A Bounty on Savagery

I have been reading some of Cormac McCarthy's books: "All the Pretty Horses", and so on. The first section of "The Crossing" nearly tore my heart apart.

(I had read it before but, mercifully, I had forgotten. There are advantages to our disadvantages!)

It has been tough slogging. It is some of the best writing I know, and some of the hardest. Hardest are the long Graham Greene-like passages where, as John Milton said he was trying to do in "Paradise Lost"--"to justify the ways of God to man", McCarthy's characters slog through their own muddy tracks, half in Spanish, half in English, half in oblique punditry something like the logic of "A Hundred Years of Solitude". (I know: three halves.)

But, oh my god, how he can tear the heart apart, telling the truth about human savagery and kindness and irrational thought! How he loves the terrible beauty of these hard, dry places! How he mangles the language into beauty by allowing nothing to interfere with how the words want to come out!

But that is prelude to what I want to say, trivially and truly. Something of the savagery in McCarthy's novels is all around us. Yesterday, as I turned into Home Depot to buy something innocent--perhaps it was some foam tape to join a ceramic pot to a glass table top--I followed another pilgrim into the parking lot.

"All I need," I thought, "is for another lost cowboy with a gun to protect me from being shot by engaging in a gun fight with a drunken lawbreaker behind me."

I don't want to live in Cormac McCarthy's books. I don't want to live where it is sport to make dogs fight, or where, if women are old enough to bleed, they are old enough to die. I would not want to carry the bones of a brother home, where home was as desolate as where he had died. I don't think I am safer when everyone is more dangerous.

I do not want to live in the wild west. It is time to hire a sheriff, and a judge, and another school teacher. Maybe get a doctor, and someone to open another restaurant, and pave the street. Protect the wolves. Put a bounty on savagery instead.

Comments

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