Monday
I’ve been reflecting upon a recent E.J. Dionne column about living in “an age of impunity.” Borrowing the phrase from International Rescue Committee head Dave Milland, Dionne looks at the horrors that arise when all moral inhibitions are swept away. Looking for an American author who depicts such a world, I settled upon Cormac McCarthy.
Milland provides a chilling list of what we’re facing:
Chemical weapons, cluster bombs, land mines, bombing of school buses, besiegement of cities, blocking of humanitarian supplies, targeting of journalists and aid workers. You name it, we are seeing it, and seeing more of it, and seeing less outrage about it and less accountability for it.
He then connects this development to threats to democracy within countries where democracy seems most firmly entrenched:
But these evils cannot be isolated from the larger political corrosion in the rest of the world — and this includes the long-standing democracies themselves. “The checks and balances that protect the lives of the most vulnerable people abroad,” he said, “will only be sustained if we renew the checks and balances that sustain liberty at home.”
This is because,
when governments abandon a commitment to accountability domestically, they no longer feel any obligation to insist upon it internationally. It’s no accident, as Miliband noted, that under President Trump, the United States “has dropped the promotion of human rights around the world from its policy priorities.”
We are increasingly seeing our wannabe autocrat and his administration acting with impunity. Setting the president himself aside, note the extent to which his underlings feel licensed to lambaste the press, disrespect the public, lie under oath to Congress, ignore subpoenas, twist the law, sell out to foreign adversaries, make corrupt deals, and engage in race-baiting. Accountability apparently is for chumps.
Over his career McCarthy has given us a series of amoral villains that override all checks, both internal and external. In the past I’ve compared Trump to the captain in All the Pretty Horses, who will do anything to keep from being laughed at, including savaging a prostitute and executing a child. But even with the captain I may be thinking too small.
I therefore turn to Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, the Judge moves through the landscape as an irresistible and unconquerable force of evil. The novel is based the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War.
We first encounter Holden when, as if on a whim, he enters a revival meeting and fabricates a charge that turns the audience against the preacher. It’s akin to Trump in a recent rally accusing Rep. Ilhan Omar of loving Al Qaeda and being married to her brother, leading the crowd to demand for her expulsion from the country:
Ladies and gentlemen I feel it my duty to inform you that the man holding this revival is an impostor. He holds no papers of divinity from any institution recognized or improvised. He is altogether devoid of the least qualification to the office he has usurped and has only committed to memory a few passages from the good book for the purpose of lending to his fraudulent sermons some faint flavor of the piety he despises. In truth, the gentleman standing before you posing as a minister of the Lord is not only totally illiterate but is also wanted by the law in the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
Oh God, cried the reverend. Lies, lies! He began reading feverishly from his opened bible.
On a variety of charges the most recent of which involved a girl of eleven years—I said eleven—who had come to him in trust and whom he was surprised in the act of violating while actually clothed in the livery of his God…
Let’s hang the turd, called an ugly thug from the gallery to the rear.
Not three weeks before this he was run out of Fort Smith Arkansas for having congress with a goat. Yes lady, that is what I said. Goat.
Why damn my eyes if I wont shoot the son of a bitch, said a man rising at the far side of the tent, and drawing a pistole from his boot he leveled it and fired.
More shots are fired, someone seams the tent, and there follows a mass exodus, with people “pouring out, women screaming, folk stumbling, folk trampled underfoot in the mud.”
When the Judge later admits to having fabricated the charge, like Trump he is appreciated for his entertainment value:
Where did you know him to know all that stuff on him?
You mean the Reverend Green?
Yessir. I reckon you was in Fort Smith fore ye come out here.
I was never in Fort Smith in my life. Doubt that he was.
They looked from one to the other.
Well where was it you run up on him?
I never laid eyes on the man before today. Never even heard of him.
He raised his glass and drank.
There was a strange silence in the room. The men looked like mud effigies. Finally someone began to laugh. Then another. Soon they were all laughing together. Someone bought the judge a drink.
I want to caution against pushing comparisons between Trump and the Judge, since Holden is a sophisticated, learned, and refined psychopath whereas Trump (in the words of Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien) is driven by nothing more complicated than “self-aggrandizement and self-preservation.” The president, O’Brien observes, “thinks about money, food, sex, and revenge. Very little else. Maybe sports.” Both men, however, act with impunity.
What we get in the revival meeting is only a taste of what is to come as the Judge joins with the Glanton gang on their murder spree. The narrative sucks us in somewhat since, at first, they are battling “bad” Indians (bloodthirsty Comanches and Apaches). Then, however, we see them attacking peaceful Pueblo villages and Mexican townspeople. As an extra flourish, sometimes the Judge will casually break the neck of a child or drop a gift of puppies into a river.
By the end of the novel, the Judge is orchestrating a dance, which becomes a metaphor for the great human drama. Only the truly barbaric man, he tells the protagonist, can really dance this dance:
Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance…
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps.
At the end, McCarthy reflects on the Judge and his dance:
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
I have sometimes wondered what drives a writer to imagine worlds that lack any sympathetic characters. Why doesn’t McCarthy write more novels like All the Pretty Horses, which features a protagonist of unimpeachable integrity who stands up against the forces of darkness? Why Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road?
But if the world is truly becoming a place where people routinely act with impunity—and if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe he is just telling the truth. Perhaps optimists are no more than naïve sentimentalists?
At the very least, idealists will find themselves tested by his vision.