How great literature can change your life

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Thursday

Increasingly I’m hearing Donald Trump described as a “stochastic terrorist,” which is someone who demonizes his or her enemies so that they stand a chance of becoming targets of violence. We saw him behaving as such, of course, when he got his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and now it appears that the former president is employing stochastic terrorism as a way to keep from going to jail. If he can use threats of retribution to intimidate his foes, perhaps he may once again escape accountability.

While this might strike us as un-American, we have seen instances of stochastic terrorism throughout our history. Violence has always been latent, awaiting individuals or events to trigger it. An author like Cormac McCarthy understands this well, as do William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor (“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”), James Dickey, Toni Morrison, and others. I focus here on McCarthy because, as a contemporary, he sensed where we are now. This essay draws on two past posts as it applies Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West to the dangers of Trumpian violence.

According to the recent Mitt Romney biography, Trump’s stochastic terrorism swayed votes during his impeachment hearings. As the Washington Post reports,

“One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety,” Coppins writes. “The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome?

“Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.”

Since his numerous indictments, Trump’s threats have only escalated. After one set of rulings, he sent out word, “If you come after me, I’m coming after you.” Pundit David Corn has other instances, including one that brings to mind the 2018 attack on a Pittsburg synagogue, in which 11 died. Corn points out,

In a Rosh Hashanah message posted on social media earlier this month, Trump railed against “liberal Jews”: “Just a quick reminder for liberal Jews who voted to destroy America & Israel because you believed in false narratives! Let’s hope you learned from your mistake & make better choices moving forward!”

Trump has also called Army General Mike Miller, whom the former president hates for standing up to him, “treasonous” and worthy of death. (Texas congressman Paul Gosar followed this up with his own instance of stochastic terrorism, writing in his weekly newsletter, “In a better society, quislings like the strange sodomy-promoting General Milley would be hung.”)

And then there are Trump’s attacks on NBC News, MSNBC and Comcast for committing “Country Threatening Treason.” As New York University’s expert on terrorism Ruth Ben-Ghiat recently pointed out,

it is clearer than ever that inciting political violence is Trump’s political project, and his campaign appearances and events must be seen in that light. Trump is a marketer… [N]ow his brand is violence, and his rallies and other events sell that violence, presenting it as the preferred way to resolve differences in society and as the only way to move history forward. 

She writes that Trump’s visit yesterday to a gun shop to admire a customized “Trump 45” Glock “was inevitable.”

African Americans have long known that White elites turn to authoritarian violence to control them. Women, American Jews, Latinos, members of the LBGTQ+ community, and others have encountered their own versions of such coercion. What’s new, perhaps, is that (1) many of us thought America had left such violence behind and (2) now it is also straight White males who are being threatened. Whereas once White liberals such as myself had to take an imaginative leap into another perspective—that’s why novels by authors from diverse backgrounds are so important—now we are seeing up close what these others groups saw. On January 6, it was White members of Congress and White cops who were included in the targets. And it’s judges, lawyers, jury members, FBI agents, military personnel, journalists, and others who find themselves on hate lists.

I said I’d look back at American history before turning to Cormac McCarthy, and for this I draw on Richard Slotkin’s 1992 study of the Western, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. As Slotkin observes, America has often framed political violence as a frontier drama. Although America is hardly the only country to experience violence—in fact, most countries have bloody histories—it has had a distinctive way of framing the drama. For America, the myth involves subduing a recalcitrant wilderness. “Regeneration through violence,” Slotkin says, is the American myth.

Throughout American history, he notes, there have been different versions of this myth, from the Puritans emphasizing “the achievement of spiritual regeneration through frontier adventure” to

Jeffersonians (and later, the disciples of Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” [seeing] the frontier settlement as a re-enactment and democratic renewal of the original “social contract”; [or] Jacksonian Americans [seeing] the conquest of the Frontier as a means to the regeneration of personal fortunes and/or of patriotic vigor and virtue.

Trumpism is closest to the Jacksonian model—think of Jackson’s role in the Trail of Tears—but in each case, Slotkin says, the Myth

represented the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation, temporary regression to a more primitive or “natural” state, and regeneration through violence.

When Trump in 2017 gave his “American carnage” inaugural address, describing America as a nation under attack by forces domestic and foreign (Muslims, urban Blacks, Central American immigrants), he was invoking this myth, which may be why his vision has resonated with so many. When he has praised the tactics used by thuggish dictators like Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un or when he has pardoned the court-martialed Navy Seal and psycho killer Eddie Gallagher, so-called responsible Republicans could rationalize that his actions were the primitive means needed to regenerate American society. “Trump is crude,” they would say, “but maybe it takes someone like him to shake things up.”

It should be noted that, while the “regeneration through violence” myth had its origins in the Indian wars, it has mapped easily onto other American conflicts, including those involving race and labor movements. For instance, in D.W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece Birth of a Nation (1915), one sees the KKK playing the role of the U.S. calvary, riding to the rescue of people under assault from, not Indians but rampaging ex-slaves. Because they do so, Northerners and Southerners can reunite after their bitter war and a new nation can be born.

One sees the myth played out in many of Hollywood’s greatest westerns, such as High Noon, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and others. In the 1970s, the western got transferred to urban settings but the theme was the same: Dirty Harry resorts to primitive means, with thugs now playing the role previously taken by Indians, as he deals out the unregulated violence necessary to restore civilization.

Slotkin focuses mainly on cinema in his study, but one finds literary westerns grappling with the same theme. Along with Blood Meridian, which I’ll turn to in a moment, there’s Lonesome Dove. Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel mourns (like Frederick Jackson Turner) the closing of the frontier, conveying a sense that the age of heroes is past once we’ve civilized the entire nation. While one is reading the novel, however, one cheers on Gus and Cal, the two Texas rangers who take the law into their own hands. Such actions are necessary in a landscape that includes a murderous Indian (Blue Duck) and a pathological gang of outlaws (the Suggs Brothers).

In the end, the rangers prevail, showing cattlemen that they can take their cattle from Texas to Montana’s green pastures. In their success, however, the rangers render themselves obsolete. Like John Wayne in a number of his movies, Cal cannot join the civilization he has helped bring about. In the process, however, the violence that he and Gus have resorted to has served its purpose.

While McMurtry may think we have reached an end of the violence so that rangers are no longer necessary, however, McCarthy is another story. Forget about regeneration, I hear him saying as his murderous Judge Holden rampages through the 19^th century American west, killing Indians and settlers alike. More of an archetype than a flesh-and blood figure, Holden by the end is proclaiming that he will never die, which may be how McCarthy sees America. Perhaps exposing the comforting myth that society can ever find stability, McCarthy’s novel disturbs because it suggests that violence is perpetual and social order hangs by a thread.

The novel is based on the carnage caused by John Joel Glanton and his ruthless gang of scalp hunters following the Mexican American War (1846-48). 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. He’s a stochastic terrorist in this scene, behaving as Trump did on January 6:

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. At that point, his auditors become complicit in his action. Maybe they, like Trump supporters, get a thrill from the judge’s sheer audacity, and also from his sadism:

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 former 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 or No Country for Old Men, with its cold-blooded and seemingly invincible killer Anton Chiguhr?

But if the world is truly becoming a place where stochastic terrorists such as Trump can thumb their noses at judges—if horror really does speak to humanity’s “inmost heart”–then maybe McCarthy is using the lawless and violent west to get at a vital truth. Perhaps he sees us as further gone than we realize.

At the very least, McCarthy’s vision tests those of us who like to think that civilization will triumph over barbarism in the great American democratic experiment.