'm impressed by their loyalty to one another and their homeland, but I don't want to glorify them either. For example—
ZINN: The Orcish hazing that goes on.
CHOMSKY: Yes, Orcs do seem to haze one another. Calling each other "slugs" and "maggots," and what have you.
ZINN: But they're pulled from the earth. Being called a slug or a maggot might not be such a bad thing from the Orcish perspective. In the end, we shouldn't be talking about humanizing Orcs. Perhaps we should be talking about Orcanizing humans.
CHOMSKY: There's a movement I could get behind.

McSweeney's, as always, has lots more worthwhile reading online.