West of The West

Who are to be informed?

The unformed, the shapeless, superficially differentiated but fundamentally undifferentiated mob, the post-modern blob, whose simulated identities are selected from pull down menu answers to pre-determined questions, void of any inherited identity, ignorant of any heritage, tradition, roots, values, value.

These are those Chesterton warns may become so open minded that their brains fall out, or who, given the absence of anything believe in, will believe anything. These are creatures ripe for in-formation:

See the child. He is pale and thin, he wears a thin and ragged linen shirt. He stokes the scullery fire. Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves. His folk are known for hewers of wood and drawers of water but in truth his father has been a schoolmaster. He lies in drink, he quotes from poets whose names are now lost. The boy crouches and watches him.
Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.

The child is formless. He knows not that his ancestors were known as hewers of wood and drawers of water and even if he did, he would not know the significance of this allusion to the ancient son, cursed for dishonoring his drunken, disgraced father. The child has a schoolmaster for a father who has neglected to teach him how to read. He lacks a knowledge of all things past, all things which created him. He knows not the names of Wordsworth or his own mother. Who will the child, the father of the man, grow to be? Who will form him, inform him?  

These are quintessential American questions, especially the further one ventures west, further removed by not only time but physical space from the origin. Occidentalis ultimus. These, Captain White’s filibusters and the countless others of the formless, rootless archetype, have no business being on that land:

There is an old disordered Mennonite in this place and he turns to study them. A thin man in a leather weskit, a black and straightbrim hat set square on his head, a thin rim of whiskers. The recruits order glasses of whiskey and drink them down an order more. There are monte games at tables by the wall and there are whores at another table who look the recruits over. The recruits stand sideways along the bar with their thumbs in their belts and watch the room. They talk among themselves of the expedition in loud voices and the old Mennonite shakes a rueful head and sips his drink and mutters.

They’ll stop you at the river, he says.

The second corporal looks past his comrades. Are you talking to me?

At the river. Be told. They’ll jail you to a man.

Who will?

The United States Army. General Worth.

The hell they will.

Pray they will.

He looks at his comrades. He leans toward the Mennonite. What does that mean, old man?

The Mennonite watches the enshadowed dark before them as it is reflected to him in the mirror over the bar. He turns to them. His eyes are wet, he speaks slowly. The wrath of God lies sleeping. It was hid a million years before men were and only men have power to wake it. Hell aint half full. Hear me. Ye carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land. Ye’ll wake more than the dogs.

Young, rootless, literally or figuratively illiterate men, recruited to “carry war of a madman’s making onto a foreign land” for want of anything else to do is, in literature an American archetype, and in reality an American rite of passage. Post-modern America is formless, thus, the constant need for information.

This phenomena in America is produced by its extreme Occidentalism. Though in previous iterations, it has been produced by the simple and total destruction of a civilization. Ernst Jünger is, at first, a particularly acute but European version of this archetype, and, after having passed through the rite of passage, a particularly acute diagnostician of the phenomenon. After running away from his German bourgeoise home to join the Foreign Legion, he enlisted in the German army and served in the world’s first mechanized war. Emerging from that war a war hero and celebrity after the success of his war memoir, Storm of Steel, he attempted to wrest Germany from both post-war nihilism and liberal mediocrity as a leader of the Konservative Revolution. After watching this movement degenerate into Nazism, Jünger turned his focus to cultivating an inner, impenetrable personal freedom, while also remaining a lucid observer of the final dismantling and destruction of the Old World and the technological forces which were creating the new. His appraisal of the situation in America is startling:

Where automatism increases to the point of approaching perfection—such as in America—the panic is even further intensified. There it finds its best feeding grounds; and it is propagated through networks that operate that the speed of light. The need to hear the news several times a day is already a sign of fear; the imagination grows and paralyzes itself in a rising vortex. The myriad antennae rising above our megacities resemble hairs standing on end—they provoke demonic contacts.

Demonic contacts indeed. For the madman, whether that be Captain White, or Glanton, or Ahab, or Hitler, is always merely the fool followed by the other fools. Who leads the fool in charge? In Blood Meridian, McCarthy’s answer is a bit on the nose: Judge Holden literally leads the idiot around on a leash for much of the novel after saving the idiot’s life, much the same as he controls the fates of other fools, from the preacher Reverend Green to Glanton. Much the same for Ahab and Pip.

We thus find ourselves once again in history where the formless masses of idiots and Pips, illiterate kids and those with a taste for mindless violence, having no meaning or purpose or roots, but fully informed, are willing to hitch themselves and their fate to yet another madman. They will wake more than the dogs.

This raises the question, who, or what, is holding Trump’s leash?