Tag Archives: Blood Meridian

America’s Political Violence Problem

By Robin Bates | Published: September 27, 2023

Some see Trump as a “stochastic terrorism,” inciting others to violence. Cormac McCarthy may understand as well as anyone what’s going on.

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McCarthy: Dark, Occasionally Hopeful

By Robin Bates | Published: June 14, 2023

Although the late Cormac McCarthy had a very dark vision of humanity, one can find glimpses of hope within his novels.

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Trumpism and the Violence Myth

By Robin Bates | Published: August 1, 2022

Slotkin says that “the” American myth is regeneration through violence. That myth can be seen in the Western, including in “Lonesome Dove” and “Blood Meridian.”

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License to Act with Impunity

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2019

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 […]

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From Frontier Racism to Wall Racism

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2019

Wednesday New Yorker writer Francisco Cantu has alerted me to an important book on the role that the frontier plays in the American imagination. Greg Gandin’s The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, traces Donald Trump’s wall back to America’s frontier days. I describe the […]

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