In Cormac McCarthy's book, No Country for Old Men, a hunter stumbles across dead bodies, a stash of heroin and $2.4 million near the Mexican border. He takes the money and is ruthlessly pursued by Anton Chigurh, an expert killer with East European finesse. A local sheriff who attempts to intervene makes the following observation: "If you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics." The sheriff is troubled by America's abandonment of Christian folkways, sensing a total collapse of moral order. The storyteller knows that the world is coming to an end, and it isn't pretty.
Internal disorder is the key, but the order we are talking about isn't simply moral. It is chiefly intellectual. And we may observe the immediate result in politics. At the same time, those who would make all this about politics have failed to see that the socialist and conservative are cut from the same cloth. The conservative has nothing left to conserve. What he ultimately defends is a culture steeped in entertainment, distraction and consumption. That is what remains to him, and what effectively operates overall. One does not look back to one's ancestors, or ahead to one's posterity. We dwell in the twilight of an eternal present, which is obsessed with up-to-date news (which descends into yet another form of entertainment). Politics has become a sport where you cheer for a team, where critical sense has been supplanted by emotional affiliation. It doesn't matter that the minions of both parties are clueless, that statecraft accommodates the absurdities of Madison Avenue. When all your energy is focused on projecting an image that will impress millions of people, there is no energy left for the reality within and the danger without. The result is a hollow shell, or even worse, a human pastry filled with the spiritual equivalent of rotten custard.
A few days ago a Pentagon specialist, Keith B. Payne, testified before a U.S. Senate committee that the administration's Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty offers numerous loopholes to the Russian side. This is especially alarming because existing U.S. nuclear forces are improperly positioned. Meanwhile, Russia is bolstering its road mobile ICBM forces, developing a new strategic bomber, new ICBM forces, and a cruise missile with a 3,000+ mile range. The U.S. doesn't even possess a road mobile ICBM, and has no plans to develop new strategic forces. How can this happen? Is it the stupidity of one party over another? Here is a reminder, however, that should be noted: Both parties share the same mentality, which was molded by television instead of books, and by the experience of shopping instead of war.
The logic of going downhill, the logic of decline, entails an absolute failure to bite through. It signifies a softening. It is known, as well, that soft people no longer have the stomach for what is necessary. They are focused on shopping. What occurs is a form of denial, in which the realities of politics and war are cast aside in favor of fantasy substitutes, heavily laced with ideological logos of the kind that paralyze all thought. This intellectual failure, born out of spiritual collapse, heralds the end of rational calculation and grand strategy. One does not need strategy to win. Merely, the right kind of publicity is all-in-all sufficient. When something tangible occurs, which may be strategically fatal, the answer is to revile the opposition. There is no analysis, no judgment, no genuine fright at the prospect of death and destruction. Few are those who believe that real destruction is possible. Few suspect that weapons of mass destruction can and will be used against people who are too silly to know, and too careless to consider, who is preparing these weapons against them. Soft people imagine that such weapons cannot be used because the world would end. And nobody wants that. Here is a failure of imagination alongside a dismissal of the concept "enemy," done without any hesitation, with the survival instinct overridden by the daily corruption that attends absolute comfort. Those who are soft cannot see into an enemy that emerges from totally different conditions of life.
Grit is a requirement of attaining good, and where everything has gone soft, goodness is nowhere at hand. What vouchsafes to us something akin to Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic vision in The Road, which is nothing short of a world destroyed, is the fact that the culture -- from Left to Right -- refuses to contemplate that an impulse of self-disregard and self-annihilation (i.e., nihilism) has taken the upper hand, and under the neurotic banners of various celebrated causes, has become a cudgel in the hands of foreign strategists of whom we know almost nothing.
