The the resident Goddess of Snark at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, thinks that Christine O’Donnell lives in a fantasy world. Sneering at O’Donnell’s interest in J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis says more about Dowd’s isolation from normal Americans than it does about the GOP senate candidate from Delaware. If she bothered to check she would see that the two Oxford Inklings are amongst the best selling authors of all time. Their works have profoundly influenced tens of millions of lives and in spite of the critics, are major touchstones of 20th century literature.

tolkien

It is not surprising that Dowd regards Tolkien and Lewis as her cultural enemies; they may be dead and gone but the emanations of their penumbras threaten her in ways that she may sense, but that she is probably afraid to examine deeply. Maybe its the fact that the Lord of the Rings has sold more than 150 million copies. Maybe its the fact that it, like the works of C.S. Lewis, celebrate the values of courage, honor, loyalty, friendship and patriotism. Or just maybe, its that her peers really believed in the inevitable rise to power, of what in the late 1960s and early 1970s was called the counterculture. Millions of students, hippies and other freaks were reading Tolkien and absorbing his ideas and rejecting those of the New Left.

C.S. Lewis never gained the cult status of Tolkien, but his books have had an influence on this culture that no purely secular writer can hope to obtain. He may have died almost 47 years ago, but to the anti-religious elites he is still the object of their hatred. He did after all, write some of the most enduring stories about Christianity and about humanity’s relationship with God. If Christine O’Donnell is a fan of Lewis, it indicates to the New York Times that something is seriously wrong with her.

Lewis

What Dowd’s column shows is that the split in that emerged in the early seventies between the New Left and the Hippies never really went away. Dowd, like Willam Ayers or Abbie Hoffman or some other almost forgotten radical leader, has never really forgiven the Hippies for not being revolutionaries, for preferring the dubious joys of sex drugs and rock and roll to the exquisite pleasures of political power.

In the Age of Reagan, the New Leftists retreated to the universities and the Hippies melted away into the background (only to remerge in Eric Cartman’s nightmares.) Many of them, influenced in part by Tolkien, switched sides and supported Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984. The old actor represented courage and idealism in ways that neither Carter nor Mondale could ever hope to do. It may be this that frightens Ms. Dowd more than anything else.

Christie O’Donnell’s messy life, her search for transcendence, her idealism and her open religiosity remind anyone who even vaguely remembers the 1960s and 1970s.

Of the real, as opposed to imaginary “Hippie Chicks” of the era, Dowd may put O’Donnell down as “loopy” but she represents something that the older members of the cultural elite once had a powerful influence over. Those girls were used and abused in ways that few today remember, but that marked them and their generation forever.

In the anti- Vietnam War movement, the call “Chicks up front” and the slogan “Girls say yes to boys who say no” were powerful tools. The use of sex and sexual imagery as a weapon to helped defeat America and South Vietnam and to bring the Khmer Rouge to power may have been successful but it had a price. It is well known that the resentments it created helped bring the modern feminist movement into existence. What is less well known was that it left behind tens of thousands of spiritually and emotionally wounded women. This was hinted at in the movie Forrest Gump, but otherwise has rarely been mentioned.

In the end, it may be ironic if those women, ignored and scorned for so many years now, are ultimately vindicated by the improbable figure of Christine O’Donnell.