Mini-Cast #2 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Nobody likes Cormac McCarthy, but you have to reckon with him. There are no rewards from his books, all you need is twenty pages to understand how much more they demand than they give - no humor, no compassion, no fun, no character observation. What you get from McCarthy is hundreds of pages of nature description, and the pure, unmitigated darkness of our worst fears - for our country, for our people, for our selves, for our souls.

Much moreso than George R. R. Martin, McCarthy is only interested in human beings for the way they die. What really interests McCarthy is the desert, the western American landscape, described more ripely than any John Ford movie can. There are none of the traditional Western myths where manly heroes kill outlaws and Choctaws. For McCarthy, there's no higher human being - humans are no less part of nature than animals, and humans kill as animals do, squalidly, gorily; they kill to enjoy themselves, they kill to eat each other, they kill to use the dead's features as jewelry.

There is nothing unique about human beings in McCarthy novel. To McCarthy, we're all ridges on the ancient mesas, natural manifestations of a dead earth who don't belong upon it, born merely to die in a climate that kills everything, and therefore have a barely suppressible urge to end one another's lives, perceiving the out of place within each other which we do not see in ourselves.

I'm currently reading the infamous Blood Meridian. Was the American West as brutal as Blood Meridian makes it seem? I doubt it was in every particular, but I have no question if Blood Meridian conveys the West's spiritual reality. The meaning Blood Meridian reckons with Manifest Destiny - a doctrine with genocide seared in.

In an era when we wonder anew what bigots are capable, remember please how little control we have of their rage. Even at its peak, Manifest Destiny was not embraced by more than an American public's portion. Raised against Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were voices from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln, but even if you prevent the slaughter a hundred times, there will always be a hundred-first. Grisly murder is part of the American condition, and McCarthy is its prophet.

In every country, there are people who believe that the country's owed more land, but America is too big to be a mere country - there are too many facets, too many peoples, too many cultures to govern something so unwieldy without intentions going awry. Perhaps no continent should be its own country, and within that continent there are so many foreign places and peoples that many facets will always be foreign to each citizen.

For those of us hailing from plentiful vegetation, nothing's more foreign than desert. Nothing more foreign than a climate of death who installs a homing device in its citizens to return each other to the land of the dead as we can before we are duly ourselves returned. And yet, the desert of McCarthy and the southwest may be our truest future, a worldwide desert, a universal desert, in which all remaining life is alone for all time. This is the image of climate change that haunts our dreams -universal death. It clearly haunts Greta Thunberg, it haunts her generation, and it will more than haunts the following generation.

So it's simultaneously stunning and unsurprising when I read an article the other week reported that Cormac McCarthy edits science articles for the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. It makes a perverse kind of sense that a writer who spends hundreds of pages chronicling every hue of sky and rock would be interested in their formation, and would also take an interest in what might happen to the landscape after the age of sentience.

I've spent so little of this podcast talking about The Road. Suffice to say it's a book so perfect that a critic can say little. The Road's journey's spiritual as much as physical - of a father to keep his son alive post-apocalypse when most food humans can eat is each other. It's as much about preserving souls as preserving life. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy's fascination with violence deadens our horror to it, you almost feel him rooting for the killers. In The Road, the desire of a nameless father and son to survive is so basic that our horror never ceases. This is real horror, not the macabre gore of Stephen King whose disgust you're meant to enjoy, this is what it means to live in a place where the homing instinct to return all things to nature is so strong that it obliterates nature itself. This father's desire to raise a decent son may be the last good impulse in the universe. It's such a simple story, and yet how many reverberations does it have to history and the all too many stories of cannibalism during World War II, the civil wars of Africa, the Communist and Imperial famines?

And how many reverberations will the future hold? Cormac McCarthy was born in 1933 - part of the same pessimistic generation as Stanley Kubrick and Phillip K. Dick who first heard of the Holocaust and the Bomb when they were adolescents, spent their adulthoods haunted by nuclear war, and are now in their dotage must hear about planetary death. The specter of planetary apocalypse has been with us nearly seventy-five, yet it has not come. When the generation born between 1925 and '42 passes, the 'Silent Generation', will we remember their era as an age of anxiety, beset by premonitions that never came, or will their anxieties be vindicated?