Category Archives: America

Must-Read AMERICAN Novel: Blood Meridian, Or The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy

America, Art, English, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Morality

“This is prose that is akin to a neo-archaic channeling of the King James Old Testament by way of Herman Melville”

By Juvenal Early

Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian is, in the estimation of many critics, among the finest half dozen American novels of the 20th Century. The late Harold Bloom thought it the greatest novel since As I Lay Dying. Unlike no other novel in contemporary letters, the book has been called an American Iliad, also compared to The Anabasis of Xenophon. Published in 1985, Blood Meridian is a revisionist, maybe even a nihilistic, Western. It’s also an epic. If you want a sense of how the West was won, you will find no finer fictional work.

The Plot: A character known only as the Kid, born in Tennessee with a predilection for “mindless violence, in 1833, runs away from home at 14, and by 1850 finds himself in Texas. He takes up with filibusters—mercenaries—hired to solve the new state’s Indian problem. The Comanches and Apache had dominated the plains for three centuries. Texans demanded eradication.

The fictional Kid eventually joins the historical Glanton Gang, and falls sway to the gang’s philosophical leader, Judge Holden. McCarthy learned from his sources that the Judge was an uncommonly tall man, a completely hairless albino. In Blood Meridian, he turns the bare facts into the mythical. The Judge is perhaps the most nightmarish monster in all of fiction. Not Ahab but Moby Dick himself.

The Glanton Gang murders its way across Texas, Northern Mexico, Arizona, eventually to the sea. They take many Indian scalps (proof for the money men). They take non-Indian scalps too. Who can tell the difference? It all pays the same. In time, these bounty hunters will have a bounty on their own heads. Few are left by the end of the narrative.

Blood Meridian may be the most appallingly violent great novel ever written. Be prepared for several particularly graphic scenes but do stick with it. As Shelby Foote said, the book’s hero is the American Language, and here it is presented in prose that is akin to a neo-archaic channeling of the King James Old Testament by way of Herman Melville.

There is movement, always movement, mixed with a sense of place in Blood Meridian. Few have ever combined the two better than McCarthy. To take a random sample:

On the day that followed they crossed a lake of gypsum so fine the ponies left no track upon it. The riders wore masks of boneblack smeared about their eyes and some had blacked the eyes of their horses. The sun reflected off the pan burned the undersides of their faces and shadow of horse and rider alike were painted upon the fine white powder in purest indigo. Far out on the desert to the north dustspouts rose wobbling and augered the earth and some said they’d heard of pilgrims borne aloft like dervishes in those mindless coils to be dropped broken and bleeding upon the desert again and there perhaps to watch the thing that had destroyed them lurch onward like some drunken djinn and resolve itself once more into the elements from which it sprang.

How do McCarthy’s mercenaries talk? Aside from the Judge, they are as terse as a John Ford Western. But, oh!, when the Judge does speak, you hang on every word. Here’s a short speech he delivers about halfway through the novel. He expounds on the nature of God’s cruel universe and man’s place in it. It explains the book’s cryptic title:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.

Notice that the passage quoted contains no punctuation, save for periods and question marks. Commas appear infrequently in McCarthy, but little else. There are no quotation marks. Even James Joyce set his dialogue off with dashes. McCarthy assumes you’ll figure it out. You will. McCarthy’s oeuvre is all this way. He used 42 semicolons in his first novel and only one in the nine that followed. Most writers need a more formalistic approach. But I wouldn’t try to enforce Strunk and White on Homer—and not the modern Homer either. Art has no rigid rules, and Blood Meridian is high art. But don’t be intimidated by art. Blood Meridian is not particularly arcane. After four readings, I think it’s lucid—and exhilarating.

Does McCarthy take sides, Cowboys or Indians? We never really get to know the Indians. From the viewpoint of the settlers who hired the filibusters, they’re a problem to be solved. As for the Glanton Gang, it takes a tough bunch to solve a tough problem. I doubt McCarthy was concerned with questions of right or wrong—only about getting the story right. In that, he succeeds triumphantly. The reader—grateful for such poetic prose—can make of the ethical lessons what he will.

Cowboys and Indians alike, they are forces of nature, compelled to do what they have always done. The novel’s 3rd epigraph is your first clue.[i] Scalping didn’t originate in the Wild West of the 19th Century. The culmination of Blood Meridian could not be otherwise than what it is.

We would do well to keep this in mind as we go about assigning blame among our own ancestors.

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[i]
“Clark, who led last year’s exhibition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped.
THE YUMA DAILY SUN
June 13, 1982”

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“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog. His first essay was “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem.” It made waves! He has a BAB archive.

Tucker And The Trucker: Condescending About Canada; Wrong About American South

America, Canada, Juvenal Early's Archive, Liberty, Race, Racism, The South, The State

Tucker Carlson: “Canada, they always steal our ideas and produce a slightly shoddy copy of them.”

Tucker Carlson’s segment, “There’s no more fearful despot than Canada’s Prime Minister,” is an important one. However, as a Canadian (an American too), who grasps very well the fundamental differences between Canada and America—Americans think they are God’s Country and operate with such imprimatur; Canadians don’t—I found it was remarkably condescending, as the famous and important host cackled that, “Canada always steals our ideas and produces a slightly shoddy copy of them.”

I have pinpointed and analyzed the differences I experienced personally between Canada and the US in an interview series with Dissident Mama: “Ilana Mercer, part 1: Roots, writing, & resistance” and “Ilana Mercer, part 2: Lady Paleolibertarian.”

To the extent Canadians have aped American state legislation and cultural trends; they lose. To the extent they stick with their more reserved, understated, quieter, far-better spoken civility and civilization; they win. On the whole, the Canadian State is usually far less menacing to its citizens than is the American State to its legal inhabitants. The US jailed Conrad Black; not Canada. And even when they reproduce their facsimile of the prototypical, American, TV Fox News blonde, Canadians do it better: Witness Lauren Southern versus dummy Tomi Lahren. (Oy! And my Dutch relative tells me Holland is now producing what is considered in The Netherlands déclassé, hackneyed, American-style TV blonds. Tucker already had one on!)

Juvenal Early, a regular writer for Barely A Blog, was furious:

“Tucker disgusted me with his coverage of the truckers last night. He asked one of them to refute the leftist assertion of racism in the crowd. What does that have to do with the vaccine mandate protest? Tucker also continues to demonize the Confederacy and the battle flag. Among real Southern right wingers, that’s a big non-starter.”

The Confederate flag segment is at the 13:00 minute mark.  The trucker interview starts at 16:45 and goes until 19 minutes.

TRUTH: Ukrainian Lobbying Is To Blame For Overheated Atmosphere; Not Biden

America, Argument, Conservatism, Democrats, Economy, Foreign Policy, Globalism, Military, Republicans, Russia

Breitbart: “After Destroying America’s Economy Biden Now Destroying Foreign Economies.

That bit of Breitbart reporting attests to the fact that conservatives would rather score political points against the opposition, Joe Biden, in the tit-for-tat manner that typifies our impoverished political discourse, than TELL THE TRUTH.

THE TRUTH: Ukrainians are tireless and wily lobbyists in Washington and way more cunning than their American counterparts. Like lobbyists for wars in the Middle East; they play Americans for the fools they are. Biden is not responsible for the overheated atmosphere in Ukraine, the one Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now wishes he could dial back; Ukrainian activists and politicians have brought us this far. Ukrainians energetically lobby the EU, too.

ONE-SIDED NONSENSE via Breitbart: After Destroying America’s Economy Biden Now Destroying Foreign Economies.” This idiotic advocacy from Breitbart is as sub-intelligent as anything that CNN emits. Ukraine agitated for foreign intervention. It almost got it. Now the corrupt enterprise that is Ukraine is regretting the exercise. Biden has actually said, “There is not going to be any American forces moving into Ukraine.

MORE. AND HERE & “Ukraine’s Relentless Lobbyists Take to Congress: How a few Washington firms are seeking to put the U.S. on collision course with Russia.”

Except the Ukrainian lobbyists beat the Russian lobbyists, since America has settled into propagandized hatred of Russia.

NEW COLUMN: Exporting Toxic Wokeism

America, Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Exporting Toxic Wokeism” is the new column now on WND.COM, The Unz Review, Townhall.com, CNSNews.com, The New American and American Renaissance.

And excerpt:

America has made a habit of exporting democracy at the point of the bayonet, be it by fomenting war or agitating for color-coded, plant-based revolutions, blessed and backed by the duopoly.

While not as lethal, cultural trends and products exported can be toxic, too. They, moreover, displace and contaminate indigenous culture. To wit, Wokeism is made in America, is entirely toxic, and, sadly, suffers no supply-chain disruptions in its spread abroad.

In case you’re not awake to it, woke is the current state-of-being in America. In particular, to be woke in America is to be anti-white and to be anti-white is to be woke. More so than “in” and “hip”—to be woke is existentially important; it will often determine whether one gets and keeps a job, a social media account, even a bank account.

Although Wokeism is a product of a distorted and deformed American marketplace of ideas—there is always a libertarian who sees a free and energetic agora worthy of defending and exporting, where there is only coercion and cruelty.

“Wokeism has passed a market test,” effuses Tyler Cowen, an economist writing for Bloomberg.com. “The woke movement could be the next great U.S. cultural export—and it is going to do many other countries some real good.”

Yes, Cowen, a libertarian, both explains and exculpates  an increasingly entrenched, coercive system of pigment-based prejudice and persecution. “Wokeism,” he further enthuses, “is an idea that can be adapted to virtually every country: Identify a major form of oppression in a given region or nation, argue that people should be more sensitive to it, add some rhetorical flourishes, purge some wrongdoers (and a few innocents) and voila — you have created another woke movement.”

Welcome to the quintessential, collectivist, libertarian Jacobinism—Cowen’s. Omelets can’t be made without breaking the few proverbial eggs. Cowen, like most of his ilk—and against all evidence—also thinks that, “American culture is a healthy, democratizing, liberating influence,” so he wants “to extend it.” …

… READ THE REST. “Exporting Toxic Wokeism” is now on WND.COM, The Unz Review and Townhall.com, CNSNews.com, The New American and American Renaissance