It seems hard to remember now that there was a time when the American counterculture embraced J.R.R. Tolkien and his masterpiece. Groovy dudes in pipe-weed jerkins yelling “Go Go Gandalf,” walls covered with graffiti proclaiming “Frodo Lives!”, and election-year “Gandalf for President” buttons were all popular sights on college campuses from Harvard to Berkeley.

The author himself was properly repulsed by the hippie movement (and indeed, by what he saw as the entire slovenly depths of American culture in general), and late in life began referring to their nightmare world of antiwar riots and hedonism as “this Fallen Kingdom of Arda, where the servants of Morgoth are worshipped.” But it was not only our side of the pond that gave him grief: he watched aghast as his work became so superficially popular and grossly misunderstood among the hip and the mod in Great Britain that the Beatles expressed a desire to star in a film version of The Lord of the Rings, complete with Stanley Kubrick directing!

It was Gandalf himself who warned Saruman that, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.” But that little nugget of common sense, and virtually everything else that made the book special, was passed over by those who were trying to snort, smoke, and screw their way out from under the thumb of The Man and Western Civ. Tolkien considered the free-love drug mob and its associated subgroups “cults of faineance and filth” that mindlessly smashed everything Old and Noble and Sacred while simultaneously embracing everything New, Hip, and Easygoing, all in a foolish, futile attempt to deconstruct and experiment their way to an earthly Utopia. Unlike so many from that crazed era, the man who decades earlier had laboriously penned Frodo’s arduous journey to Mount Doom knew better than to grant hippie pipe-dreams intellectual or spiritual credence.

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In the classic manner of series television, the USA Network’s latest new dramedy, White Collar (Fridays at 10 EST), smartly combines elements common to numerous other contemporary TV crime dramas, especially other USA Network shows, in a way calculated to maximize both familiarity and originality. Thus we have at the center of the show a pair of characters of strongly contrasting personalities but similar values under the surface differences, working together to do good.

Convicted confidence artist, forger, and counterfeiter Neal Caffrey (Matt Bomer) is released from prison (and shackled with an electronic tracking device) in order to assist FBI agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) in catching other criminals. As in the 1960s TV series It Takes a Thief, Caffrey is young, handsome, single, insouciant, creative, and free-spirited, and his FBI handler is more mature, less handsome, and more conventional and stable. (more…)