I’ve just finished reading No Country For Old Men by Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy, which was also made into an Academy Award winning movie. It’s a dark and disturbing novel with the interspersing of Sheriff Tom Bell reflections indicating the progressive disintegration of American society. For example, he speaks of coming across a survey sent out to a number of schools around the country “a while back” concerning the problems with teaching in schools:
And the biggest problems they could name was things like talkin in class and runnin in the hallways. Chewin gum. Copyin homework. Things of that nature. So they got one of them forms that was blank and printed up a bunch of em and sent em back out to the same schools. Forty years later. Well, here come the answers back. Rape, arson, murder. Drugs. Suicide. So I think about that. Because a lot of the time ever when I say anything about how the world is goin to hell in a handbasket people will just sort of smile and tell me I’m gettin old. That it’s one of the symptoms. But my feelin about that is that anybody that cant tell the difference between rapin and murderin people and chewin gum has got a whole lot bigger of a problem than what I’ve got. Forty years is not a long time neither. Maybe the next forty of it will bring some of em out from under the ether. If it aint too late.
The Sheriff proceeds to recall a woman who aired her political views to him at a conference:
Finally told me, said: I dont like the way this country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt that what she’ll be able to have an abortion. I’m goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she’ll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.
Later in the book the Sheriff recalls being interviewed by a young reporter:
She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your country? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told her, I said: It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight. I told her, I said: It reaches into ever strata. You’ve heard about that aint you? Ever strata? You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it’s just too late [here the Sheriff is going back to the opening scene of the book concerning criminals involved in the drug trade killing each other].
More profoundly we might say that one of the key foundations of social order is treating people with respect and honour. It is precisely the biblical view of people that provides the essential basis for the recognition of human dignity, that is, all people are created in God’s image and God’s love is demonstrated in the giving of his only Son to die on the cross.
Posted January 4, 2010
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