Vastare is, of course, Latin for "to lay waste". One of these useful factoids that form the residue of a classical education: the Romans had a single word to express the idea of laying waste to (for example) an enemy city. (In this case, the classical education is my wife's, as I have none.)

I just drank my first bottle of Stone Brewing Company's Ruination IPA and, as promised, it has laid waste to my taste buds. I believe the "bitter" portion of my tongue is bruised.

And I am very, very, hoppy about it.

We probably will go see Return of the King, though we haven't yet, and we don't have any concrete plans for babysitting. I think there's an analogy to Shakespeare here: no matter how poor I expected it to be, I would go see Hamlet if it were being played in Edmonton. Peter Jackson's rendition of Lord of the Rings can't be worse than a bad version of Hamlet.

Perhaps we'll wait till we can get the whole trilogy on extended DVD. We'll watch the version with the audio track of Peter Jackson apologizing to a barely-restrained group of hardcore Tolkien fans for the damage he's done to the story, while in the background Christopher Tolkien counts his money.

In any case. Colby referenced this explanation of the importance of the scouring to the story as a whole. I would add that Tolkien's purpose in writing the Scouring was almost certainly not to remind us that as citizens of a democratic state it is up to us to ensure that our liberties are not stolen away. Although you can read the Scouring as a "profoundly antistatist" chapter, the more important point is that it is every one's responsibility to fight evil when it arises; that evil may be (often is) banal and bureaucratic; and, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis: When that line was written about fighting "powers and principalities," it was written about you.