Above is my new interview with John Friend of The AFP Report. The topic: Soros and Anti-Semitism. Below is a brief tribute to Cormac McCarthy, including my recent conversation with Linh Dinh on McCarthy’s The Road . -KB
Whoever America’s greatest living novelist is, it isn’t Cormac McCarthy any more. The author of The Road, Blood Meridian, and Suttree (my three favorite McCarthy books) passed away yesterday, just over a month shy of his 90th birthday.
The three aforementioned masterpieces each depict a man’s struggle to survive. The first two paint grim, horrific pictures of existence in general and the history of the United States in particular.
The Road is where we’re headed: a post-apocalyptic hellscape. (Scroll down for details.)
Blood Meridian tells the unspeakable truth about how America was founded. It has been roundly condemned for its ultraviolence and, shall we say, moral ambiguity. But it is ourselves—and our country—that merit condemnation. Don’t shoot the messenger, especially when the messenger writes so wisely and gorgeously.
Suttree is my favorite McCarthy novel, entirely different from the other two. Unlike them, it doesn’t mesmerize you with exquisite gothic horror. Nor can it be as easily reduced to historical allegory, as Blood Meridian (America’s founding) and The Road (America’s inevitable end) can be.
If Blood Meridian describes our country’s birth, and The Road its death, Suttree is a pleasant and nostalgic—though ultimately tragic—reverie on its young adulthood. It’s McCarthy’s most autobiographical work, stringing together a series of dreamlike recollections of his younger days, when he dropped out of college, severed relations with his respectable family, and lived impecuniously on a ramshackle houseboat in the Tennessee River, catching catfish and selling them to Knoxville markets.
Though it’s bad lit-crit manners to impose your own biography on somebody else’s autobiographical novel, I must admit that I love Suttree in part because I can relate to it. As a young man, I spent quite a few years living pretty much the way Suttree does, except in a ramshackle vehicle in San Francisco instead of a houseboat in Knoxville. When I read a chapter of Suttree before falling asleep, my dreams intermingle decades-old scenes from my life with those from the book.
But I doubt one needs such an intimate relationship with Suttree to appreciate its unique genius. If Joyce set out to make the mundane mythical and amazing in Ulysses, McCarthy fully succeeded in Suttree.
By Allah or synchronicity, take your pick, Linh Dinh and I happened to open last week’s Truth Jihad Radio with a discussion of The Road. Below is a transcript of the discussion of the book.
Linh Dinh on Truth Jihad Radio
Kevin Barrett: In the first hour, my friend and colleague Linh Dinh is reporting from…well, I guess he’s in Laos, last I heard. Or was it Thailand? Anyway, he’ll tell us. He’s written some great recent stuff, including Brave New Reset, which includes appreciations of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Zhang Yingyu’s The Book of Swindles. And well, let’s just say that (second hour guest) Harrison Koehli and Linh are both in agreement that there are some serious psychopathological tendencies at play in today’s so called civilization, and that things look to be getting a bit worse — maybe a lot worse, as Linh suggests. If he thinks The Road is the the way of the future, we’re in even worse trouble than I realized. So let’s talk about it. Welcome, Linh. How are you?
Linh Dinh: Hi, Kevin. How are you doing, man?
Kevin Barrett: All right.. Good enough to go. So Linh, I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road 10 or 12 years ago and I became a McCarthy fan. It’s his grim depiction of a father and son traveling south in a desolate landscape after what appears to have been some kind of nuclear holocaust or its equivalent. It’s somewhat unspecified. And the landscape is full of roaming predators and would-be pederastic rapists who would clearly target the father’s son if they could get to him. There’s a lot of cannibalism going on. That’s pretty much how the few people left stay alive. And the sky is always gray. It’s cold. Nothing’s growing. And they’re trying to get south where maybe there might be a little bit of sun and maybe something can grow, and maybe a couple of humans will still survive. It’s quite a trip, that book, and you just wrote about that, thinking about the possibility that that vision might come true. So tell us about how you were you were thinking along those lines from Southeast Asia. By the way, are you in Laos or in Thailand?
Linh Dinh: I’m in Laos. Southern Laos. Pakse. That’s the second time I wrote about the book, Kevin. But recently I thought of it again because I was drugged and robbed on the streets of Laos. Laos is so safe, you don’t expect anything like that to happen. But the guy who did it was obviously not Lao. He’s like a traveling con man. And I didn’t expect this to happen because I was in public. I was drinking with him in a public space. I didn’t expect him to put anything in my drink and then wait for me to leave. He timed this perfectly. Because I was lying on the street for I don’t know how long. So that’s why I thought of The Road. Because in The Book of Swindles, the still obscure Chinese book of people getting hustled, a lot of incidents happen on the road. The road is like a place in between, right? You have cities which are civilized space. That’s what I thought of cities, civilization, civic citizens, all that. And the road is where bad things can happen. But in the USA it is a little bit problematic to suggest that. Because our cities, American cities, are where bad things happen right now — especially the bigger cities: Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston — just mayhem, chaos.
But traditionally, the road is where bad things happen, because no one sees what’s happening. You are alone. You’re meeting strangers. You get robbed, you get raped. You get killed. The book, The Road, is about that. It’s about wandering: Not having a home is not having a shelter. It’s about being a refugee, just a permanent refugee. And I’ve talked about being refugees in the past because I was a refugee.
Americans can’t conceive of being a refugee. They think of refugees as just people flooding into the southern border. And many of these are not even refugees. They are “economic refugees.” So they’re just opportunists. But a real refugee is one who is in imminent danger. And Americans think of refugees as other people. But white people were refugees not that long ago.
So it’s a theme that’s constantly on my mind. You know what happens when you are forced into fleeing and you have nowhere to go because wherever you go, you’re not going to be welcomed. People don’t want you there.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah. And these days, your audience and maybe even to some extent my audience, includes a lot of people on what’s sometimes called the alt right. And they don’t really like refugees and immigration too much. And there’s a marked lack of sympathy with the plight of refugees in that demographic, which always struck me as a little bit obnoxious. You could simultaneously say, look, we need to accept fewer immigrants. We’ll have a better society if we have fewer immigrants. And at the same time, you could be compassionate about people who are in that situation and even maybe try to figure out a solution for them. But instead, you get all this demonization: Trump says “all those Mexicans are a bunch of rapists.” And he cites all these examples. And so people just start sort of hating on refugees. I guess that’s politics, but still, it’s kind of obnoxious.
Linh Dinh: Well, what’s most obnoxious is that they accept no responsibility for creating refugees. Because America is the biggest creator of refugees.
I profiled an Iraqi woman barely making a living in in Scranton, Pennsylvania,and got these just basically assholes coming (in the Unz.com comment section) to rage against her, like she’s coming here as a freeloader. She was working her tail off at a Dunkin Donuts factory. And she she wouldn’t have been here if her life hadn’t been destroyed by America, by the USA, by your tax money. You have blood on your hands.
So they accept no responsibility for that. They just see you as another brown person coming in to take advantage of them. I’ve had them say to me that I should be grateful. A guy (like that) recently came on to my Substack. I said: Get away from me! Because I got got sick of these idiots, man. I’m not here to fucking entertain morons. So a guy came on to my Substack to rage at me out of nowhere. He said I should appreciate America for introducing me to air conditioning and refrigerators.
What presumptuousness! Because all his knowledge of Vietnam was from Apocalypse Now, from Deer Hunter! Vietnam was a civilized society a thousand years ago before America was even founded. And Vietnam will outlast America. And so will Laos. Laos is one of the poorest countries on earth, and they still have their tradition. They still have their values, you know, their heritage. And that’s why they will outlast America, which doesn’t realize how transient it is. It is a transient society. It is basically a homeless society. It’s a bunch of squatters, man. They don’t realize that they’ve been squatters and they’re going to be refugees soon enough. They don’t realize that they are so damn arrogant.
And I’ve been on that side. I’m more of a patriot than they are. Because I’ve been trying to do something about it. I speak up for them. And every time I do I get attacked.
Kevin Barrett: Yeah,I don’t think there’s a lot of political nimbleness and adroitness among that that crowd. It’s funny you mentioned that, that they’re saying you should be down on your knees groveling and thanking America for giving you, you poor benighted Asian savage, some air conditioning.
When I first when I first married my Moroccan wife, we sometimes used to tell people just for fun that she rode a camel to school when she was little. And with big eyes, They’d say, “Oh, really? That’s so interesting.” They’re imagining that she was living in a tent or something.
Linh Dinh: It’s preposterous. But Kevin, here’s the thing, man. The collapse of the United States is really tragic, and it’s accelerating. It’s happening so fast, it’s unbelievable. Okay. We can talk about that. You know, like the barbarity, the surging barbarity that’s overtaking America.
Kevin Barrett: Okay, let’s talk about that. So, The Road by Cormac McCarthy gives us a kind of a logical end point of that barbarity: The massacres and wars perpetrated by this country, which of course created all these refugees that the right wing people are always raging about, end up…well, the chickens come home to roost and the war comes home and it’s a nuclear apocalypse. At least we assume that’s probably the issue, or something like it anyway. And so that’s it. There’s not only no civilization left, but basically no life support left. And so how far down that road, as it were, are we?
Linh Dinh: Well, The Road is not clear about exactly what happened. We can assume some kind of nuclear…
Kevin Barrett: There’s a flash over the guy living near Washington, D.C. and (after seeing the flash) he quickly pumped water into his bathtub before the electricity went out. It sure sounded like a nuclear war.
Linh Dinh: Right. And his wife committed suicide. That’s the funny thing. And actually he didn’t think that was such a bad choice, but it just wasn’t his choice.
But he’s still on the side of life. He’s still the father. He has to live for his son. So they’re not going to commit suicide together. The mother can go and kill herself, but he’s going to be the father. He’s going to take care of the son.
Kevin Barrett: And that’s that is a little odd…
Linh Dinh: Life affirming, huh?
Kevin Barrett: I mean, generally most mothers are just as attached to trying to keep their children alive as fathers, if not more so. So that’s a little odd.
Linh Dinh: That’s a very strange twist. But the theme is that they are still the good guys: They’re not going to eat people.
Kevin Barrett: The last two good guys who don’t eat people on earth .
Linh Dinh: So they’re not going to kill anyone. At one point they heard a dog and the son said, “we’re not going to kill him, are we, Papa?” Something like that. So they’re not going to kill a dog. That’s not very realistic, is it? But the fact that they still have values is important. That’s the main theme of The Road: Whatever happens, they’re going to remain humans. They’re not going to kill or eat people. And at the end, the son has his faith restored because they encounter this apparently Christian family who’s going to take him in. So that’s the positive message of The Road.
Still, the book is very bleak. When the father reflects on the state of the world inside the novel, he seems to have no faith: deep down, he realizes this is just futile. This is just hopeless. But he doesn’t have a choice but to go on for the sake of his son. What is he going to do, kill his son and kill himself? He’s not going to do that. So it’s a very desperate faith. And I’m wondering where we are right now as far as our faith in anything — in civilization, in ourselves.
Post nuclear apocolypse lit has evolved over the years. Alas Babylon (1959) was imbued with the ideas of obese lunatic Herman Kahn i.e. a nuclear exchange would not be so bad….even doable with civilization up and running again after a couple of years. The Postman (1985) presented a bleaker picture of a post nuclear exchange world requiring many decades to recover. The Road (2006) incorporated the more accurate result of a full thermonuclear exchange i.e. a terminal nuclear winter ushering in a new ice age with no recovery and no possible return of civilization. One way or another, the fate of all species is extinctiion. It just may be that the total evolutionary purpose of the destructive voracious hominid animal is to remove the carbon from the earth’s crust and return it to the atmosphere and then go extinct, ushering in a new golden age of plant life.
Tried to read one of his books (Blood Meridian, I think), didn’t like it, couldn’t finish it.
I think he’s overhyped like most or all modern writers.
Years ago I’ve read something by De Lillo and Roth which I found interesting at the time. But that was it for me for modern American literature.
Cormac Carthy’s last novel Stella Maris is a gem*** too. It has a lot in common with Seek my Face by John Updike. Love both – – a lot.
****main character is a young mathematician, who had gone crazy some years back. Now she is doing well and – – – loves motor racing not least. Visits even posthumus (!) F-1-champion Jochen Rindt’s – still stylish and beautiful and cool widow Nina in her villa at the Lake of Geneva.
So if the purpose of humanity is to re-inject carbon into the atmosphere to save the planet from its death spiral of ever-worsening ice ages, who orchestrated that? Gaia? ETs? Allah?
Maybe you would appreciate Andrew Anglin’s accolade more. When I die I want him to write a eulogy for my family to ease the parting.
https://dailystormer.in/cormac-mccarthy-finally-dead/
Having read the road when my kid was little and we were going through a heavy dinosaur phase, the catastrophe read detail for detail like an asteroid impact like the KT impact. The Road features no radiation sickness or any of the stuff we associate (rightly or wrongly) with nuclear war.
Of all the things that could be said about Cormac McCarthy’s work, the Vietnamese guy says not eating a dog seems unrealistic. Go figure.
I suppose if he was from New Guinea or the Congo, the whole point of not becoming cannibals would have seemed rather far-fetched.
Kevin, would a desperate post-apocalyptic situation be sufficient to persuade you to feed your son pork?
Great review!…Now I’m going to have to read the books you described, because otherwise I never would, having taken a dislike for No Country For Old Men….Thank you…
I like McCarthy’s work, but the book that had more personal impact for me was Suttree, a down and out tale set in a 1950’s American South city. Blood Meridian is fascinatingly violent, I hear tales of a movie being made. I don’t feel that they passed on if there is a book of theirs I’m willing to read again.
I thought of it as a love story. Not the usual man/woman romance but the story of a father’s deep love for his son and his iron determination to ensure his son’s survival in a nightmare world.
I have long amused myself with the idea that the conscious, intelligent biosphere raised up humanity to spread life off-world before the sun’s increasing luminosity sterilizes the Earth.
Thanks, Kevin and appreciate seeing Linh Dinh again.
“Postcarder from the end of America.”
Right. Perhaps way overdue.
Sorry can’t comment on Cormac McCarthy, sounds nihilistic, bleak chaos.
Father trying to protect son from pederasts …
Sounds about right for USA.
Maybe solution is land invasion after Mexico joins BRICS.
First army through California portal, second through Texas.
Huge numbers would welcome/assist them.
No viable resistance from Camp Gayparade.
Thousands arrested. Trump sent for trial in Iraq.
Jews drop hot potato USA, deny any role in anything.
Yellen, Schumer, Blinken etc already long gone.
“White Supremacists”. Victims.
Write paeons of praise for invading armies, condemn Pentagram.
Seek advisory roles with BRICS, easy finance. Payday loans. Lavish presents.
Yanks under the bridge, under the bus, tent city. Too bad.
USA = New England … Mejico el Grande … New Afrika …
Hollywood to make big production.
Maybe another 6 million in there somewhere.
“Who / what orchestrated that?”
The golden age of plants stuff was meant as a joke. And obviously the lucky ones are those capable of chalking all the really crappy stuff that goes on to “god’s will”.
I assumed the same, that it was an asteroid impact, or (more likely) a volcanic super eruption. Consistent with the latter is that the father seems to be dying from silicosis rather than radiation poisoning.
Cormac’s output in a nutshell.
Part 1: Americans suck.
Part 2: Mexicans suck too.
Send them to Israel as Jews start the wars.
As for migrants, as opposed to refugees, shoot them all.
If you feed the animals, more come.
THAT is a law of nature.
KB, youre giving the cabal an easy pass. Linh has confronted you, its overdue
they are at most elite college campuses feeding their network. facts are facts, the innocent get trapped at the freshman stage. it cannot be explained by general ethnic nepotism or professional jealousy. they excel at collective punishment, they believe it is their right to embed and then stealthy persecute others
–ardent admirer
Allow unmarried female migrants only. That’s how we destroy feminism.
And here I thought “The Road” was a portentous look at America after Israel was done with it.
The Road, the movie version, was a pretty good guesstimate of what life would devolve to after a big nuclear war. We’d empty the stores, and in 12 months there would be few deer or fish left, and then we would start eyeing each other as food. Agricultural attempts would be made, but stealing/looting/killing would be rampant. Very rural communities might survive but there would be bands of desperate people of various races walking the earth trying to procure food. The top 1/10 of 1% might have underground bunkers in mountainsides with 20 years of canned food, generators/fuel, and weapons to keep you out (robot dogs with machine guns probably), but for the rest of us……….
The Deep State is currently prodding the one country on Earth that could easily make the above scenario come to pass. They could even poison much of our coastal fishing for years with a couple of dozen nukes (they have 6000, so no sea food for a while either).
“Linh Dinh: Well, what’s most obnoxious is that they accept no responsibility for creating refugees. Because America is the biggest creator of refugees.”
100%.
The massive amounts of migrants/refugees trying to get into EU is staggering and it’s from the us empire’s endless wars/war mongering. The courts are clogged with them–appeals/avocats (lawyers), it’s mind blowing.
That’s us tax dollars “at work.”
Allah of course! Need you ask?
excellent points, life is life and it’s going to go on. humans tend to see themselves as other than and better than, the other species, when in fact they are just another form of consciousness, sharing this amazing and living planet.
look at orchids, for instance, many mimic the particular pollinators, that are specific to that orchid. there is unseen interplay between all forms of life and realizing this, brings immense joy to life and ends the feeling of alienation and loneliness, that drives many to seek a divine savior.
No Country For Old Men is his most underrated book. It’s much scarier than The Road. The truly literary handling of this genre novel doesn’t undermine its tightly-structured suspenseful noir plot at all. And it is much better than the movie–and the movie is good.
I just want to say I agree about Suttree, the best read.
His other works are all just littered with exquisite prose. The Crossing and Cities of the Plain both come to mind there, brutal as can be, but then some magical paragraph or two.
Linh Dinh spewing anti.American clichés looks a bit like the dog who bites the hand that feeds him. But there’s a masochistic streak in all of us – other people need Blacks to tell them how bad they are, for us it has to be Linh Dinh.
A lot of McCormick’s texts look like mere violence porn. As other porn literature they will find their readers, until somebody finds a way to even trump them.
That’s the impression I had that kept me from reading him until after The Road came out and I somehow started it and have been reading him ever since.
Calling McCarthy’s work “violence porn” is like calling Crime and Punishment “crime porn.”
Cormac McCarthy’s fiction does not consider Wilbarger’s facts :
How many people would actually survive 20 years in their bunkers? Not all would, for various reasons.
In other cases, the bunkers would breached by outsiders. Maybe they would take the young females and liquidate everyone else. Or take all the food and the weapons and leave the occupants to fend for themselves. Maybe they would take any sturdy looking young men they found, indoctrinate them, and use them to replenish their own ranks.
A lot of things are possible. In the real history of the world, any and all of these things are not only possible. They have happened.
The bunker is just another variation on the last stand, lone-man-against-the world mentality. For another thing, in the face of a sudden apocalypse, what is the chance that some super wealthy family will be able to gather together in time when the sons and daughters are attending residential schools or studying on far-flung campuses and their young adult progeny are living condos in some far-away city.
Then there is the question of who is going to maintain the generators and keep the robot guard dogs working. Are they going hire their paladins for this purpose and will they make it to the bunker in time? Will they actually be loyal and even if they are loyal, will they actually be competent?
Then there’s the final question. Suppose, after 20 years, the doors get stuck and they can’t get out? Seriously, the time limit for bunker life might be more like eight months, and after that the people are going to have to come out and face the world. If they want to build something they can survive within for 20 years, it will have to be a compound, not a bunker.
In that case, they will need a force to protect them. Or they will have to bargain for protection. In not too long, they will be facing forces stronger than a few famished loons who want to raid them for their stock of canned soup. Again, all of these things have happened already in world history. Historically, the way these alliances are cemented is by supplying sons for military service or daughters for marriage. More likely, you go feudal or die. But a billionaire with a bunker would have a good chance of setting up himself and his progeny as part of the hereditary aristocracy. The more barbarous would see a kin alliance with the billionaire’s family as a way of gaining some cachet. That’s just how the human mind works. Always.
I miss Linh’s pieces on Unz. He is extremely perceptive, and I like his take on the human condition even if I may not always agree with him. Like Tocqueville before him he is foreign-born, and sometimes foreigners understand us he seems to understand us better than we who were born here understand ourselves.
That seems somewhat overblown praise . Of course, the commentariat have no idea whether or not you have done any reading beyond the title of a JB novel.
Is LD an ethnic Vietnamese or some such , or , is he , as may be entirely feasible, just another Chinese South East Asian Uber Mensch ?
Blood Meridian is based on the historical Galton gang. But yeah, I took offense to Kevin’s comment about “the unspeakable truth about how America was founded”. If you’re a reader of colonial history you know that’s not the case.
I picked up a copy of “The Road” at a goodwill after reading the first paragraph. I had read “Blood Meridian” and “All the Pretty Horses” previously. Two days after buying the book, we had an ice storm that left us without electricity for four days. Nothing can make you appreciate books like “The Road” or “Two Seconds After” like going without power for days.
I agree with those who say that extinction of the humans is the ultimate fate of the species. It is remarkable that we have gone 65 million years without another asteroid capable of killing us.
One of my own versions of the end of life: https://borderlandjournal.com/february-2023/
Eh, when I want to cheer up I read “Awake in the Night Land” by JC Wright. Cormac is for pikers.
Elon musk would concur; greetings to Linh from 21st and Lehigh.