"War is god." Reflecting on Cormac McCarthy's bloody tale of the American West

I recently read "Blood Meridian" and I have a lot of thoughts...

“This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.”

I recently decided to read “Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness In The West” by Cormac McCarthy.

I hadn’t previously read any of McCarthy’s novels, although I saw “No Country For Old Men” in theaters (and maybe twice since) and found it to be one of the most gripping but ultimately challenging films I’ve ever seen in the theater. It was based on a novel by McCarthy, which in fact was originally intended to be a screenplay before ultimately becoming a novel which was quickly adapted by the Coen brothers into the winner of the 2007 Academy Award for best picture. I join the academy in recommending it.

Blood Meridian is considered to be McCarthy’s masterpiece and after seeing a lot of online references to it as a canonical piece of Western culture, as well as getting a recommendation from my younger brother, I decided to dive in.

I was warned going in that it was going to be a challenging experience. The book is a Western set mostly in 1849 on the Texas-Mexico border after the Texas-Mexico War and follows a young kid from Tennessee who heads West and gets caught up in the Glanton gang, a pack of scalp-hunters working across the borders fighting Indians.

Hardened perhaps by reading and watching violent stories since I was a young kid thumbing through the chronicles of war and murder in the Old Testament as a kid sitting in Church service, I breezed through the carnage in the book…until the night when I reached the end.

The ambiguous conclusion to the story set my brain to work and a few perusals of online summaries and reflection pointed me to a deeply disturbing conclusion about the plot which kept me awake for an hour or so before I could fall asleep.

Even setting aside theories about the ending (there’s really only one correct theory, in my estimation, and it’s the most horrifying), the work is quite the examination of the human condition and America’s own history of warfare and struggle. That makes it pretty solid fodder for our own project of studying America’s favorite war game.

So, let’s talk some about this book. I’m going to have a spoilers section with clear delineation for anyone who hasn’t read the book but either intends to or would end up watching the movie adaptation which is currently in production.

Good luck with that, btw, both for those trying to produce the movie and anyone planning to wait and see it rather than reading the book. The level of violence that you would need to depict to get the story right is beyond anything I’ve ever seen from a movie before to say nothing of the book’s unique structure and the ending.

Alright…

The changing nature of war in 1849

Warfare in America had just been dramatically changed when this book is set. It changed with the Battle of Walker’s Creek which took place just a few years earlier in 1844 when a squad of Texas Rangers attacked a war party of Comanche who were burdened with loot from a series of raids across Central Texas.

Now previously, America’s warfare and emergence had been best defined by the Kentucky long rifle. Across the Appalachian frontier, young Americans grew up with a working knowledge of the Kentucky long rifle and how to shoot it accurately. Their ability to put superior fire on European regulars under cover or in formation was a big deal in establishing America as an independent nation.

Well out West, that dog wouldn’t hunt no more.

The Comanche in particular were one of history’s all-time great light cavalry with the ability to shoot from horseback and even wrapped around the unexposed side of their ponies.

Spanish and Mexican forces had no idea what to do with them. Anglo settlers with their established Indian fighting method of dismounting, finding cover, and shooting with the slowly reloading long rifle also found themselves thwarted by the perfect union of horsemanship with Stone Age weaponry.

Then Samuel Colt invented the revolving cylinder pistol, the importance of which was quickly understood by the Texas Rangers, leading captain Samuel Walker to work with Colt to perfect the design.

At Walker’s Creek the Rangers attacked the Comanche, not by trying to pick them off with legendary shots from the rifles, but by riding right in amongst them with their pistols.

This also served them well in service of their new country (the United States) in the Mexican War and finally in taking the frontier from the dreaded Comanche (still took a long time). It empowered the individual and democratized warfare in a fashion similar to what the long rifle had done in the east and helped make the West a virtual free for all.

The game of college football has had only one similar breakthrough in democratization, the initial rise of televised games which gave smaller programs a sales pitch to make in national recruiting. “Come to Boise State and your family can easily find you on cable playing on our blue field!”

Which brings us to this story.

(lesser spoilers below)

In Blood Meridian, a key moment comes very early when our main character “the kid” finds himself amongst the Glanton gang. Being destitute and purposeless previously, he’d gotten roped into joining a squad of “filibusters” or Indian fighters who were going to try and wage a genocidal war against the Indians out West.

They proved to be in over their skis after running into Comanche and enduring a savage massacre that is probably one of the most violent passages of the book. The kid wanders around in the wake of that massacre, is imprisoned in Mexico, then bailed out by John Glanton, his lieutenant Judge Holden, and their gang. The gang are scalp-hunters, hired by Mexican authorities to protect their frontier from Indian raids, particularly the Apache. The gang prove their services by producing scalps in exchange for payment.

After the kid is enlisted in the gang, they find a shipment of weapons they were supposed to deliver to a Mexican governor. They open the shipment to find a company’s worth of Colt Dragoon pistols. Glanton tests them out, sees their amazing firepower, and opts to keep them and distribute them to his gang rather than to the authorities. Uh oh.

This empowerment allows them to proceed to absolutely run amok across the Texas-Mexico borders. They set out to kill and scalping Indians before also realizing they can just massacre and scalp the Mexican towns they are supposed to be protecting and passing off those scalps as those of Apaches.

Soon they’re totally given over to their own impulses. An absolute orgy of violence and destruction ensues before the gang is finally caught, overly indulgent and secure in a ferry crossing they’d commandeered, by a tribe of Yuma Indians.

The violence of America’s history

I found some old interviews of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom discussing Blood Meridian, which he regarded as modern entry worthy of inclusion in the Western Canon of literature and perhaps the greatest work by a living author (Cormac McCarthy recently passed since the statement in 2023).

Bloom regarded Blood Meridian as a tragic accounting of the violence sadly common in America and a work that grows in importance as the nation’s struggles with gun violence continue to own a place in the news of the day.

I don’t think McCarthy would totally agree, either in the characterization of America or in the central theme of his book.

One of the interesting things about America and what makes the Western genre so powerful and so distinctly American, is the closeness of contemporary citizens to the actual settling of the West. Consider Europe, where its various nations have been settled, built up, and developed over hundreds of years by people who settled and established its dominant cultures and institutions long ago. In Europe, the settling of a civilization and the bloodshed and chaos that can ensue before and in the process, is a thing of the distant past.

Their concerns and traumatic memories concern what happens when established civilizations clash, or perhaps the guilt of exploiting a distant and “less civilized” culture. The great European works in the Western Canon often center on that topic. The nearness of the American West’s savagery and settling is so much greater, which offers us a different story to tell.

Whatever happened when various peoples settled England is mostly lost to time, although it was likely very grim, but in the American West we get a picture of what relatively modern people were doing relatively recently amidst the lawless and violent frontier of our nation. The saga of the American West is almost a prequel for Western Civilization, written and told AFTER the initial story but about something that happened prior. There isn’t really a better landscape for telling a story about the primal condition of man, save perhaps for post-apocalyptic stories which tend to mirror Westerns. Naturally McCarthy has written one of those as well.

I don’t think McCarthy would regard gun violence and potential for mindless evil in a brutal and lawless condition to be a particularly American phenomenon but instead a close up peak at the human condition. More on that in our next, spoiler-heavy section.

That said, the nearness to settlement along with some of the types of people who settled this country do give America a particular taste for violence and fighting. As I noted when musing on Colin Woodard’s “American Nations,” America was settled by some folks who love to fight and treat it as a way of life.

Such folks are most heavily congregated in areas which also overlap with where some of the most serious college football programs exist.

Of course the war game of football requires the European “clash of civilizations aspect” to work properly. It’s not an individualistic sort of game.

The fact this country was expanded and settled by bloodshed is not unique, but the fact it happened relatively recently means the values for fighting, heroism, or even violence for its own sake are thus very strongly engrained. The demands of settling America’s great and expansive territory fed it’s latent preference for having well armed, individualistic citizenry who could go out and make things happen on their own as individuals. This is very unique amongst Western nations and while it doesn’t mirror football, it does help explain the uniquely American taste for fighting and violence.

It’s a good thing we have football to help us channel, and perhaps safely preserve, those energies.

Alright, now about the ending…

(Spoilers ahead)

What does it mean?

The final chapters of the book chronicle the kid’s escape from the Yuma Indian attack which kills most of the Glanton gang, including John Glanton himself. The kid flees from Judge Holden, the satanic lieutenant who serves as the real power behind the group (the author of our opening quote), and while he can’t bring himself to shoot and kill the judge he does get away.

He then lives a life and grows much older, from 16 to about 45, and tries to live a more honest life protecting people making the trek across the west to the coast. This proves to be fruitless and doesn’t erase the trauma or guilt. He makes his way down to Texas where things started and encounters some rough young kid, much like himself at that age, who questions where he’s heading and whether he’s trying to reach the notoriously prostitute-filled Fort Griffin for the obvious reasons.

The new young kid has an antagonistic exchange with our main character, who’s now referred to as “the man” rather than “the kid” and “the man” shoots the young kid when the latter tries to sneak up on his camp at night with a gun. He carries on to Fort Griffin and enters a saloon where he meets with the judge, who doesn’t appear to have aged at all in 29 years. The judge gets back on his proverbial pulpit and tries to tempt him back into his way of life and thinking, prying him with arguments and whiskey while extolling the virtues of war in a nihilistic philosophy. The kid says no and leaves the judge at the bar before being engaged in the brothel by a prostitute with dwarfism.

It’s implied that the kid cannot execute his task with the prostitute and he wanders outside to an outhouse while in the background people are searching and calling for a young girl who’s gone missing from the saloon. Missing children have gone alongside with horrible acts by the judge throughout the book, although the fate of these children has always been off-screen so to speak and left to the reader’s imagination.

Inside the outhouse he finds the naked judge, who takes up the kid in an embrace.

The next scene is two men approaching the outhouse while a third, is outside the outhouse urinating in the mud. The urinator warns them against going inside, then buttons up his trousers as “the man” did previously before leaving the prostitute, and goes back inside the saloon. The men take turns looking into the outhouse, are horrified by what they see, and go back into the saloon.

Next scene we find the ageless judge dancing and playing the fiddle amidst the party inside. McCarthy keeps repeating, “he never sleeps, he says he will never die.”

Then we get an even more ambiguous epilogue that poetically describes a man making holes across the prairie (for fence posts, presumably) while people wander about behind him. It appears to be a metaphor for the settling of the west.

So what happened? The most common intrepretation appears to be that the judge assaulted and murdered “the man” (formerly the kid) in a triumph of his own “might makes right” nihilism.

The truth is worse, although I think the superior interpretation I’m about to offer only slightly alters the meaning of the book. Many seem to think it’s basically an anguished and hopeless cry about the endless supremacy of violence in the world. I don’t think it’s quite that.

Here’s the grim truth of how the story ends. The judge throughout the book is strongly implied to be a pedophile, and when he’s initially introduced it’s in a Texas town where “the kid” is listening to a traveling preacher in a tent warning everyone that God is with them at all times.

“He’s a goin to be there with ye ever step of the way whether ye ask it or ye don’t. I said: Neighbor, you cain’t get shed of him. Now. Are you goin to drag him, him, into that hellhole yonder?”

The judge then steps up next to the preacher and interrupts to inform the crowd that this traveling preacher is a charlatan who is wanted elsewhere for sexually assaulting an 11-year old girl. Everyone goes nuts and runs the preacher out of town while the judge laughs it off later in a saloon by saying he’d never met the preacher before.

The kid went to Fort Griffin LOOKING for the judge but truly was carrying him with him all the time. He’s traumatized by his youth and the abuse and carnage he endured and participated in. His life since leaving the gang has been one in which he cannot shake the evil within him which wants to be expressed. The judge he meets in the saloon and finds waiting in the outhouse is his own evil nature to be a child predator as a grown man. The judge is barely even a person in the book so much as the demonic evil which tempts the gang into nihilistic destruction of every sort, always hoping to push them all the way to the greatest crime. Child abuse.

Our protagonist finding the naked embrace of the judge in the outhouse is a coded metaphor for finding the missing girl, who’s presumably sobbing in the outhouse (her pet bear had just been shot and killed). The little person prostitute wouldn’t suffice, he’s looking to satisfy his dark desires with an actual child. The kid takes the judge with him into that hellhole, as the reverend warns people they always carry God with them wherever they go, and gives in.

The judge is triumphantly dancing in the end because the cycle of abuse and violence which he has been justifying the whole time with his nihilistic philosophy has continued in “the man.”

Now, as horrifying as this is, I think it also speaks to McCarthy opposing the nihilistic philosophy presented in the book. It’s a cautionary tale, a sort of reductio ad absurdum, which shows you what you justify when you embrace the judge’s philosophy. That’s the end point, the justification of child abuse, that’s how far mankind will go without parameters. You never really get a counter philosophy to that of the judge, just the caution.

It’s possible that McCarthy is remarking upon America in particular, the frontier experience traumatizing a young nation and goading it toward perpetuating the cycle of abuse down the line. But it’s not gun violence in particular he’s warning against. There’s a reason McCarthy treats child abuse differently in the novel while routinely depicting other violent acts. If he’s cautioning against one particular thing it wouldn’t be guns. The West just can’t be beat as a setting for the temptation of men to indulge evil and ultimately ignore the voice of God they bring with them which would speak against those actions.

To bring it back to our normal, lighter fare, this is the obvious caution for America’s War Game. The war game thrives on violence and the same spirit which drives a violent man, if not fenced in, can lead to him loving violence for its own sake and indulging every dark impulse.

You can see young men used up by the war game either by being indulged in their dark indulgences by coaches and communities who want to win until they give themselves to the embrace of the judge, or they are used up by the violence of the game to the ruination of their bodies.

The war game is not something you want to make into a god but it has a strange power to become an idol because of what it mimics and how well it executes the mimicry.