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Do you have this problem? You walk out of The Prancing
Pony on a rainy evening after a day of schlepping your
weed-smoking hobbit posse across the tilt-up utopia
of Second Breakfast Nation... and you forget where you
are going?
Where the fuck am I? Rivendell? Gondor?
Oh, thank God, there's the Eye of Sauron. Whew, that's
a load off my mind. Now I can march barefoot for months
across the toxic waste, social alienation, and odious
popular culture of the middleplex to Mordor.
Actually, I have a theory about the promiscuous deployment
of Sauron's orb. It's a sort of supernatural totem,
meant to protect the bearer against harm and distract
us from the spectacle of ugliness and banality that
we've created in this high-entropy society, protecting
our sensibilities against the suspicion that we have
become a land of wicked, self-destructive slobs.