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As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.
There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.
I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.
The place where that became unrealistic to me was how stupidly Saruman behaved after he got news the ring had been destroyed. The Shire under his control, like everywhere else in Middle Earth, would have felt the reverberations from the destruction of the ring and the fall of Sauron. Saruman would absolutely have known that the Fellowship hobbits were going to return back home soon (knowing their temprament and desire for domestic life) and would fight him for control there.
The very first thing a smart Saruman would have done would have been to completely ethnically cleanse the entire Shire of hobbits by genociding them all (and we know that by this point he was evil enough to do so) and replacing them with Uruk-Hai, so that when the inevetable battle happened at least the locals would side with him instead of against him. And if you read the chapter you'd quickly realise that the fellowship hobbits wouldn't have been able to muster their successful rebellion had there been no more living local hobbits left.
For whatever reason Tolkien didn't write the chapter in this way though... Perhaps it would have been even more anticlimatic than The Scouring of the Shire is on its own, but it would definitely have been more realistic.
With what forces? Saruman was not keeping spare army in case he would lose.
Yeah, when Saruman had power and was building up his forces, his immediate aims were to get Rohan under control (and he did that by using Grima to undermine Theoden, not by marching in a conquering force) and then move on to Gondor, all the while sucking up to Sauron who, justifiably, didn't trust him not to be planning some backstabbing of his own if he ever got his hands on the One Ring.
Even if he had wanted to, he couldn't move his own Uruk-Hai army into the Shire without Sauron's knowledge and permission, which I doubt he would have obtained as Sauron would have seen this (again, correctly) as Saruman trying to build up his own base of power.
Besides, Saruman wasn't planning for "what happens after Sauron is defeated", his entire rationale for throwing in with Sauron was that he was convinced he was going to come out the winner, and Saruman wanted to be on the winning side. He had lost all his wisdom, and wasn't capable of foreseeing that the Hobbits would survive and come out the victors and he would therefore need to be three moves ahead in destroying their homeland. He didn't see this because he didn't want to see this, he wanted the position as trusted viceroy after the victory of Sauron.
When he was overthrown, and therefore wanted revenge, he had lost all his powers. Gandalf had stripped him of everything, so that all that remained to him was the ability to persuade others, and to pick up what shreds of control that remained to him. Due to using Lotho as a catspaw, he was able to introduce his band of Ruffians into the Shire first under the guise of 'post-war reconstruction' and then, as he tightened his grip on power there, to do away with Lotho altogether:
EDIT: As an aside, this bit always kills me, Saruman just casually throwing it out there that there may not even be a body to bury because Wormtongue cannabalised Lotho: Buried him, I hope; though Worm has been very hungry lately. And people say there's nothing dark in Tolkien, it's just simple Good Guys versus Bad Guys (and racially-coded bad guys, if we go with the progressive critiques).
Saruman had been much more occupied with foiling Gandalf, who even as far back as the events of "The Hobbit" (as retconned) was worried about the return of Sauron, and Saruman had to work in secret there since suddenly popping up with an Uruk-Hai army would have revealed all too early. There were other reasons that Saruman couldn't simply march an Orc army into the Shire, thanks to the restoration of the Kingdom under the Mountain and the Dale men:
From Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, Part III: The Third Age, III: The Quest of Erebor:
This isn't my reading. By the time the Fellowship reach Rohan, Saruman has already attempted to double-cross Sauron (by attacking the Fellowship at Rauros with the intention of stealing the Ring and taking it to Isengard). See this Brett Devereaux post for why Saruman's plan was very unlikely to work. My understanding is that the Unfinished Tales confirm this reading, and that Saruman had been actively concealing the likely location of the Ring (which he had guessed based on Gandalf's excessive interest in the Shire) from Sauron several years before the events of LOTR - with the implication that the offer made to Gandalf before imprisoning him (to join in a Saruman-led scheme to use the Ring to defeat Sauron and seize power for themselves) was sincere.
Isn't Saruman at lower level of divine pyramid (or how it's called?) than Sauron and cannot defeat him in any case?
I believe Sauron, Sarumon, and Gandalf were all Istari and one step below the Valar (who were second to Erú Illuvatar himself); Sauron worked directly for Morgoth, and the Istari worked for the other Valar.
Mostly right. The first group of beings under Eru Iluvatar were the Ainur, some of whom migrated to Middle Earth. The greater powers among the Ainur in Middle Earth became known as the Valar, which included Melkor (later Morgoth), Manwe, Varda, Aule, Yavanna, etc. The lesser powers among the Ainur were the Maiar, which included the original versions of Sauron, Saruman, and Gandalf under other names (Meiron, Curunir, and Olorin, IIRC).
The Istari (aka Wizards) were a group of five Maiar who were incarnated into human guises and sent to Middle Earth as the representatives of the Valar in response to the evils of Sauron (Saruman and Gandalf are the narratively most important of the Istari). Saruman vs. Sauron heads-up is probably a Sauron-wins, unless Saruman has the Ring, though both would be operating at non-peak Maiar power for different reasons. (After all, Sauron without the Ring pretty clearly had the upper hand mind-to-mind across the Palantir connection, and neither party should have a native advantage in that environment.)
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