The moral valence of real-world situations is often complicated, with more gray than black and white. But other times, the moral clarity of a conflict is evident. So it is with the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine after Hamas terrorists carried out their brutal assault on Israeli civilians just over three months ago.
I couldn’t help but think of this war as I reread Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men with one of my classes. We read the book for what it can tell us about cultural breakdown in the wake of the 1960s, rampant materialism and the loss of religion, and the furious violence of which men are capable when they are not properly culturally regulated.
This time through the book, however, I was called especially to the narrative it offers of how one must deal with unmitigated evil.
In the novel, Llewelyn Moss is being pursued by Anton Chigurh, the sinister and quasi-mythological archetype of criminal insanity who wants the money Moss appropriated from the gory scene of a shootout at a drug deal gone wrong. When Chigurh arrives at his hotel, kills the clerk, and obtains the key to Moss’s room, he finds it seemingly deserted. But when he looks in the bathroom, Moss gets the drop on him.
“Don’t turn around,” he orders Chigurh. “You turn around and I’ll blow you to hell.”
After taking Chigurh’s gun and walking him down the hallway, however, Moss inexplicably flees without eliminating the threat — but he
