Tim
Costello (who is nobody’s fool) was recently asked whether he thought
his brother would ever be Prime Minister. He gave a wry and elegant
answer that played with the notion of the difficulty of relinquishing
power in the saga of the Lord of the Rings.
As we know, one of Tolkien’s central themes is the addictive quality of
power. Even the good and gentle Frodo is vulnerable to its poison; and
Gollum is transformed absolutely, becoming a slave to the power behind
the Ring and losing both his integrity and his physical self in the
process.
It was a playful answer, but (in the way of good playful answers) a
suggestive one as well. Middle Earth is not a democracy, but the
metaphor is oddly evocative: the notion of power as addictive resonates
strongly in our present political climate. John Howard clearly finds it
so. Never did cornered rat fight so desperately as Howard is fighting,
now that he sees that the Ring must be passed on, and perhaps soon.
Even those of us who believe Howard’s stewardship of our country has
diminished its character and quality admit that he is a good fighter.
Yet there has been a manic element in his fighting of late — especially
over those mid-September days when he so nearly lost the leadership —
that’s not quite the same as before. He seems urgent and so frantic.
There’s a new red light in his eyes. It’s so — well, so Gollum-like. He
can’t give up his Precious. It’s his Precious, yess it iss, and he’s
not giving it up to anybody, not yet. Not to Rudd, not to Costello. Not
to anybody.
And that’s the thing about Tolkien: he reveals power not simply as
addictive but as corrupting and deadly. Of course this is no news to
anyone. But Tolkien shows its gradual acid erosion, its unexpected
toxins and scarcely-perceptible inroads, the way it creeps into your
bones, thins your blood and blurs your vision. We might ask ourselves
whether the 'Ring' oughtn’t to have been yanked off our Prime
Minister’s finger some time ago, so that someone else might be allowed
to put a new perspective on things.
Let us imagine that a Ring was placed on Howard’s finger when he became
Prime Minister. What harm might it have done over the past eleven
years? What promises might it have caused to be broken? What characters
might it have twisted? What judgments might it have corroded and what
vision smeared?
Could
it have explained the non-core promises, the quarter-truths, the
evasions, the multiplicity of duplicities? On seeing