Cormac McCarthy's Novel No Country for Old Men
In light of the abortion video released only a few days ago, this passage in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men seems particularly apt (with hat tip to JK and David Duff):
Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. 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 this country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but 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. (Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men; quoted in Jean Bethke Elshtain's Sovereignty: God, State, and Self, Basic Books, 2008, pages 203-204)Excellent recounting in dialect of a conversation, and a stunner of a conversation killer, but the words bring one to thinking . . .
Labels: Bioethics
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 5:16 AM
10 comments
10 Comments:
They need to get with the times. The only right that women and her female kin will have will be that of ISIS slaves where she'll wish she could be put to out of her misery like so many of the captured female slaves under ISIS rule. In this eye-opening, hell-on-Earth under ISIS, BBC documentary, one brave Yazidi lawyer is trying to free as many of the captured Yazidi women and girls that he can with limited resources and help. It's just a shame that this documentary isn't airing in prime-time around the world to show just how evil ISIS really is.
This documentary starts a bit slow, but it is undoubtedly the best film or television I've seen in years and shows just what courage really is. Hell, I was even wishing that of all the religions to be brainwashed with as a child, the Yazidi religion would be one of the the best to be raised in.
It is very hard to watch, but is just a foreshadowing of things to come if people don't see the real threat posed by ISIS and radical islam.
The documentary actually did appear in prime time in at least Arkansas. 2000 last Wednesday on our PBS station.
But I'd agree, worldwide prime time would be best.
Getting "everybody" to watch though ...
JK
I agree with both of you. Worst of all, ISIS can supply the textual support for its outrages.
Jeffery Hodges
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brilliant excerpt
Yeah, I thought so, too.
Jeffery Hodges
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I was inspired to read the whole novel. It's very, very good, but rather depressing - a sort of realistic version of dystopian novel, if that makes sense - he treats the contemporary Southwest, Texas in particular, in a realistic manner while evoking all the unsettling characteristics of dystopian novels without any of the fantasy elements of the latter. The result is very powerful, particularly in the way he limns the fading away of the old southwestern frontier ethic embodied by the County Sheriff who is the principal protagonist.
Thanks, Sperwer. That confirms what I've heard from my wife, who saw the film and read the book in Korean translation.
McCarthy has written a fully dystopian novel titled The Road, also made into a movie. I know of both book and film from reviews.
I guess I need to read both novels . . .
Jeffery Hodges
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I've read the Road. He's a very powerful writer
I'd have labelled The Road as post-apocalyptic
Right. That's more accurate.
Jeffery Hodges
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