I think articles like this one not only don't help the PO education effort, but actually hurt it slightly.

First of all, Tolkein has an interesting place as an author, in that a large percentage of mainstreamers know of him and/or his work, but have had their fill of both.  This is no doubt due in large part to way people still fawn over the movies, and is not a comment on the man or his work; it's just an observation about people reaching their saturation level.

Second, this kind of extended riff on "look at what a Great Person said about stuff that has haunting similarities to our situation" convinces almost no one.  It might play well with the already converted, but to many mainstreamers it sounds like a love child formed by the unholy union of a bad conspiracy theory and too many nights reading fantasy literature while stoned.  

It could have been worse; imagine a Star Wars, Star Trek, tarot card, Nostradamus, or Babylon 5 version.  If you just flinched, then you had exactly the same reaction I bet a lot of other people will have when reading the Ring article.

(Before you load up the catapult with a dead cow and aim it in my direction, let me say that I have a great love of fiction, particularly SF, albeit less so for fantasy.  I'm a published SF writer, in fact, with three dreadful stories in Analog.  So I'm not one of those two-dimension morons who "doesn't get" speculative fiction (SF&F); rather, I'm one one of those two-dimensional morons who likes it enough that I wanted to write it for a living, and actually convinced myselg it was a possible career path.  What, you thought economists sat around all day arguing about demand curves and Fed. policy?)

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On a totally different topic, did anyone else notice that from the Sept. to Oct. newsletters ASPO pushed their PO estimate from 2007 to 2010?  Must have been that case of 10W30 Colin Campbell found in his closet.