The Sheriff

Today's discussion of the sheriff reminded me of a fellow named Edmund Burke, a British guy who flipped out during the French Revolution because of how many historically-cemented ideas these revolutionaries were upsetting. He saw culture and "society" as something you inherited from your ancestors. You shouldn't start over just because you think you have a better idea for it. Burke admitted that society and goernment are illusions but insisted we must play by their rules to keep from killing each other. (Some evidence to his argument: People stopped playing by those rules during the French Revolution and very soon after started killing each other, exactly as he predicted they would.) Even if truth is socially constructed, it's socially constructed for a functioning reason. It's kind of all we have.

I think this is very relevant to the sheriff, though the two would probably disagree on principle about truth. Their disagreement, however, would be irrelevant. They both have conservative ideas about how we should treat history, how we should respect it, how we should grant it some agency to act on us. For example, McCarthy includes the story about the motel killers. The story is a really repulsive story for a lot of reasons. One of the most awful parts, however, is that all of the murdered people are elderly. The story goes against our traditionally protective concern for the past, a concern that the sheriff worries is deteriorating (or knows is deteriorating). Given that the sheriff is aging, he has a concern for who is inheriting society and what they will do with it.

That might be a reductive portrait of the sheriff (it's certainly a reductive portrait of Burke), but I think it captures a mood that has occurred repeatedly in this class. Notice that no matter what year a story occurs in, the main character is always looking back on a better idea of the West. The West is perpetually ending, even in the 80s. It's always finding new ways to be less cool and less moral than it used to be. How is this possible?