Sunday

22 October 2017

— freshly weeded patio bricks

Good Morning All,

Down the basement visiting our books yesterday afternoon, I came across a soft-cover copy of The Best Mystery Stories of 1997. How it came to join us I do not know. It is not one of the inscribed books. The price on the back is $13.00, so—since $10.00 is my upper limit--I probably didn’t purchase it. Maybe, like hundreds of other books down there, it simply arrived on the doorstep one day and offered to mow the lawn or something if we provided it shelf space.

The introduction is by Robert B. Parker, who wrote dozens of crimmies featuring Spencer, a Boston private eye. Spencer is sort of the WalMart version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. He is flippant, romantic, incorruptible, etc., but so cute you never quite believe in him. The books are readable popcorn, except when Spencer is agonizing about his relationship with his principal other, Susan, a shrink, at which times they are flat-out awful.

Towards the end of his life, Parker wrote a few crimmies featuring Jesse Stone, the alcoholic Chief of Police in Paradise, Massachusetts. They are pretty good!

Anyway, Parker's intro is interesting. First he speaks of the English Mystery Story, invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “The unstated, perhaps even unthought assumptions about life that underlies the Holmes stories are that a rational God created a reasonable world. His will is manifest in his creation. Crime is an unreasonable deviation from the norm, a man of superior reason can restore the norm by solving the crime.”

Parker goes on to say that view of the world was harder to maintain after the trenches of World War I, that "the past 100 years have brought to our attention a universe that seems, frankly, not to give a damn.”

From there, he shifts to the American Mystery Story of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. “The U.S. was founded by the movement from east to west, from Europe to America, from Boston to St. Louis, from a condition of settled society to one outside of the settlements. We remain to this day the descendants of people who left the settlements and the rule of law to find something else … [This East to West migration] was influenced by the Protestant Reformation, which urged that right conduct was an individual responsibility (every man his own priest), not a hierarchal [Roman Catholic] one. Thus most of us [U.S. citizens]… derive from people for whom civilization was perceived to be limiting and life outside of it understood to be freeing."

From there he shifts to the Myth of the West: “But the West being lawless and therefore dangerous, the custodians of the myth …  were men with guns (every man his own cop.) And the man with a gun became a staple of of American fiction. He was alone, outside of society, compelled by his own rules. Neither against the law or of it, keeping his moral integrity hard and intact … The man with a gun filled the pages of dime novels until the frontier closed and the West was gone. Then the dime novels became pulp fiction and the cowboys dismounted, but kept their guns and became detectives.”

It’s probably a stretch to blame Martin Luther for Donald Trump, but Luther and his 95 theses on the church door must have been perceived in his day to be about as politically incorrect as it was possible to be. Would it be that much of a stretch to suggest his Catholic Church got to be “inside the beltway” or “the swamp”?

The Pilgrims coming to America were doing so because they felt trapped in European society; they wanted freedom. The same could be said for thousands of others leaving the stuffy confides of Boston and New York seeking more freedom farther west. 

As for the Western man with the gun, how we have  glorified him, either on the side of justice, Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Matt Dillion, et. al., or—and perhaps especially—those outside the law: Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Bonnie and Clyde, and dozens and dozens of others. Glorified because they—unlike we—escaped the fetters of society. They were free. They were their own law. And the gun was (and still is)  the glorified symbol of that freedom. 

If any of this natter holds water, it’s not so hard to see the undercurrents that make gun-control such an upstream battle. And in retrospect, it’s easier to see how Trump got himself elected. Inadvertently or not, he tapped into the very core of America’s best-loved myth about itself.

(With trepidation do I now await what my history-major and American-studies-major friends have to say about any of this! Other than, probably: “Pierce, old sock, you have already convinced us several times of how little you know about American politics, and now you want to prove you are also an ignoramus about American history?)

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. One Holly snap and one Johs snap: