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When Sheriff Bell arrives at the crime scene in the desert, it looks like a theater of war.
Pick-ups riddled with volleys of assault rifles, corpses bled to death, other people executed at close range.
Something has changed in the US, and not just because Mexican cartels entered the drug trade.
Morals and decency have become foreign words, values have been lost, simple truths are no longer believed.
Nobody has any respect for the state anymore.
Bell, on the other hand, still remembers the times when some sheriffs did not carry a weapon on principle.
He's already seen a lot;
in the Second World War he was awarded an Order of Bravery.
But slowly it dawns on him that his decision to be re-elected sheriff of his Texas county at an advanced age was a grave mistake.
He no longer understands the world, his time, people.
Because he always believed in good, but only evil reigns.
It's 1980.
Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in the 2007 film
Source: picture alliance / United Archives
In Cormac McCarthy's novel “No Land for Old Men”, the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh is up to mischief.
Sheriff Bell is his true opponent, although there never is a duel in the classic sense in which the old-fashioned Bell would not have a chance.
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The novel, published in 2005 and shortly thereafter successfully filmed by the Coen brothers, is a philosophical thriller and a dark neo-western in which the traditional motifs - of law and (threatened) order, of the indomitable sheriff and just punishment - are reduced to absurdity in the face of unleashed violence that is devouring society.
It is, of course, only the bloody surface of a comprehensive moral decline.
McCarthy, one of today's great American writers, makes Bell the mouthpiece of his Christian-influenced cultural pessimism, which will feel bitterly confirmed by the escalation of the political and ideological trench warfare in the Trump era.
Sinister picture of his country: author Cormac McCarthy
Source: WireImage
Which side his Bell would be on today has by no means been determined.
He interprets the legalization of abortion and the proliferation of hard drugs equally as the work of Satan, and when a woman in a discussion "keeps talking about the right this and the right that", he defends the people as "perfectly normal": There, "where I come from , that's of course a big compliment ”.
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Perhaps Bell would be a partisan of the religious fundamentalists today, who attribute all evils to social liberalization.
Perhaps, however, with Joe Biden he would defiantly and pathetically invoke America's very own values.
When the new president appeals with grandfather-like rhetoric to “respect” and “decency” in order to reconcile the torn America, then he reminds us of the brave but helpless Bell who, in the face of diabolical crimes, holds up the flag of truth, which one does too Little can twist "how to add salt".
An Anton Chigurh would only laugh at so much good faith if he did.
This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG. We are happy to deliver them to your home on a regular basis.
Source: Welt am Sonntag