the anti-Viggo

Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies has been a favorite of mine since his portrayal of Sallah in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I've recently discovered a few more reasons to appreciate him, however.

In July he and Sean Astin were guests of honor at the GenCon geekfest in Indianapolis. I wasn't able to make it up that day, but TheOneRing.net helpfully provides a (long) transcript of his Q&A session. Highlights follow.

On our current war:

[Tolkien] was at the first battle of the Somme. The British army in the first day of the first battle of the Somme I think probably had 20,000 dead and maybe 60 or 80,000 wounded. And that was the first day. You don't go through that sort of furnace without having to ask yourself questions: Why are we fighting? Is the cause we're fighting for a just one? How can I justify the deaths of those men that I'm leading? And I think that Tolkien found a justification for it. His justification is that there are certain times when your civilization is challenged and if you do not meet that challenge and overcome it, you will lose your civilization.

And I think that there's a terrible resonance between that period of time and our period now. I do think that our civilization is being challenged. We've been challenged internally because I think we've lost so much character, moral fiber, decency, integrity, and I think it's being challenged partly, because we have lost those, externally by fundamental Islam. And I think that if we do not pull ourselves together and recognize that that challenge is there, we're going to end up with people taking a hammer to the Pieta and to the, you know, defacing pictures and portraits in the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But you Americans I think are further along the way of realizing that. I actually think that you're morally a stronger country than Britain is. I'm appalled by what I see in England these days. There was a time when an Englishman's word was his bond and an Englishman didn't steal. Even Welshmen. (laughter) The little town where I live in Wales, well not far from where I used to live in Wales, has one of the highest rates of carjacking in the world. More cars are stolen from Exely and Swansea and places like that than almost any other part of the world, including Bogotá and places like that. I'm ashamed and embarrassed by that but you know, unless we start to affirm that we are not going to steal, that we will not put up with theft, that we will not put up with drug-taking, we will lose our society, and then perhaps it will be for the best that fundamental Islam, which forbids these things, sweeps across the world. I personally dread that thought. I hope one day that I will have great-granddaughters and I am very adamant and determined that one should not lose one's daughter's fingernails to the local Taliban if she dares to paint them.

The resonance between Lord of the Rings and present time is that we need people of courage to take the real challenge to our civilization and meet it head-on and win.

Well. Take that, Martin Sheen. And there's this, too, in response to a question on the possibility of Welsh autonomy (not all geeks have narrow interests):

[The Welsh] are an independent culture, we have our own language. We certainly don't see the breakup of the United Kingdom as being a benefit to anybody, and we see it as a real disadvantage, actually. Scots independence? I think it might make sense for them, but I think it's a disaster for the rest of us, really. Do you realize how much blood was shed uniting the kingdom? I don't know; I see that there's a process going on in Europe of breaking Britain down into sort of small, easily-divided communities and I think this is very deliberately designed to eliminate Britain from having any real say in Europe. But I'm talking politics now and I shouldn't be talking politics, but I think it's a disaster.

More recently JRD has been giving interviews mainly discussing The Return of the King and the DVD release of the Indiana Jones trilogy. The Houston Chronicle has one, complete with the following picture:

Bless you, sir. (Link via TORn.)

Just for kicks, let's compare this with the attitudes of one of Rhys-Davies' The Lord of the Rings costars, namely Viggo Mortensen. Last fall he was all over the media proclaiming his anti-war stance, perhaps most notably on Charlie Rose, where the host was put in the unfamiliar position of defending the US against the charge that the liberation of Afghanistan was somehow analogous to the depredations of Saruman. Had this site been around then, I would surely have commented; fortunately, Tony Woodlief has the goods.

Or, in the immortal words of James Lileks: “Viggo? An airhead and a lousy painter, but just the man for The Lord of the Rings movies. Two thumbs up!”

UPDATE: More here.

God, how could you call John Rhys-Davies the "anti-Viggo"? Granted, they're two very different people but putting it like that is just demeaning to Viggo Mortensen. He's not an "airhead" ... unless airheads write meaningful poetry and take photographs as a hobby ...

Nancy,

I certainly don't call everyone who disagreed with the war in Iraq "airheads," although many do seem rather daft. But: those who argue that our actions in Afghanistan were immoral--that, in effect, we should have left those good people to the tender mercies of the Taliban--are in serious need of a paradigm transplant.

And Viggo falls into that latter category. See the above link to Tony Woodlief's site for details. (Note that his comments on Charlie Rose were not atypical, though I don't have links to other examples at hand.)

regards,

--Anthony