No Country and the Slow Collapse

“He was nineteen. And he told me that he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was goin to hell. Told it to me out of his own mouth. I dont know what to make of that. I surely dont. I thought I’d never seen a person like that and it got me to wonderin if maybe he was some new kind.”

This quote is from the first page of No Country For Old Men, and it succinctly summarizes the following 309 pages of story to follow. This is a book about malice, or more appropriately, the weakness of those who refuse to fight it. Ed Tom is wrong about that nineteen-year-old. His kind have been around since Cain bashed his brother’s head in with a rock. What’s changed are the men who have forgotten what evil looks like.

No Country for Old Men is an old Western set in the backdrop of 1980s America. Llewelyn Moss, a man down on his luck, comes across the scene of a cartel deal gone wrong—and two million in cash ready for the taking. This chance encounter sets off a man-hunt as Llewelyn chooses to make the ultimate gamble and run with the money. But his story has always been the least interesting part of the narrative for me. It’s the men who are after Llewelyn who grab my attention.

First, we have our villain, Anton Chigurh. He is a a stranger in a strange land, or rather, a psychopath in a strange land. We don’t know his origins, what set him on the career of a hit-man, or even if he has a life outside of his gruesome profession (all signs point to no). Like a whirlwind straight out of hell, he is a demon summoned into the plot and banished just as quickly by an act of God.

And for our noble hero? We have Ed Tom, a WW2 veteran facing down retirement. His goal is to reach Llewlyn before the sinister Chigurh and steer his wayward charge back on the path of sanity. And in a more hopeful story, that would’ve been exactly what happened. Ed Tom would’ve swooped in at the last second, moralized about the dangers of greed, and Lleweyln would’ve left the money behind. Chigurh would’ve died in a firefight with law enforcement, and all’s well would’ve ended well.

But this is No Country for Old Men. Ed Tom didn’t make it in time.

Over the course of the narrative, we see Ed Tom slowly being worn down. He is a man always slow to the draw, always too late, never comprehending, never in control. But by the end of the book his sin isn’t that he fails to save Llewelyn; it’s that he gives up. 

Ed Tom sees the world going crazy, and he resigns himself to retirement. It isn’t the graceful bowing out of old age, handing the reins to another more capable. Ed Tom leaves his position to be filled by his lackey deputies, who are even lesser men than him. In doing so, he condemns his progeny, the next generation, to suffer. 

Llewelyn is a product and victim of this widespread attitude. The world is slowly crumbling (though paradise compared to what things are like now). He’s a cynic who’s learned to always look out for yourself and those you care about. It isn’t that he’s apathetic; he does risk his life to give water to a dying man. However, the thought of any greater good never entered his mind when he steals the money. He is a man equipped physically but not spiritually for the age. Men like Llewelyn Moss are never going to put the world back together. They’re just trying to get what’s theirs.

Men like Anton Chigurh are inevitable, but we build barriers to mitigate them and the damage they cause. Civilization is one great wall against chaos, but that wall needs to be maintained. It needs to be manned with men who can get their hands dirty. It needs men who are unswervingly honest and faithful. It needs strong men. And the second men begin to desert their posts, that wall crumbles, and it is the men like Anton Chigurh who slide through the cracks.

“Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? 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.”

Collapse is a slow process. It almost never happens all at once. It is the result of entropy slowly wearing away at a society, and men no longer standing up to fix it. We all know the old adage: hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create bad times. But why do good times create weak men?

It is because that wall we call civilization is sturdy. Men can abandon their posts and suffer no consequences. The system remains stable… for now. And so, men do what they do in prosperity. They grow fat and lazy. They relax those harsh moral codes that kept them alive in the darkness. They call religion ignorance and faith stupidity, not realizing it was those precise things that built everything they have. And so, they make shortcuts. They indulge. And every time they do, an incision is made. Civilization is not killed in one fell blow. It is bled out by a thousand paper cuts. The wall crumbles, and then it falls. 

No Country for Old Men ends with a dream. Ed Tom is wandering through the cold wilderness on horseback. His dead father rides passed him. Somewhere up ahead in all that cold and snow, Ed Tom knows that his father is fixing a fire. 

I don’t know if Cormac McCarthy believed in any higher truth, but I do think he had some notion of the transcendent. Even when that wall crumbles and falls, we still have fire to light the way back for those strong enough. Even when things get bad, there’s still light at the end of the tunnel for those willing to walk through the decline. 

McCarthy published No Country for Old Men in 2005, and I think he knew exactly where the world was headed. And after reading this book, I have come to my own personal interpretation of the title. This is no country for tired men, unable or unwilling to put some little piece of the world back together again.