November 8, 2024, 6:12pm

I’m no pundit, but I think one reason Why We’re Here has to do with a pervasive lack of reading comprehension and media literacy. I’m not sure how else you get a result where ballot measures protecting abortion rights are passing, while the candidate who has done more to imperil abortion access is simultaneously winning.

In this case, it seems the fish rots from the head:

If you’re thinking, “that McCarthy quote sounds like something a deranged murderer would say,” you’re right. This is a line of dialogue uttered by fictional madman Anton Chigurh, from Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-bleak No Country For Old Men. If it’s been a while since you’ve read the book, the deranged hitman Chigurh says this to toy with and belittle someone before murdering him.

I don’t really care to unpack what Vance is trying to say here — so much of what this guy says is bad-faith, debate-me-sir puffery — but I do think his choice to trot out this quote is weirdly telling.

Vance is too online, and sanctimoniously quoting a villain to scold people about assumptions and give some half-baked, LinkedIn-brain, hustle culture advice is depressingly on-brand. I’m not surprised that Anton Chigurh is an icon for the blue-checkmark edgelords, alongside the Joker and Patrick Bateman.

And like a true Yale debater, Vance is snivelingly trying to make his ideas sound smarter than they are. But the condescending “In the words of Cormac McCarthy” does not add sufficient pseudo-intellectual gloss to excuse fascist apologia. Quoting one of literature’s most sociopathic characters only tells me that you read a book and learned nothing, which is a waste of everyone’s time.

You don’t have to hand it to a rotten character who unflinching kills for money, even if Chigurh’s succinct code of living looks good as a meme in your militia’s photo dump on Instagram. Making your point with the words of one of the most frightening villains in fiction is deranged stuff. But Vance knows that his logic doesn’t have to make sense — for the authoritarian, the bottom line is always rules for thee, but not for me.

I am not looking forward to finding out what other battered paperbacks Jim Davie Vance found in the couch cushions.