“Every time someone puts a little capital into this Territory I’m called in by the Govenor and sent on my way. It doesn’t matter I suffer from the rheumatism, nor that I’m past the age of riding a horse’s back. If a man files a claim that yields, there’s a town. If he finds some grass, there’s a town. Does he dig a well? Another town. Does he stop somewhere to ease his bladder, there’s a town. Over this land a thousand times each year towns spring up and it appears I have to charter them all. But to what purpose? The claim pinches out, the grass dies, the well dries up, and everyone will ride off to form up again somewhere else for me to travel. Nothing fixes in this damned country, people blow around at the whiff of the wind. You can’t bring the law to a bunch of rocks, you can’t settle the coyotes, you can’t make a society out of sand. I sometimes think we’re worse than the Indians... What is the name of this place, Hard Times? You are a well-meaning man Mr. Blue, I come across your likes occasionally. I noticed Blackstone on your desk, and Chitty’s Pleadings. Well you can read the law as much as you like but it will be no weapon for the spring when the town swells with people coming to work your road. You need a peace officer but I don’t even see you wearing a gun. I look out of this window and I see cabins, loghouse, cribs, tent, shanty, but I don’t see a jail. You’d better build a jail. You’d better find a shootist and build a jail.” - Brown from E.L. Doctorow's novel, Welcome to Hard Times
Welcome to Hard Times is the first novel of writer E.L. Doctorow. When it was published in 1960, it was heralded as a beautiful and thought-provoking blend of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the generic themes of the American Western. The novel is an account of how the human soul reacts to tragedy. At the beginning, a "Bad Man from Bodie" comes into the makeshift town of Hard Times situated in the bleakness of the Dakota Territory. In a drunken yet pleasure-filled rampage, the Bad Man kills several residents of the town, including the only man who stands up to him, Fee, rapes a local prostitute, and burns what remains before riding off into the proverbial sunset.
After the Bad Man from Bodie departs, most of the remaining townspeople do as well. Blue, the mayor, too cowardly to have stood up to the Bad Man, takes personal responsibility for rebuilding Hard Times and convinces a few others to stay, among them a ravaged barmaid, Molly, and the orphaned son of Fee. Blue takes Molly as his common-law bride and adopts Jimmy Fee, but Molly despises him for not stopping the Bad Man, and her paranoia infects Jimmy. The remaining townspeople succumb to rage and madness. From the 1960 New York Times review from Wirt Williams:
Perhaps the primary theme of the novel is that evil can only be resisted psychically: when the rational controls that order man's existence slacken, destruction comes.
Indeed, the ripple effect of tragedy on the human psyche is something with which we should be more familiar. From the events of September 11, 2001 to the recent fatal shooting of six people at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona, we as a technological civilization have reapeatedly responded to tragedy in a fashion characteristic of a different, tribal human nature, divorced from present time and circumstance: descent into direction-less madness, paranoia and finger-pointing.
David Hume once said that reason ought to be the slave of the passions. It's okay to be angry when a tragedy happens, but we must be conscious of our anger, and we must employ it judiciously. Any scientist or philosopher of science will tell you that anecdotal evidence should never be taken without a proverbial grain of salt. Indeed, anecdotal evidence was the basis for phrenology and we all know where that kind of sloppy thinking eventually led: to techno music. (Incidentally that previous contention rests on anecdotal evidence, but you see where I'm going with this.)
The interconnectedness of our media-saturated society makes us particularly prone to wild displays of misdirected anger sprung from obscure and isolated phenomena, like the shooting in Tucson. For this reason, it is especially important in emotionally tense times like these to postpone action. There is a reason the ancients prescribed long periods of mourning. We must learn from the mistakes of the USAPATRIOT Act and the War in Iraq that hastily conceived legislation passed in an emotionally heightened political climate seldom achieves its stated ends without enormous repercussions.
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Like many I’m sure, I take for granted the ease with which I walk into my corner store and get the things I need without having to bother or hassle with traveling further to a large grocery store once every three weeks or so to restock. More likely I bitch - like many - about how high the markup is on items (under my breath) and move along. Something happened to me yesterday as I was in my corner store chatting it up with the day-guy and the night-guy came in for his appropriate shift and while doing so he patted me on the shoulder and said “What’s up Chip?” This little effort made the day a little better and, I obviously remember it.
Monday, March 7, 2011 at 8:16AM | tagged 
