In the accident lies necessity. To be more precise, the Ring's own drive to domination turns against itself.
One of the reasons I keep harping on Tolkien (to the dismay of some on this list) is that he's such a keen reader of the ideologies of Empire. Everything in the Ring story is a weirdly distorted (I'm tempted to say, Hegelian) anagram of the crumbling Pax Britannica: the orcs *are* the elves, the Eastern threat *is* Western colonialism, Sauron's all-encompassing Eye *is* the all-consuming Capitalist "I". The ending is the self-renunciation of the Empire's symbolic Id (Gollum, the English yeoman peasant-turned-imperial lackey), which melts into the fires of collective mobilization. That's the limit of Tolkien's narrative, of course - he can't really imagine what that mobilization would look like. (It would look like 1968.)
> Both Kerry and Bush are
> going to try to fight the drawdown by soaking the poor
> to keep the military boondoggle going
No question. It's just that the terrain will be more favorable with Kerry in there than with the current bunch of petro-fundamentalist ghouls.
-- DRR