Blood Meridian (cont'd) & Trust the Plan
when reading one book weirdly complements a completely unrelated book you're also reading
HELLO IT’S VIOLENCE TIME. I finished Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian after about three months of poking away at it and coincidentally towards the end of that period I picked up a reporter’s nonfiction book about QAnon and weirdly the latter informed my understanding of the former. Reading is cool.
My struggle reading Blood Meridian has been sorta kinda thoroughly documented the last few months. It’s a weird, dry, dense, borderline incomprehensible book that I’m not really sure I get, and taking a look at the Wikipedia page I guess is one of the things people love about it. I don’t love this one! The last chapter was great and haunting, but I don’t really get what the vast, vast majority of the book (hundreds of pages of acts of violence where the OG main character was barely ever mentioned) was supposed to be doing. I wrote previously that I get how the “real” main character was the concept of violence, and the plot was less about any individual person’s journey so much as it was a failed extraction of the innate evil inherent in humanity (more or less), and that’s Fine but kind of merely fine. Not a book I liked. Not a book I disliked. It wound up being basically just fine.
A drum I am constantly banging is that I’m not writing book reviews here, but rather writing about what all goes into the experience around reading. Why we end up reading the books we read, how we read them, what even is a book if you think about how some video games require lots and lots of reading with thematically relevant skill checks you have to pass to be allowed to keep reading. Stuff like that. Recently well put by No Escape on BlueSky talking about a particularly well-written video game review - a medium plagued by bad writing and subpar critical thought - that puts the text in the context of living breathing space rather than in a weird frictionless vacuum.
So because of that I’m dabbling in the affective fallacy (sorry, humanities degree) and writing about how weird, but weirdly illuminating, it was to finish reading Blood Meridian – an inscrutable great American novel about the innate violence of man – while also starting Will Sommer’s Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America – a reporter’s investigation into an inscrutable and violent mass delusion with a tragic death grip on those it takes hold of.
I tend to read multiple books at the same time, for what I maintain are very normal reasons. I have a paperback copy of Blood Meridian. But sometimes my girlfriend is asleep and I’m not so I grab my backlit Kindle rather than turning the light on, and sometimes what I’ve borrowed from the library on my Kindle is not ideal bedtime reading, like nonfiction reporting about QAnon. But, honestly, is Cormac McCarthy better bedtime reading? (Am I the problem?) Because of this combination, I wound up reading two very different books about violence in parallel.
Here’s a bit from Blood Meridian’s Wikipedia about the theme of violence in the novel:
A major theme is the warlike nature of man. … Caryn James of The New York Times argued that the novel's violence was a "slap in the face" to modern readers cut off from brutality. Terrence Morgan thought the effect of the violence initially shocking but then waned until the reader was desensitized. … Lilley argues that many critics struggle with the fact that McCarthy does not use violence for "jury-rigged, symbolic plot resolutions ... In McCarthy's work, violence tends to be just that; it is not a sign or symbol of something else."
And then a bit about the violent desires of a powerful present-day conspiracy theory:
The strangest moments of the [Patriot Roundup] conference came during breaks between speakers, when the organizers played pro-Q videos from an anonymous creator. … “The only way is the military,” the video stated, over video of spec-ops soldiers, fanning out in a field with their rifles drawn. The crowd of hundreds stood up and applauded. They loved the video’s message: only a fascist takeover of the government could save America.
Sommer describes QAnon’s followers as having “responded to modern life by retretaing into a violent fantasy that exists parallel to the real world.” If there’s a clear theme to Blood Meridian, it’s that there is no parallel: bleakly, Blood Meridian suggests through unending, often inscrutable, violence that this is all humanity is, always was, and ever will be. The novel’s most traditional antagonist – the judge – ends the novel with yet another (implied) murder, and he sends the reader off with this fascinating, naked devil dance gloating in his eternal victory:
And they are dancinv, the board slamming under the jackboots and the fiddlers grinning hideously over their canted pieces. Towering over them all is the judge and he is naked dancing, his small feet lively and quick and now in doubletime and bowing to the ladies, huge and pale and hairless, like an enormous infant. He never sleeps, he says. He says he’ll never die. He bows to the fiddlers and sashays backwards and throws back his head and laughs deep in his throat and he is a great favorite, the judge. He wafts his hat and the lunar dome of his skull passes palely under the lamps and he swings about and takes possession of one of the fiddles and he pirouettes and makes a pass, two passes, dancing and fiddling at once. His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
And then from the beginning of Trust the Plan:
QAnon isn’t a one-time phenomenon. Instead, it’s just the start of the all-consuming conspiracy theory movements to come. Unless something changes, QAnon is a glimpse into our future.
“Is man good” is, imo, not a super interesting question. We’re certainly pretty fucked and we are our own means of understanding ourselves. Blood Meridian, certainly, believes nothing will change, and it’s hard to think maybe that book is onto something when the shocking violence of Blood Meridian no longer seems like a relic of centuries-ago humanity at a frontier space but something returning to the world through things like QAnon, which, as suggested by Blood Meridian never really went away. Trust the Plan doesn’t offer much hope otherwise.
In January 2022, right-wing activists attending a rally starring QAnon speakers near the Mexican border in Texas targeted a butterfly sanctuary. The sanctuary’s staff had opposed the construction of both government and private border walls that would cut through its land. Days earlier, a former Republican official in the town warned the sanctuary’s director to either leave town or carry a gun. QAnon believers were furious at the sanctuary, claiming it was a front for child sex-traffickers.
A few days before the rally, two far-right activists showed up at the sanctuary. Why, they wanted to know, were the sanctuary staffers helping child traffickers? The sanctuary closed for days our of fear of what the QAnon believers might do. The sanctuary’s plight made me wonder. If something as innocuous as a butterfly refuge can be targeted by QAnon, what chance do the rest of us have?
Sommer does, through his reporting and analysis, offer more hope than Cormac McCarthy about what balm could ever help humanity:
Ultimately, I think the best solution to conspiracy theories comes from building a government that fulfills its citizens’ basic needs, so people aren’t driven to find comfort in conspiracy theories in the first place. Throughout my reporting, it became clear to me how many people found QAnon because they felt marginalized. While QAnon is a conservative movement, the post-Storm world it promises is far to the left of anything that Bernie Sanders could imagine: the destruction of major pharmaceutical companies, the concellation of all personal debt, and rents inheriting the property they live in, among other things.
Which I guess kind of explains why everyone kills each other in Blood Meridian. There’s never been a world that meets people’s basic needs, and neither Democrats nor Republicans have expressed any interest in ever doing that as they set up their weird Weekend at Bernie’s–ing1 their way into eternal power for the rich, pouring every resource into state monopoly on violence while carving up healthcare. The casual intense violence of Blood Meridian isn’t that shocking in a world where landlords brag on social media about evicting single mothers, where studios would rather pay a fine for cutting down trees providing shade to striking workers than give their workers a living wage and healthcare, and where the two-party system is only united at the thought of things like enabling cops to clear homeless camps.
Trust the Plan theorizes “a portion of the country buy[ing] into a mass delusion” is largely explained as “a symptom of the world we live in, a product of unchecked social media platforms, rampant political polarization, and the crumbling of offline communites”. It’s easier to turn violent fantasies towards “invididual people in a cabal … rather than the entire economic system. Austin Steinbart–follower Michael Khoury, for example, was driven into QAnon after his application for Social Security disability benefits was denied.” The violence of Blood Meridian makes more sense when considering the material conditions of everyone in that story. The inherent evil of man might not necessarily be the individual acts of violence so much as the manufacturing of the desperation driving them. But if a reading of present day reporting on violence such as Trust the Plan helps a reader unpack what Blood Meridian is getting at, Blood Meridian offers the bleakest possible outcome of what Trust the Plan suggests could come next.
No one may be less protected, though, than the people who are targeted by QAnon. Innocent people find their lives upended because Q becomes fixated on a social media post they made. … When [lawyer] Kim Picazio was attacked by QAnon, she had to assemple a small army of researchers just to convince police to enforce a court protective order she had already obtained. Victims without Picazio’s resources or tenacity have been left to fend for themselves.
He never sleeps. He says he will never die.
I don’t really know where to end this, although clearly McCarthy didn’t either, since Blood Meridian – even if thinking it through in the lens of present-day extreme violence helps it make sense why this Blood Meridian is like this – doesn’t offer much conclusion beyond nihilism. I just moved onto his last novel – The Passenger – so let’s see where he landed. It’s easy to walk away from Blood Meridian wondering why any of this had to happen. I accidentally found the weirdest additional reading to complement it and sort of have an answer, but the answer is also sort of the same question.
I don’t really know where to end this! Here’s blink-182.
Standard plugs zone:
Over on Trash Garbage, a playlists and vibes blog thing I’m part of, we posted a follow-up to our “most Trash Garbage” playlist: It’s Just Rap and Carly Rae Jepsen Side B. It is exactly what it sounds like. A little behind the scenes thing I particularly like about this one, while I mostly put the first one together three years ago, this one was mostly put together by Sammie, the other half of Trash Garbage. Art, baybee.
We also posted an obligatory jazz covers playlist as a weird thesis for why these types of playlists kind of suck (or at least all have an audience of basically one person).
We also do a regularly updated heavy rotation playlist for Trash Garbage of stuff we’ve been listening to lately, which I assume literally no one listens to. You could be THE FIRST.
I have a new review up at Kissing Dynamite of Ashley Cline’s two new chapbooks of 2023: electric infinities and cowabungaly yours at the end of the world. I liked them! You should, uh, still read the whole review though, there’s more than that.
Speaking of Kissing Dynamite, did you know I am Book Reviews Editor there? I write reviews of small press/self-published poetry books, but I also will edit your reviews of small press poetry books. So: hit me up if 1) you’re a poet with a book coming out, or 2) you’ve got a review of a poetry book you want to write! Surely everyone’s dream is writing poetry reviews under the mentorship of one half of the team behind Bad Books, Good Times. Who could ask for more