Episode Details

Above is my new interview with John Friend of The AFP Report. The topic: Soros and Anti-Semitism. Below is a brief tribute to Cormac McCarthy, including my recent conversation with Linh Dinh on McCarthy’s The Road. -KB

Whoever America’s greatest living novelist is, it isn’t Cormac McCarthy any more. The author of The Road, Blood Meridian, and Suttree (my three favorite McCarthy books) passed away yesterday, just over a month shy of his 90th birthday.

The three aforementioned masterpieces each depict a man’s struggle to survive. The first two paint grim, horrific pictures of existence in general and the history of the United States in particular.

The Road is where we’re headed: a post-apocalyptic hellscape. (Scroll down for details.)

Blood Meridian tells the unspeakable truth about how America was founded. It has been roundly condemned for its ultraviolence and, shall we say, moral ambiguity. But it is ourselves—and our country—that merit condemnation. Don’t shoot the messenger, especially when the messenger writes so wisely and gorgeously.

Suttree is my favorite McCarthy novel, entirely different from the other two. Unlike them, it doesn’t mesmerize you with exquisite gothic horror. Nor can it be as easily reduced to historical allegory, as Blood Meridian (America’s founding) and The Road (America’s inevitable end) can be.

If Blood Meridian describes our country’s birth, and The Road its death, Suttree is a pleasant and nostalgic—though ultimately tragic—reverie on its young adulthood. It’s McCarthy’s most autobiographical work, stringing together a series of dreamlike recollections of his younger days, when he dropped out of college, severed relations with his respectable family, and lived impecuniously on a ramshackle houseboat in the Tennessee River, catching catfish and selling them to Knoxville markets.

Though it’s bad lit-crit manners to impose your own biography on somebody else’s autobiographical novel, I must admit that I love Suttree in part because I can relate to it. As a young man, I spent quite a few years living pretty much the way Suttree does, except in a ramshackle vehicle in San Francisco instead of a houseboat in Knoxville. When I read a chapter of Suttree before falling asleep, my dreams intermingle decades-old scenes from my life with those from the book.

But I doubt one needs such an intimate relationship with Suttree to appreciate its unique genius. If Joyce set out to make the mundane mythical and amazing in Ulysses, McCarthy fully succeeded in Suttree.

By Allah or synchronicity, take your pick, Linh Dinh and I happened to open last week’s Truth Jihad Radio with a discussion of The Road. Below is a transcript of the discussion of the book.

Linh Dinh on Truth Jihad Radio

Kevin Barrett: In the first hour, my friend and colleague Linh Dinh is reporting from...well, I guess he's in Laos, last I heard. Or was it Thailand? Anyway, he'll tell us. He's written some great recent stuff, including Brave New Reset, which includes appreciations of Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Zhang Yingyu's The Book of Swindles. And well, let's just say that (second hour guest) Harrison Koehli and Linh are both in agreement that there are some serious psychopathological tendencies at play in today's so called civilization, and that things look to be getting a bit worse — maybe a lot worse, as Linh suggests. If he thinks The Road is the the way of the future, w