Daily Archives: August 2, 2022

If anything good has come out of the COVID-19 pandemic it is the growing awareness by parents across the nation about what is being taught in schools. This is especially true concerning civic education. For decades, a crisis has existed over the decline of civic education. Numerous surveys and studies have shown that at all grade levels, including higher education, students do not have an adequate understanding of American history, American government, or Western civilization. Reform is needed to strengthen civic education in Iowa schools and the National Association of Scholars has issued social studies standards a guide for curriculum in each classroom that will help improve civic education in Iowa. "American Birthright: The Civic Alliances Model K-12 Social Studies Standards" is a guide to help improve standards in civic education.

Jeffrey Sikkenga, executive director of the Ashbrook Center, described the crisis in civic education as a civic illness.

The results make clear that too many young people around the country dont know the basic facts of U.S. history and government. More important, they also dont adequately understand the fundamental principles that guide our country, Sikkenga wrote.

Numerous reasons exist for the growing national unfamiliarity of American history. One reason is the focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) education. Over the last several years, education at all levels has been pushing STEM. Sikkenga notes that educational taxpayer funds and state and federal standards are focusing more on STEM. The argument being made is that STEM and technical education fields prepare students for todays workforce. Our society needs more skilled workers, but we also need informed citizens.

Although STEM and technical education is valuable, education is more than just preparing an individual with the necessary skills to succeed in an occupation. Education must also be about character, citizenship and liberty.

History isnt just something that ought to be taught, read, or encouraged only because it will make us better citizens. It will make us a better citizen and it will make us more thoughtful and understanding human beings, historian David McCullough said.

Many schools are using radical curriculums that reflect a socialist interpretation of our nations history. Increasingly, students are displaying significant support for dangerous ideologies such as socialism. This politicization of civic education also includes critical race theory, political correctness, and multiculturalism, among other themes. Students are taught that they are global citizens rather than citizens of the United States. Many students are being exposed to action civics, which encourages activism and hands on democracy.

During the past few years, many Americans were shocked at the reckless behavior of young people destroying and defacing historical statues and memorials. This, combined with an organized effort to destroy and replace American history with a new history such as the 1619 Project, is a dangerous development. A comprehensive review is needed to ensure that all students are learning American history, but also American government, and Western civilization.

The American Birthright social studies standards can serve as a model to improve Iowas social studies standards. The goal of American Birthright is to educate students so they can know what freedom is, where Americas ideas of freedom come from in the long history of Western civilization, how our ancestors achieved their freedom, how our laws, republican institutions, and limitation of the scope of government preserve our freedom, and what they need to do to preserve their countrys liberty.

Further, this standard serves to teach social studies so students can learn why their country deserves to be loved, and to learn what we owe to our ancestors the heroes of the American past who deserve our gratitude because they created a free and prosperous country and bequeathed it to us, their posterity. This also includes learning about Americas common language of liberty, patriotism, and national memory.

The objective of education should not just be about obtaining skills for an occupation, but also to be a responsible and informed citizen. Therefore, we need to renew and strengthen civic education in Iowa. We have a responsibility to our ancestors and for future generations to preserve our great Republic and heritage.

Citizens and state policymakers should get in touch with Iowas Department of Education to urge them to adopt American Birthright as the model for Iowas state social studies standards. Parents should get in touch with their school district to urge it to adopt American Birthright as a guide for their social studies curriculum.

The decline of civic education is a moral crisis that we must resolve. In "The Death of the West," Patrick J. Buchanan wrote: How does one sever a peoples roots? Answer: Destroy its memory. Deny a people the knowledge of who they are and where they came from . . . Destroy the record of a peoples past, leave it in ignorance of who its ancestors were and what they did, and one can fill the empty vessels of their souls with a new history . . .

David Randall, Ph.D. serves as Research Director at the National Association of Scholars and John Hendrickson serves as Policy Director at Iowans for Tax Relief Foundation.

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Op-Ed: Reviving civic education in Iowa - The Center Square

WITH each passing week, more and more conservatives in the United States are being made aware of KemiBadenoch.

She first came to my attention in October 2020 when she gave a very powerful, compelling, and rightfully critical speech on the floor of the House of Commons.

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She was speaking about the identity-politics pitfalls of critical race theory which is being pushed incessantly by the left and far-left on both sides of the pond.

In a number of important ways, I share her valued life experiences from the opposite end of the colour spectrum.

As a white child I grew up in abject poverty and was homeless often - and by the time I was 17 years of age, I had been evicted from 34 homes.

After a number of those evictions I found myself in majority black housing projects where I was often one of the few or the only white child in my class.

During those early childhood years my black friends and I never saw colour.

We were simply disenfranchised children fighting against the common enemies of poverty at large and dysfunction in our homes.

During those formative years, I was blessed to witness that black America was truly a great America.

Again, it was ultimately just families, single parents, and children who had been abandoned by the system fighting to survive while trying to create slivers of normalcy along the way.

To this very day, my enduring heroes and role models are the single black mums I knew who sacrificed their own happiness for their children as they worked two to three jobs at a time.

All of that begs the question: What is real-life experience worth in and to todays political class?

As in the Congress of the United States, many members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords come from great wealth often far removed from the everyday plight and even horrors of the majority of their constituents.

But then, every once in a while, a child in favour ofthe working class manages to gain entrance to these highly exclusive clubs of power and privilege.

What to do with them?

The wiser heads within those chambers should be picking the brains of these lower class interlopers as often as possible to absorb as much of their real-life experience as possible.

Why?

Because, in the real lives of those living under the dictates of the entrenched-elite power-players, real-life experience can literally be life-saving.

Aside from her formal education,KemiBadenoch has the unofficial, but greatly more important, Doctorate in real-life experience.

London-born and raised in Nigeria, Kemi came back to the United Kingdom at age 16 and began to work any and every menial job to support herself as she set her eyes on that formal education.

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Since joining the Conservative Party at 25 years old, she has never been shy about articulating her views.

I would certainly argue that her real-life experience has taught her that the welfare of the people should never be about the identity politics pushed by the elites from the left but rather about the needs of the actual people.

Over the last few years, this mother of three and wife has made it crystal clear that she is a multi-issue advocate who refuses to be labelled or dismissed because of the biases or ignorance of others.

Along with that, she has drawn deep lines in the sand to state that she is not only pro-Brexit, but anti-woke and anti-cancel-culture.

Additionally, Ms. Badenoch is courageously unafraid to question the fossil-fuel crushing dictates of pampered green loving leftists which not only punish the working-class, but will eventually bankrupt the economy of the United Kingdom (as well as that of the United States).

What my life experiences have taught me over the years is that the extremists at either end of the political spectrum often hate honest, pragmatic, commonsense solutions which benefit the vast majority of the people.

That same experience also tells me that Ms. Badenoch is a truth-teller who does believe in doing the most good for the vast majority of her country.

As she battles the tsars of political correctness; identity politics; wokeness; and questionable or outright fraudulently green energy policies, I for one, will be rooting for her success.

For if Ms. Badenoch succeeds, the poor, the working-class, and the disenfranchised will have a champion looking after them for a change.

As will the people of The United States.

Douglas MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the book:The 56 Liberty Lessons from those who risked all to sign The Declaration of Independence.

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Kemi may not be next PM but she oozes real-life experience & will be a champion for working people a... - The US Sun

Whenever there is a strike especially during that four-year period when the Labour party was led by people who actually supported labour rightwing figures will rush to the airwaves to insist: Nobody wants a return to the 70s.

To them, the 1970s were a nightmare: organised labour wielded too much power, uppity minorities were demanding too many rights, prime-time television was full of dreary dramas about the working classes or documentaries about racism, the Thames full of punk bands yelling about republicanism. All had to be crushed, and following the neoliberal revolution that took place after Margaret Thatchers election in 1979, they were.

Now we live in a country with the most restrictive trade union legislation in western Europe, a soon-to-be-privatised alternative broadcaster (Channel 4) that makes documentaries attacking people on benefits and a pop culture dominated by privately-educated people who wouldnt know how to bring social critique into their work even if they wanted to.

For the left, this Tory nightmare might sound like a reasonable starting point for a better society. But we beware nostalgia. Yes, people were pushing for better wages, working conditions, gender and racial equality. But many facets of Thatcherism, such as high unemployment, council house sales and rampant deindustrialisation were already in place. Society was more violent, car accidents killed far more people and industrial accidents, fires and transport disasters were far more frequent. Chart-toppers were just as anodyne and apolitical as they are now, and television was full of racist sitcoms and bad light entertainment programmes hosted by serial abusers. Just as there is leftwing nostalgia for high unionisation rates and regicidal punk bands, so too is there rightwing nostalgia for this side of the 1970s, an era when it was acceptable to use homophobic slurs on TV, before news presenters with regional accents, before #MeToo, political correctness, corporate social responsibility and health and safety turned men soft. While the left associates the end of the 70s with economic revolution, the right sees it as having heralded a cultural revolution. In both cases, the changes were cemented by New Labour.

Any revolution or counter-revolution will weaponise the memory of the period immediately preceding it to emphasise its legitimacy. (For a parallel of the Tories invocation of the British 70s, see the reaction against the Soviet period and attendant removal of monuments and banning of socialist or Communist parties in Poland or Ukraine, as their market reforms brought spiralling inequality and a resurgent far right.) Over time, this tactic becomes less effective: you would have to be of retirement age now to have been an adult during the three-day week, the Bloody Sunday massacre or the UKs entry into the European Economic Community, and these were the people who overwhelmingly voted Conservative at the last election. The older middle-aged whom Labour lost between 2017 and 2019 might be nostalgic for their childhoods. Anyone under 45 will have no recollection of the 1970s at all, and in a period of unaffordable rents and mortgages, insecure employment and an aggressively unintelligent media, may think it sounds better.

Indeed, a desire to reverse Thatcherism, by renationalising key industries, building more council housing and increasing access to the arts lay behind Labours manifestos of 2017 and 2019. This only became possible after the membership voted for a leader who had criticised the neoliberal turn, ever since the installation in 1973 of Augusto Pinochet as Chilean president after the CIA-backed overthrow of democratically-elected leader Salvador Allende.

In Chile, the laboratory of neoliberalism, people have expressed a desire to go back to the early 1970s: leftist Gabriel Boric was recently elected on the promise of a new constitution to replace the existing one, written after the Pinochet coup. In the UK, in the wake of Corbyns defeat and the recapture of Labour by a Thatcherite wing which forbids solidarity with striking workers, neoliberalism has taken an authoritarian turn, as it can no longer manufacture consent since the 2008 crash and the punitive austerity that followed. Hence the hysterics about the rise of militant unions, new anti-protest laws, a spite-fuelled media ramping up its attacks on young people and minorities, especially those who might be better off than you, and ever more barbaric immigration and border policies. Any movement trying to undo the damage done to public services, the British media, trade unions and workers rights has a huge job on its hands, in terms of resistance from the two main parties, the state and corporate interests, all of which worked in concert to smash the Labour left.

Its notable, though, that the spectre of the 70s still terrifies the Conservatives, even those who didnt live through them. Opinion polling showed that Labours 2019 plans to roll back the privatisations of the 80s and 90s were popular, and it was the more 21st-century policies free broadband and the Green New Deal and demands such as John McDonnells for socialism with an iPad that attracted media ridicule. This week, Keir Starmer head of a faction stuck firmly in the 90s announced that the 2019 manifesto would be junked; despite some hesitancy, previous form suggests he will soon ditch promised nationalisation pledges altogether.

But Labour was led by the right in the 70s, albeit in a political order still shaped by the postwar reforms of the Attlee administration. What the 70s can teach us is the value of bringing pressure to bear on either party, whether it was the miners effectively bringing down Edward Heaths Conservative government in 1974 or Transport & General Workers Union general secretary Jack Jones being seen as the most powerful person in the UK in 1977, ahead of Labour prime minister James Callaghan. The recent wave of RMT activity, UCU strikes and proposed ballots elsewhere suggests a turn back towards institutions that will give workers power, and whose leaders will be far bolder than the Labour party in confronting the collapse of the neoliberal consensus.

Equally important is resisting the immunisation of the British media from public accountability, by building the lefts cultural power. When the Tories say nobody wants to go back to the 70s, they are also trying to dissuade people from revisiting a time when programmes about working-class people drew audiences of millions. The BBCs Play for Today drama series put films about the civil war in Northern Ireland, factional disputes within the Labour party, the experiences of the Windrush generation or of trans women in prime-time slots; ITV ran playwright Trevor Griffiths 11-part series Bill Brand (1976), about the struggles of a leftwing Labour MP, on at 9pm so that working people could see it, helping it to reach an audience of 11 million (The show was discontinued in 1984, having long been criticised by rightwing commentators. There was talk of reviving it in 2006, ex-journalist and comedian Michael Gove MP, later to be education secretary, derided the dramas as exercises in viewer patronisation; the proposal came to nothing.) Watching it back, Play for Today seems precisely the opposite, treating its viewers as intelligent, their lives worthy of dramatisation; they certainly strike a different note to The Crown or Downton Abbey.

Doubtless, a modern-day equivalent of any of these shows would not achieve anything like the same massive audiences in a streaming age. But the prominence and popularity in the 1970s of ideas-driven, formally inventive culture in the mainstream was not simply the consequence of there being nothing better to watch on the telly. Instead, it was the result of decades of work by the cultural democracy movement, in universities, trade unions, political parties and elsewhere. This provides another useful lesson (more useful, at least, than those offered by the I Love the 70s-type shows that focus on Space Hoppers and Super Noodles).

Having smashed the workers movement in the 80s, leading to a New Labour prime minister who boasted that he would leave British law the most restrictive on trade unions in the Western world, and a Tory government that tore public service broadcasting to shreds throughout the 2010s, the right has set its sights on reversing the social gains that came out of the 70s. At present, this is more obvious in the US than here, with the reversal of Roe v Wade leading many states to reinstate bans on abortion and plan attacks on equal marriage and trans healthcare. In the UK, refugees and migrants, Muslims and trans people are most under fire, as the right looks to divide minority groups to cement its rule. The civil rights movements of the 70s staged fierce debates about how intersectional to be, and sometimes kept their distance from organised labour or leftwing parties one way we can build on that legacy is to stress the importance of cooperation, with anti-racist, LGBTQ+ and feminist groups linking up with trade unions and other centres of workers power. That way, we can build the institutions we didnt have in the Corbyn period, giving us a better chance of success if we have another opportunity to win power, and in the meantime put pressure on the Conservatives. Its a massive task, but we shouldnt forget that 10 million people voted for the 2019 manifesto, and the difficulty that our media has had in discrediting Mick Lynch and the RMT should be a source of hope that, in the end, we might just be able to build on some of the promises of the 70s.

Juliet Jacques is a writer, filmmaker and academic based in London. Her most recent book, Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021, is available now from Cipher Press.

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Were the 70s Really That Great? - Novara Media

While responding to a trending Twitter hashtag that is calling for the boycott of his upcoming film Laal Singh Chaddha, actor Aamir Khan said, Please dont boycott my films, please watch them. The posts calling for a boycott of the film recalled a controversy from 2015 when Khan had said he was alarmed by the incidents of growing intolerance in India and that his then-wife Kiran Rao had suggested they should probably leave the country. Since then, the actor has been careful not to make a single controversial statement. Responding to calls that his new, much-awaited film be shunned, Khan said he loves India and requested fans to not think otherwise. I really love the country Thats how I am. It is rather unfortunate if some people feel that way. I want to assure everyone that its not the case so please dont boycott my films, please watch them, he added.

It is disappointing how boycott/cancel culture has evolved into a phrase that is all over the news and tossed around in numerous social media conversations like it is not a big deal.

The roots of cancel culture are concealed in a quest to attain some form of meaningful accountability from public figures who are typically answerable to no one. But after centuries of ideological debate turning over questions of free speech, censorship, and, in recent decades, political correctness, it was perhaps inevitable that the cancel culture debate has now become about how we communicate within a right versus the wrong framework.

The core concern of cancel culture accountability remains as crucial a topic as ever. However, the central question is not whether we can hold one another accountable, but how can we ever forgive.

While one part of the practice can mean re-investigating our past under newly forged restrictions, the practice of re-circulating Khans old statements ahead of each of his films releases seems a bit unfair. Because a movie never belongs to just its lead actors alone, thousands of workforce and creative minds put in hard work and time to bring out that magic on the silver screen. This cultural movement has dramatically impacted art. Hence, to decide the films fate even before its release seems quite unjust.

Allowing people to choose what they want to see ensures a vibrant artistic climate. And rather than trying to shut movies down before they reach the box office, activists should instead reach out to audience upon seeing the film and ask if the perspectives presented resonated with them or offended them instead.

At its worst, this boycott culture curtails speech. It threatens the longstanding fundamental freedom. If we limit speech by cancelling those we disagree with, other societal pillars also face peril. When expression is compromised, which freedom is next?

Within the realm of good faith, the cancel culture will produce conversation around these questions, combat wrong behaviour and promote social justice. But taken in bad faith, it will attack all even at the merest sign of dissent.

In an interview, Kareena Kapoor Khan, who plays the female lead in Laal Singh Chaddha, opened up about the boycott trend. She said, I am like Its a film and its going to release and everyone will have their opinion. So thats it. If its a good film, I believe that it will surpass anything, pretty much, the response will be good. I think that good films will surpass anything.

Khans grovelling public avowal of love and loyalty towards his country subsets his enormous contribution to Indian cinema. Perhaps Laal Singh Chaddha will get through the stern eye of bizarre offence-mongers, perhaps not, and only time will tell that. Meanwhile lets hope creative freedom survives the scrutiny and gets its due.

An official remake of Forrest Gump, Laal Singh Chaddha releases in theatres on 11 August.

Suggested Reading: The Conflict Of Cancel Culture: Is It A Catch-22 Situation?

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Laal Singh Chaddha: Is It Unfair To Call For Boycott Of Films Even Before Their Release? - SheThePeople

Image via Prime Video

It is rather ironic that mere decades after his death, J.R.R. Tolkiens worst fears about the unbridled evil of industrialization should come after his lifes work and set about the desolation of the impressive Arda legendarium, itself one of the greatest works of literary fiction in history and, dare we claim, the cornerstone of all modern speculative fiction.

While that statement might admittedly be a much too dramatic way of announcing a new Lord of the Rings adaptation is on the way, it perhaps underpins what most Tolkien fans fear these days after witnessing, over the past few years, the rapidly shifting landscape of entertainment, where the need for quantity to feed the furnace of the unruly content frenzy of the streaming age precedes quality and capitalizes on substance rather than value.

Perhaps thats also the reason why most Lord of the Rings fans were too quick to cheer on the licensing deal between Amazon Studios and the Tolkien Estate back in 2017, oblivious to impending industry standards for most adaptations that would attempt to succeed Game of Thrones as the next big fantasy series. Now, more than five years after the deal was struck, Amazon is preparing to introduce the world to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which they refer to not only as their most ambitious undertaking but factually as the most expensive production in the history of television.

The only catch is that while at first, it seemed like a brilliant idea to resurrect Middle-earth nearly two decades after Peter Jacksons highly acclaimed cinematic trilogy, fans are now showing an ill disposition towards The Rings of Power and anything it might have to say about their favorite work of genre fiction, even if theyve seen far too little to leave them with an unbiased impression.

Right now, the overwhelming majority of comments under anything related to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power are negative and disparaging towards the companys perceived half-hearted attempt at playing in the grown-ups league of streaming giants such as Netflix and Disney Plus, and theres a good reason why.

Jeff Bezos might claim that this is a passion project for him, but the timing is way too convenient for anyone to believe that. It all goes back to what Tolkien intended with his creation and how it influenced speculative fiction, or more specifically, the high fantasy genre.

Tolkien is now widely regarded as the father of modern fantasy, influencing most of the works that succeeded it in the past several decades. The Linguist professor had sensed a lack of mythos in the British literary canon, and the only story that barely resembled anything of the sort he had in mind involved the Arthurian legend, which was largely developed in France when the two countries were at each others throats in the Middle Ages.

But Tolkiens work, especially through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, blended mythology with the storytelling tropes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spearheading a literary movement that would help define the entertainment industry as we know it today.

From the early days when dozens of creative writers tried to imitate the success of The Lord of the Rings by untastefully rehashing everything he had done in his story, to prominent Hollywood moguls cautiously dipping their toes into the untraveled waters of speculative fiction in search of gold, the world of Middle-earth has inspired artists and their patrons as usual driven mad by the greed of filling their coffers even more to take a crack at the seemingly impossible case of J.R.R. Tolkien.

I mean, if he could do it, if he could write one of the best-selling novels of all time and become a cultural sensation across the pond from where he lived, so could they, right? Whats more, Tolkien proved to the world that fantastical stories have the potential to be just as profound as what literary snobs refer to as serious literature, so theres no reason it could suddenly stop working or not yield as many fruitful results in other mediums.

And so began the nerd era. While J.R.R. Tolkien definitely wasnt the only creator to influence and inspire the rise of geekdom, he kickstarted the high fantasy movement, in whose shadow the bespoke Mount Tolkien many authors have risen to prominence and success, namely Robert Jordan with his Wheel of Time series and George R.R. Martin with A Song of Ice and Fire.

Of course, todays fantasy landscape bears the name of many acclaimed writers besides the most obvious and popular contenders, each contributing a novel note to this ever-expanding orchestra of imaginative brilliance. (Brandon Sanderson with Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive, Patrick Rothfuss with The Kingkiller Chronicle, Joe Abercrombie with The First Law, Robin Hobb with The Realm of Elderlings, etc.)

But no two names have managed to become so embedded into the public psyche as J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin have across the years, and thats mostly thanks to the cinematic medium.

The release of Peter Jacksons The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and its subsequent box office success and critical acclaim, not only reinforced interest in Tolkiens work but also ruffled a few feathers in the speculative sphere of the entertainment industry. What predictably followed was a string of unsuccessful and half-hearted attempts at recapturing Jacksons magic, but lightning would refuse to strike twice until the time came for an unassuming new high fantasy adaptation by HBO to take the world by storm.

Game of Thrones becoming the most popular television series in the world coincided with the golden age of television, a perfect prologue to the age of streaming, by the grace of which were constantly, and perhaps too incessantly, entertained. But as HBOs hit fantasy series slowly crept up on an inevitable end and in hindsight, an altogether controversial and middling one industry moguls quickly got to work brainstorming about the next big fantasy series to take its place in the public psyche, and what better IP than the story that spawned this industry in the first place?

It might have taken them a long time to get here and make the series, but Amazon is in this for the numbers and people recognize it, or else theyd have tried their hand at adapting other novel fantasy stories floating on the edges of awareness, begging to be picked up by a producer.

Now, you might say that the entertainment industry isnt here for the sake of making great art at least not solely and youd be completely right. In any business, the idea is to always capitalize on returns, and Amazon is an absolute powerhouse in this regard. Things become problematic, however, when you factor in the companys track record and the overall trend of adaptations over the past several years, which brings us to our next point.

The Lord of the Rings took many years of Peter Jacksons life because it was an absolute behemoth of a story to spin into existence. But what you ever so subtly discern when watching those movies is the fact that a lot of effort and passion went into making sure that they would become timeless masterpieces. And even if you dont find the creative footprint of that effort tangible, the extensive behind-the-scenes footage left of the work on that trilogy will put any such doubt to rest.

That dedication and passion is something that a lot of adaptations are missing out on today. Because nowadays, when it comes to producing movies and TV shows, youre confronted with a checklist of ideas that come directly out of out-of-touch focus groups that care nothing more than to cater to the whims of their demographics or the so-called genre tropes that theyre certain will work.

Dont get me wrong; Im not talking about political correctness and the warring cultural fronts that have divided audiences right down the middle. The problem occurs when these established narratives and character tropes that must have no doubt yielded great results in the past become the golden foundation on which almost every studio builds its stories, resulting in a long list of adaptations that not only fail to capture the essence of their source material but fail to even work in their own mediums as decent works of entertainment art, being neither entertaining nor artistic.

Netflixs The Witcher, HBOs His Dark Materials, Amazons own The Wheel of Time, Apple TVs Foundation, and even inspired stories like Cursed are but a few contenders in this category. Some of these adaptations are decent enough, mind you, but when all is said and all is done, none have managed to highlight what makes their source material such a lasting work of art, not like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones have.

And who is to blame them? For streaming giants, the most important thing is to pick up a culturally relevant and adequately popular story and churn it into content. More and more content, thats what we need. Its all about filling up that watchlist and keeping audiences engaged. Youre done with this fantasy series? Well, dont you worry, you can just hop into another world with a few clicks of your TV remote. And if that doesnt hook you, its no bother whatsoever, because there are dozens more to take its place. Youre eventually going to find what youre looking for, contented, and spend even more time on the platform, if for nothing else than the sheer frustration of going through those endless lists.

Suffice it to say, audiences have slowly recognized a pattern here, so its no wonder that theyre on the fence when it comes to The Lord of the Rings, a story that deeply resonates with them and brings to mind memories of much simpler times.

Consequently, there are many reasons why folks simply dont want to have anything to do with The Rings of Power, or even remotely acknowledge it at the edges of their conscious awareness, despite not having seen a single episode of the new series.

But what if there was a small chance, perhaps barely there, that could turn this reception narrative around on its head?

Because unlike all those other adaptations we talked about, and the general trend of the industry, Amazons adaptation has managed to get a few things right, things that actually go a long way in putting fan concerns to rest.

Perhaps chiefly among them, despite having every reason to not do so, Amazon decided to take their time with this adaption and do it justice. Instead of rushing a television production after acquiring the rights in November 2017, as any company would do especially if theirs was to spearhead a replacement for Game of Thrones Amazon took its time and realized that one does not simply make a Lord of the Rings television series.

Its been almost five years since the Tolkien Estate struck that deal, which means that the crew of The Rings of Power has spent years in pre-production, as Peter Jackson had done, to make sure that every piece of the puzzle falls seamlessly into place. Did they have to spend so much time? We know that a company of HBOs standing is perfectly capable of making a season of television in less than two years, so why take all of that time if all you care about is profit?

Another instance of this proposed hopeful outlook comes courtesy of several creatives whom Amazon has consulted or even contracted from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to help them realize this vision. The inclusion of Howard Shore as the composer for the main theme, and John Howe as the graphic artist for world building purposes, sends across a clear signal: We know how much the trilogy means to you. So, were going to make sure that the language of our world is synonymous with the Middle-earth youve grown to love.

And ultimately, wed be remiss to not mention the elephant in the room. Amazon has already spent something close to $500 million on the first season of The Rings of Power, making it, effectively, the most expensive television production in the history of this medium. While we all know that dedicating these egregious sums isnt necessarily going to put a dent in Amazons deepless purse, this pattern of behavior once again fails to correspond to the trend of the industry.

As stated earlier, the goal of this business is to capitalize on profits, which means that Amazon didnt have to go this big. Whether wed want to admit it or not, the company is taking a gamble here, one that they know wont pay off if the series is anything other than spectacular and immediately popular.

It would also do to note all the reassuring things showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have repeatedly said over the past few months, but if youre already feeling skeptical of the series, nothing that they have to say is going to change your mind, which is why we decided to stick with an otherwise outside perspective for this piece.

Ultimately, The Lord of the Rings fans have every right to their misgivings about The Rings of Power. But at the same time, I dont think the franchise as a whole would benefit from any of us auguring its doom before the time has come.

I might live to regret these words, but perhaps, and against my better judgment, I should like to give the series a chance to prove its merit.

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The Reason Why 'The Rings of Power' Is So Controversial - We Got This Covered