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Those are interesting points on Tolkien, Cynique. I think some readers and writers in the past found the whole craze for Middle Earth silly. Dune is a more sophisticated book with a similiar concern for the earth. Was never satisified with the film adaptations of Dune, though the films are entertaining. I know there is a famous Harlan Ellison dismissal of Tolkien but Ellison is known for his bluntness if not his meanness. I think he was wrong about the books. The books are better because you get all this love of nature. Being a city boy I got a taste of it too roaming about the wilds of Edenwald or rather Seton Falls Park. Deep enough in the park one could almost feel what it was like when the Indians lived there because the city noises of trucks, cars and buses were muffled. In Winter, Summer, fall and Spring. I don't think I could've enjoyed the books without getting a little taste of the woodland right across from the library. This was after we had moved further north. We had lived on the edge of the South Bronx and could smell the burning. Yes, black authors and message boards are full of rich discussions on this topic. I shared my research on the Sumerians on one such site and a few whites there rejected it. Blacks there assumed that's what "blackheaded" meant--black people. Unfortunately some websites that deal with this issue in terms of racial identity damage the historical search for the truth while offering up the evidence. Maybe I am conflicted but I'm against black people in particular accepting something imposed on them by racism. But it's a Catch 22 situation and a political one. How can you call yourself a human being only when the tribe or land you came from is no more. I think native Americans feel more keenly a nostalgia for their lost reality. The African slaves brought here lost theirs completely. The Sumerians also called themsevels the People of the Land. Races as you can see with Tolkien is a white thing. Race identity is very real to whites. Modern Egyptians and the History Channel don't want to or can't acknowledge it even as a possilbity that those earlier Egyptains were blacks of the negro type. Something happened in the fertile garden of the Sahara. Then there is the Nubian connections. Recent studies show a bias against darker skin even in very young white children, children grow up to be academics, historians etc. So the History Channel will quote Herotodus on mummification in one breath but show lily white modern Egyptians in the role of the Ancient ones despite Herotodus' descriptions of people who fit the catagory of blacks today or some versions of them. And of course you probably have seen the Ancient Egyptian depictions of races in terms of color and physique yet is this from a later generation? The evidence in the sculpture seems not to be enough. Oprah Winfrey years ago had a show that revealed how easy it was to go from black to white in terms of mixing out, passing white. And one drop of black blood could make even the whitest person black. Whites can look at King Tut and not see a negro type. Amazing. And Jefferson's mix race offspring come to mind. Jefferson never acknowledged them. I guess I'm interested in it for the sake of the truth rather than identity. I'm not sure most black working class people care all that much about it the way some whites care about accurately translating Tolkien's book to the screen. I did like how Micheal Jackson used this afrocentric point of view in one of his videos. For modern Egyptians it is there post colonial nationalism of course and the pride that one feels for being accepted as having had a civlized past unlike the lie of Africans to the south not having any and this despite Islam's antagonism towards pagan shrines and idols. And if we want to skip Ancient Egypt, there is the whole Medieval period of African kingdoms south of Egypt. In some parts of Asia the Islamists have blown up pagan idols. Your point about the children forsaking their greatgreat grandparents is interesting, too, and reminds me of something Dr. Clark said about the immense age of the Ancient Egyptians and how like all powerful civilizations, even the shorter lived Roman empire, they reached a point of exhaustion. Shelley's poem Ozymandias comes to mind. I've not watched Games of Thrones, for various reasons I won't get into here, I'm blattering on and on enough. I do find Tyler Perry's The Have and Have Nots fascinating despite its overthetop soap opera or operatic and Dickensian melodrama. I'm not too fond of his comedies but he is a very talented writer and filmmaker. Cops, soldiers, and comedians are three of the standard types we most often see for blacks in mainstream films. I like and have enjoyed some of the interesting roles given to blacks on Boardwalk Empire, though the show is unrelentingly bleak in favor of the negative side of those times, it doesn't show the positive efforts of working people to achieve a better standard of living, for example, everyone is basically corrupted, even Nucky's exwife Margaret wasn't allowed to escape untainted by corruption. In other respects it captures the sensiblity of those times in which people could enjoy fairground lynchings. Empire is powerful and well made art and anything that references the Wizard of Oz in such a subtle way--I'm big fan of Baum--is something to see. I consider myself a humanist in the liberal arts sense, a true liberal rather than what the word seems to mean with its association with neo-liberialism now. Maybe I don't know what it means. I can't be a radical because radicals become too selfrighteous and have in the past made a terrible mess of things, the Soviet Union being a perfect example of good intentions going wrong. I don't like selfrighteousness and I must watch it in myself. All ideologies tend towards extremism. I may be an elitist or would be one, ironically so since my origins is working class and I'm barely literate myself. I believe most of all that people should first be able to think critically for themselves, they don't need vanguards and such--"don't follow leaders watch the parking meters." Class and art and who gets it, who makes it is quite a question, a dificult topic. The serious literary author as some kind of taste maker is perhaps extinct. I know I dismiss rap music off hand, partly because I think it lacks tender feelings unlike R&B, one Gladys Knight & The Pips record is worth a million rap records in my book. And why don't more ordinary working class blacks like Jimi Hendrix? Rap throws the baby out with the bath water, though it developed in the Bronx my reactions to it was sorta of snobbish, I'll admit. It's a modern form or a black form of the art of flyting. The sound is the sound of boasting. Rap seems to represent crude responses rather than more intellectual and complex ones and unlike older black folklore or storytelling it doesn't appeal to me. There is something flawed in it that I'll need to put my finger on to make sense of it here or elsewhere. No doubt about it, it's popular and seems to fit in nicely with commerical sensiblities. It and this extreme super-escapism that seems to have taken over films in particular is not healthy. It was harmless in comics but with special effects films that can do what only comics used to do, well...Superpeople are not going to save us. By the way, for me, the best Marvel adaptation was the first Hulk film, though I would've adapted it even more against the grain. I like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's Black Panther and Kirby's attempt at the character in the 1970s, though the books are flawed for various reasons. I did collect the Biilly Graham issues, too, and also collected Luke Cage. Eventually novels replaced comics. But when I discovered the Comics Journal and saw that comics don't have to be just superheroes, my interest in them was renewed. I'm one weird elitist!