No Country For Old Men - Time To Make Way Before Your Soul Is At Hazard

Ed Tom Bell, sheriff in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men in an opening soliloquy says:

The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willin' to die to even do this job. but I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet somethin' I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: "Okay, I'll be part of this world." 

It is often hard in this divided and contentious age to take life's measure - what is going on?  How did the world get so complicated, so unequivocally complex? It seems like only yesterday that life was far simpler.  Family, faith, neighborliness, Sunday dinners, easily understood values; and now not only has that idyll disappeared, but an almost incomprehensible nightmare has replaced it. 

Things are not as they seem in an AI-mediated world.  Reality, as Browning, Kurosawa, and Durrell portrayed it decades ago - a matter of perception, personality, and interpretation - has become even more a conundrum. Metaphysics - the philosophy of what is and what isn't - has to be rethought.  In an advanced computer age where where the possible replaces the actual and where the individual creates his own reality, Bishop Berkeley's question, 'If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?' has been rendered meaningless.  Such intellectual probing - or any attempt to pin down reality - is irrelevant. 

 

The post-human generation is within a few decades of existence. Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

Since the human genome was completely sequenced, the identification of specific gene configurations linked to human characteristics and behavior has become routine; and the engineering of some of those sequences to modify or eliminate them has proceeded quickly.  It will not be long before all genetic sequences will have been identified, codified, sorted and catalogued, and available for modification. 

Even more impressively such genetic engineering will be able to replace unwanted genes with more desirable ones. Once that happens, parents will be able to purchase the genes of beautiful, talented, brilliant celebrities and create the infant of their choice.

At the same time, engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

What soul is at hazard, ask theologians? Without clear, unmistakable, and unchanging signposts no individual can be expected to keep a steady course towards God.  Deviations, detours, dead ends, and roads leading back on themselves not only make spiritual travel difficult, but create a confusion that can only lead to despair.  

In the pre-transformative times in which we live life has become more and more relative. Limits of credibility have been so pushed that even the very basics of life, the DNA structure which inalterably determines and distinguishes between men and women, have been subjected to perception, choice, and convenience. 

John Paul II was the first pope to speak out against Protestant fundamentalism - a circus act, he called it, a magical mystery tour included with the price of admission, an impossibly fanciful episode and an equally imaginary end.  Spiritual evolution can only be achieved through faith and reason. Understanding the thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, and Athanasius is as important as prayer.  

The beautiful complexity of the Trinity, discussed and argued over for more than two centuries, can only be appreciated through rational thought and logical conclusion; but once it is understood for all its divine architecture, faith in God is strengthened. 

All that will be irrelevant once human beings are untethered from reality - from a 'real' world that must be subjected to logic, reason, and disciplined thought to be understood.  'Taking its measure', figuring out what life is about and why, and placing oneself in relation to it, will be soon outdated, archaic, and of no use. 

We are now observing the last throes of reality where we are not trying to make sense of things as Ed Tom Bell is, but to change them, to make things better, to progress, to proceed to a better world.  A fanciful enterprise under any circumstances, but with the very foundation of 'reality' shaking beneath our feet, a foolish, desperate enterprise. 

In preparation for a Sixtieth class reunion at Yale University, organizers sorted through the many requests for speaking time.  The Class of 1964 had among its members former scientists, professors, industrialists, and senior government officials who wanted to be heard.  They had much to say about race, the environment, social equality, politics, and much more.  These important men squabbled and jostled for screen time, a lesson in one-upmanship, status, and importance. 

Only a few demurred and suggested that since they were all in perhaps the last decade of their lives, wouldn't it make more sense to talk about this, the final existential question of their lives? Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella of the same name, is unprepared for his impending death, and remains stubbornly in the past.  Only near the very end of his life does he let go, face the unimaginable future, and accept his fate. 

It is quite amazing, although understandable why old men hang on to the present - why they are convinced that their lives actually meant something, that positive change is not only possible but inevitable, that goodness always wins out over evil, and a whole raft of other febrile dreams.  Why must they go kicking and screaming from a world which will soon do quite well without them and on which they have had only desultory, insignificant effect?  Isn't facing eternity the only real issue?

The reunion went on as they all do - speaker after speaker made their way to the podium, took out their prepared notes, and lectured their classmates on doing the right thing.  In a time and place where old men are irrelevant if not supernumerary, shouldn't they have their sights on the limitless reaches in front of them?  

Jews have a saying, 'Too soon old, too late schmart' - wise in Talmudic, rabbinical ways that gentiles can only intimate.  

Harry Angstrom in John Updike's Rabbit at Rest likes to play golf with Jewish partners.  They seem to have a hold on past, present, and future that gentiles can only hope to have.  Rabbit is in the depressive throes of assessing his life, sees little hope, and clings to the wisdom of these old men as his only refuge. 

No country for old men indeed.  Ed Tom was right to be concerned that it was hard to take life's measure in changing times, and that his soul was at hazard.  Few of us are there. 

The Fountain Of Youth - Older Men Don't Want To Be Younger, They Just Want Love With A Younger Woman

'I'm past my sexual pull-by date', Cohen said to his internist who as a married late middle aged man with a young lover wanted nothing of it.  

'Bullshit', said Dr. Rubinstein in his customary blunt way - the forthrightness that his patients had come to expect and appreciate.  No patronizing, patriarchal sugar coating - facts are facts, diseases are diseases, all of which pick their victims at random.

'Why me?', Rubinstein heard every day as he went over blood results.  'The luck of the draw', he said, never considering an evasive answer; and so it was with Cohen who in good health was in low spirits and sought his physician's advice. 

 

Cohen said, as his sexual expiry approached - although actuarily he had many good years left, death had its macabre persistence - that he felt despondent.  Not that he had not had a good, productive, and fulfilling life, but the pall of enforced celibacy was diverting his attention from everything else.  

All he could think of was his last love, a lovely young woman half his age. Lisa was not the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was the most complaisant, the most willing, the most needy of his patience, understanding, and sexual enthusiasm. 

As Coleman Silk says in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain about his young lover, 'Granted, she's not my first love; and granted, she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?', Cohen said, ‘It certainly does’.

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack caused by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel room. 

 

All older men want to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that? A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead in the Governor's mansion or the Oval Office? 

None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Rockefeller.

Cohen's affair with Annette of course ended, but not badly.  Both knew that it was destined to end, so there was no intimation of manipulation, extortion, or accusations of exploitation. Yes, they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it could never be.

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he had had just enough of the elixir to sustain him, at least for a while. 

Now Cohen was bereft, alone, and becoming depressed over the fact that he was still more than sexually capable but consigned to his rocker well before his time. 

He was reminded of the Konstantin Levin reflection in Anna Karenina, that God had created Man, an intelligent, sentient, creative, willful and enthusiastic being; allowed him but a few decades of life, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  God's irony - having created men with a lifelong passion and desire for women but granting them a similarly few decades was a far worse irony.

Dr. Rubinstein, doctor and amateur Talmudic scholar reminded Cohen both of the Biblical injunctions to love God no matter when, how, or under what conditions; and of Solomon's many wives and concubines, both well into old age.  

‘Contradictory?', the doctor asked rhetorically.  'Far from it', and went on to suggest that life, even a religious one, was not meant to be lived in emotional and sexual penury. 

'Get a hooker', Dr. Rubinstein suggested. 

At first Cohen was shocked by the proposition.  How could a doctor in good standing in an age where AIDS had not totally been eradicated, when adultery still destroyed the most stable and solid of marriages, possibly have even intimated such a remedy? 

'Because I am a doctor', Rubinstein replied, 'and my first, foremost, and only preoccupation is for the welfare and wellbeing of my patients'. 

The thought had never occurred to Cohen.  He had always been a msn about town, a Casanova of sorts, an attractive desirable man well into his sixties.  He had never paid for sex, and never thought he would. 

'Suspension of disbelief', said Rubinstein , a popular philosopher in his own way.  'Remember what Dominque Strauss-Kahn (former IMF high functionary and candidate for the French presidency) said when he was accused of solicitation. "I didn't know they were prostitutes. All women look the same with their clothes off". Don't be such a prude'. 

Now doctors are not supposed to be procurers, and Cohen was taken quite by surprise at Rubinstein’s suggestion.  He was about to ask him for a reference when the doctor, seeing his surprise, concluded, 'Or try someone fiftyish, more in your league and still many years younger.'

But the doctor, younger than Cohen and without the existential need for a soft, warm, pliant body in bed with him, had no idea of the epiphanic nature of a truly December-May affair.  Fiftyish simply wouldn't do it at this stage in life.  A post-menopausal lover, as sexually excitable as she might be, would not fit the bill.  It was young women he wanted, not younger women. 

And so it was that Annette from Accounting fell into his lap - a perfect storm of heritage, frustration, emotional need and passing age.  

Annette was from an Iowa farm family but not the idyllic, variety.  Her father and brother were both in federal prison and she by the skin of her teeth had escaped the same fate. 

She made her way through community college, junior college, and then the University of Iowa but after ten years in Washington was no better off than when she left the prairie. She was nearing midnight on her biological clock, when she fell for Richard Cohen, a senior executive at her firm, many years her senior but attentive, kind, solicitous, and passionate. 

 

Their Saturdays in her third-floor walkup were memorable - orgies of drunken, drug-addled, inimitable sexual adventure previously unknown to either of them.  

D.H. Lawrence was right, thought Cohen after one particularly heady Saturday.  Sexual mutuality is indeed the be-all and end-all of human experience, and at its best, epiphanic.

The affair went on for months.  Annette fell in love with this marvelous loving, considerate, and understanding man. 'You love women, don't you?', she said to him one day after sex, a woman truly appreciative of a man who loved everything about her, for who she was and who she could be. 

Cohen was in seventh heaven, saved from sexual dereliction by this simple farmgirl from Iowa, awakened from marital torpor, energized and given new life.  Thank God for Annette, he said not often enough. 

Esther Cohen knew what was going on, or at least surmised the real reason behind his 'working late' and 'weekend workshops' but her complaisance was equally predictable. She was brought up in a patriarchal age, and although she matured into a new world of female independence, she was only on the cusp of radical feminism.  Daddy was still king. 

More importantly Cohen was a good provider and a good father, and in these days of irresponsibility and venality, she was not about to give up a good, rare thing.  Men were simply this way and as long as there were no complications -  Aidan Jones, for example, a colleague and classmate, had had a child by his lover and his marriage had come to an expected, precipitous, calamitous end - she could overlook her husband’s depredations and soldier on. 

This was the conundrum, the puzzle faced by modern women.  Despite decades of feminist hectoring and misandrous aggression, men had not changed an iota.  Except of course for those intimidated, uxorious men like progressive Bob Muzelle who attended women's conferences on equality, who deferred to their wives on questions of dinner menus and portfolio adjustments; and for whom their wives and all women had nothing but scorn and hilarious laughter. 

No, Richard Cohen was none of the above.  He was simply both a man who loved women and who saw the younger of them as the answer to his existential angst. 

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack provoked by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel. 

All older men wanted to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that.  A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead over an office memorandum? None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Nelson. 

Cohen's affair with Annette ended of course, but not badly.  Both knew that it would end; and so there were no recriminations. Yes, regret, and yes they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it was not to be.  '

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he demurred. 

American Blasphemy Laws - Sharia Imposed By The Cancel Culture

A hilarious skit on the Internet shows a white Southern cracker in the foreground with a black man in the background.  The white man says that he has no use for the N-word. 'I hate N...' he says, and the black man says the full word.  The white man goes on. 'I don't want them N...in my neighborhood' and the black man says the full word, all a takeoff on the ridiculousness of the arbitrary censorship borne of a woke identity ideology. 

If black men are able to use the word and call themselves N-word, and throw it around as a matter of reference, affection, and emphasis, then why the imposition of white censure for the same familiar use? White Southerners understand this implicitly.  So did Mark Twain. 

Dave Chappelle, popular black comedian does a great riff on this racial dualism, and the hypocrisy of Left-imposed censorship. He explains through his comedy that context matters.  A hateful, spiteful, mean and aggressive racial taunt is one thing, bandying a familiar, home-grown epithet is another entirely. 

 

Not a television series is produced without black actors ('white reparations' say Americans who see the overrepresentation of blacks) calling each other the N-word a hundred times an episode.  At the same time these same actors and blacks in general are free to call whites 'honkeys, ofays, whiteys' and more.  Coddling, say critics of the trend, one more example of reverse racism in spades. 

This narrow-mindedness, this counter-productive species protection, this insistence on transforming reality into some distorted, idealistic vision of it has become endemic. The progressive canon is not one of beatitudes or moral precepts, but one of negativity and imposition which ignores the unpleasant truths of American life.  Coddling, artificial protection, ignoring root causes and consequent behavior helps no one. 

For anyone who grew up even a few decades ago, it is hard to understand how Americans' skins have become so thin - how insults, innuendos, slights, and insinuating remarks have become such causes célèbres.  Bullying was par for the course on school playgrounds, an element of maturing; a learning process whereby the weak in their defeat learned about the enemy and the middling figured out how to evade, negotiate, compromise, or avoid.

Taunts were expected – racial and ethnic slurs and remarks about disability were common currency, the labeling of ‘other’, the natural signifiers of difference and threat to the community  No one was animated by hatred.  There was no hostility towards Jews, Poles, or Italians.  They, after all, were the furriers, druggists, and clothiers of our communities; those who worked lathes and presses, paved streets, or cut hair.

'Kike, guinea, wop, mick, hunky, spic’– these were epithets that rolled off the backs of early American immigrants who had known real prejudice and discrimination in their home countries.  Names and verbal slander were nothing compared to pogroms, camps, and abject poverty.

Assimilation – attainment of the American Dream – was the goal of these new immigrants.  They had no interest in retaining let along celebrating their diversity.  Italian Americans who escaped the ghettos of Wooster Square or Mulberry Street wanted no part of San Gennaro, the Cosa Nostra, arranged marriages, and Sicilian onore and vengeance.  Irish Americans were ashamed of their drunken, brawling stereotype, and yearned like all immigrants to become American, cultured, and calm.

Although Irish, Italians, and Jews quickly rose up from the slums of New York, New Haven, and Boston on their own merits – ambition, enterprise, intelligence, family, and an indomitable will to full the prophecy of their immigration – ethnic slurs sped the journey.   There is nothing like the anger, hostility, and resentment provoked by insult and stereotype to steel the will of American newcomers and add even more fuel to the assimilative fire.

The families of these marginalized ethnic communities saw things quite differently indeed.  Every slight, every neglect, every epithet, every dismissal of their abilities, talents, and culture was  a call to arms.  Yet they chose no confrontational battles – attacking the ruling class for its elitism, sybaritic living off of inherited wealth, unfounded privilege, and discriminatory behavior.  They knew absolutely that the way to full integration into American society was success.

Every epithet, every stereotype, every superficial categorization has deeper meaning.  An epithet is code word as in Chappelle's discussion of the N-word.  In the earlier, ethnically-focused period of recent American history, each ethnic epithet was a signifier with meaning for both user and recipient.

The days of older ethnic slurs are over. Rarely does one hear ‘guinea, wop, hunky, Polack, kike’ because Italians, Slovaks, Poles, and Jews have completed their entry into the mainstream.  One still hears the N-word and unpleasant references to Latinos because the integration of African Americans and Hispanics is far from complete.  

Once they too have joined the mainstream, such discriminatory epithets will be things of the past.  Economics as always rules.  Barack Obama is not a N-word.  Antonin Scalia, one of the most influential Chief Justices of recent times is not a guinea. Jensen Huang founder and CEO of  Nvidia is not a chink.  Artur Rubenstein, master musician, is not a kike. 

The key to the debate is human nature and social organization.  Human beings since the first Paleolithic settlements have been suspicious of The Other, all for legitimate reasons of survival. Once The Other becomes like everyone else and is indistinguishable from them, he ceases to be the outsider, the vilified, the demeaned. Slurs disappear when racial or ethnic groups join the mainstream. 

The cancel culture does not stop at race and ethnicity.  Erasure of reality is its hallmark.  There is no such thing as obesity - calling someone fat is now considered a demeaning, ignorant slur, for the 'full-sized woman' is just as worthy, beautiful, and attractive as her svelte sisters.  No one is stupid, dumb, or retarded - low mental capacity has been overruled and been placed within the fungible spectrum of 'multiple intelligences'.  Coloring between the lines is just as valid as early algebraic reasoning. Yet everyone knows that the world is filled with idiots. 

Facebook, Google, and Instagram have introduced censorious algorithms designed to enforce 'community standards'; but they amount to nothing more than limitations of free speech, transparent expressions of a woke ideology which refuses to accept real diversity.  Google has its own Iranian-style Department of Doctrinal Purity, now virtual and AI-led but still the unelected arbiter of such community standards. 

And, just like in Iran, what happens behind closed doors cannot be censored.  Reality exists regardless of official attempts to pretend it does not. No use of official power to enforce belief in the absurd can ever change natural behavior. 

This does not stop Iran's Morality Police or Google's Department of Doctrinal Purity from doing their best to enforce their arbitrary laws on citizens or users of their platforms.  Censorship on the Internet is viral, insidious, and universal.  Only Elon Musk with his takeover of Twitter has eliminated censorship and re-established a code of free speech.  If you don't like what is on Twitter (X), ignore it and scroll down. 

Living in America over the past decades has increasingly felt like living under Sharia law. George Orwell's Brave New World has arrived.  Big Brother is indeed watching.  The thought police are out in force.  It has been a civil nightmare, an assault on democratic principle, an insult to intelligence, an ignorant blow to Jeffersonian enlightenment. 

Progressives look back at the laissez-faire early Twentieth Century as a barbaric era which has been displaced by a more tolerant and considerate one; and therefore see the rise of Donald Trump’s nationalist populism as a dangerous throwback to a more primitive age.

Nothing of the sort.  The conservative movement is simply a cleansing of  he progressive Augean stables – ridding governance of its worst idealistic and patronizing policies and programs.  Populism means individual responsibility.  No free rides, no mollycoddling, no self-absorbed righteous entitlement.  The role of government is to encourage and facilitate opportunity within a framework of individualism, not to provide a protective shell into which is infused public resources.

Fortunately the Left and its government operatives have not been able to completely shut down free speech on the Internet, and one can find the most exaggerated racial, ethnic, physical, and mental stereotypes imaginable.  It is Borscht Belt humor revisited.  It is hilarious, deliberately offensive, and often hard to watch - but that is the point.  Stereotypes have their way of encouraging conformity as the experience of the Fifties amply shows so should never be censored. 

Hear the muezzin chanting the call to Islamic prayer? Not audible but there nonetheless.  Sharia law in the United States? Never, but unless you pay attention, it is already here.