When
the faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, the people die. That
is the progression.
– Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower
But
I think once you quit hearing "sir" and "ma'am," the rest
is soon to foller.
–
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, No Country for Old
Men
The archetype of the ornery old
man bemoaning the follies of a new age is stitched into the tapestry of
American mythology. An old man has
merely to utter a variant of “back in my day” and his audience will smile,
picturing him wagging a gnarled old finger at youthful passersby from his
porch-bound rocking chair. Two old men I
have recently encountered might have prompted similar condescension (a sort of
reverse-paternalism) if not for the disturbing resonance of melancholy in their
otherwise familiar “old manologues.” Such
affecting angst moved this relatively youthful passerby to stop for a moment, turn down Pandora and stifle a yawn long enough to figure out what they were saying. In case you hadn’t guessed from the
introductory quotes, these two men are Patrick J. Buchanan, as encountered in his
2011 polemic Suicide of a Superpower,
and Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, the fictional protagonist of the Coen brothers’
Oscar-winning crime drama No Country for
Old Men.
In Suicide, Buchanan addresses modern America like an Old Testament
prophet urging the Jews to return to the God of their fathers. He points to the decline of Catholicism and
fundamentalist Christianity – in terms of influence, moral standards and
pervasiveness – along with immigration from Third World countries and the
demographic decline of white Americans as the primary catalysts of a
decomposing social order and the coming collapse of the country. Such
ideas are hardly new, having been bandied about for decades in the political
arena (though rarely have they been articulated so clearly), but the depth of feeling Buchanan has for the “country he grew up in” lends an emotional gravitas often missing from political polemics. In some sections, he delivers his money points with such feeling as to rival the impact of a roundhouse kick to the face from Old Glory herself.
I found the closing section of
his preface, when he shifts abruptly from coolly recounting statistics and historical
anecdotes to invoke a Biblical parable, particularly moving: “We [Americans] are
the Prodigal Sons who squandered their inheritance; but, unlike the Prodigal
Son, we can’t go home again.”
It is in such soul-aching eulogies for his country that Buchanan most resembles the fictional
Bell. In a long monologue that
accompanies contemplative shots of the uninhabited Texas countryside, Bell
recalls the “old time sheriffs” fondly, including his own father, noting that
many didn’t even have to carry guns. He
contrasts this with the modern era, now so dark as to be incomprehensible to
the old timers. The world has changed so
much for the sheriff that he’s almost scared to venture away from his nostalgic
musings, saying, “I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet
something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd
have to say, ‘O.K., I'll be part of this world.’"
Though Bell never spells out the
existential threats to his America as clearly as Buchanan, the film harbors
many parallels to Buchanan’s view of a broken and disordered society. Buchanan’s diagnosis of a dying faith is a
represented in Bell himself. As
suggested in his “soul at hazard” comment, Bell has little surety in his
faith. His shaken faith is almost
paralytic in his effects; it is only instinctive stoicism that pushes him on
when he lacks the courage of his convictions.
The dwindling power of Christian
beliefs and ethics is even more pronounced in the next generation, as
represented by the character of Llewellyn, a pessimistic interpretation of the Great
White Hunter. From the onset, Llewellyn
is easily led astray from the righteous path, first stealing a satchel of
Mexican drug money, then jeopardizing his wife’s safety in a display of
machismo and finally giving up on redemption and even survival for a fatal
night of alcohol and adultery.
The most explicit parallel to
Buchanan in No Country is in its
depiction of immigration and destructive culture clashes. Bell’s peaceful Texas countryside is the
subject of repeated violent invasions.
Mexican dope-runners spill over the border to spill blood and leave
behind illicit loot on the virgin soil.
They hound the aforementioned Great White Hunter before finding and
murdering him.
The character that best
epitomizes the perceived existential threat of Third World emigration is the
villain Anton Chigurh, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem. He is evil, of course: a serial murder with
no regard for human life. Yet it is his
incomprehensibility that makes him the most dangerous to Bell’s community (and,
by extension, Buchanan’s America). His
motivations, his methods, his mindset are unknown: as such, the host culture as
no way to contain him or ensure the protection of its citizens. He blazes through the American West
decimating the unsuspecting citizenry like an Old World disease through
indigenous populations (it is telling that the only suitable reference an
American in the film can apply to Chigurh is the bubonic plague).
Beyond tone and message, there
are a number of similarities between the two that merit mention. Both Buchanan and Bell are white. Both are old: Buchanan turns 74 this year,
while Bell is portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones, whose popular role in the Men in Black series has made his craggy
face almost synonymous with old age in pop culture. Both hearken from what many would consider
the “South”: Bell from Texas and Buchanan from D.C. Both have strong ties to an older order:
Buchanan having earned his stripes as a young staffer to the Nixon, Ford and
Reagan administrations and Bell a third-generation lawman.
From such familiar starting
points, the narrative line to their ultimate lamentations practically draws
itself, especially to those who have been schooled in the orthodox cultural
history of America from the 1950’s to today.
Here is a pair of good old boys from the South stewing over the loss of
illicit privilege with the overthrow of the white-supremacist, patriarchal,
fundamentalist old order. When they
mourn the “loss of America,” they are actually mourning the loss of what legal
scholar Kenneth Karst termed “an all-white preserve,” a notion at odds with the
true American values of tolerance and equal citizenship.
This is certainly the reading
that MSNBC gave to Buchanan’s book, erasing him from their line-up of political
commentators shortly after the release of the book. (Obviously, as an Oscar-winner, No Country was spared the righteous
indignation – Bell’s paralyzing crisis of faith prevents him from making any
moral judgments as offensive as Buchanan’s.)
In doing so, however, MSNBC echoes the court historians of the
conquistadors, who, as modern history professors dutifully point out, may have
exaggerated the atrocities of the indigenous peoples to discourage sympathy for
their plight as captives.
I would advocate a far more
sympathetic reading. For whatever the
faults of the earlier American society eulogized by Buchanan, and in many ways
echoed by Bell, his sadness at its passing is sincere and worthy of
consideration. It is a sadness that is
similar in tenor, if not context, to the cries raised by oppressed minorities
in works such as Mine Okubo’s Citizen
13660 or the pleas for sovereignty from American Indian tribes in court
cases such as Cherokee Nation v. Georgia. If you have a moment, I’d ask you to stop with me for a moment, and
lend an ear to the old man on his porch, mourning the loss of his country.
