Welcome to Hard Times

“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.

William Galston has argued in the New Republic that one step which should be immediately taken in response to the tragedy in Arizona is an end to the ban on involuntary commitment for psychological reasons:

(T)he law should no longer require, as a condition of involuntary incarceration, that seriously disturbed individuals constitute a danger to themselves or others, let alone a “substantial” or “imminent” danger, as many states do. A delusional loss of contact with reality should be enough to trigger a process that starts with multiple offers of voluntary assistance and ends with involuntary treatment, including commitment if necessary. How many more mass murders and assassinations do we need before we understand that the rights-based hyper-individualism of our laws governing mental illness is endangering the security of our community and the functioning of our democracy?

This is of course read and interpreted by all in the context of the latest shooting and may therein seem like a reasonable argument, but we can't imagine that every mentally unstable person is Jared Lee Loughner.  Incarcerating people who have not committed any crime based on the opinion of an "expert" is a road we should not go (back) down, because for every Jared Lee Loughner, there are a thousand Christine Collins's.    

Likewise, the politically appealing gun control legislation proposed by Representative Peter King should be met with skepticism at the very least.  That is not to say that making it more difficult for mentally unstable people to purchase guns is a bad idea, only that now is probably not the best time to be proposing gun control legislation.

Personally, I wouldn't mind a world without guns.  I've never seen one outside of a police officer's holster, and I've never had any desire to visit a firing range or go hunting, but I watch a lot of violent movies, so I know how dangerous guns can be.  I'm skeptical of whether gun control legislation really works.  It makes a lot of intuitive sense that Bad Men from Bodie will tend to purchase guns legally or illegally, while good people will always purchase guns only in accordance with the law.  I'm not an expert on the topic, but gun control legislation seems bound to tip the balance in favor of criminals.   

Among the conversation that is emerging in the wake of the Safeway shootings is the idea that protecting the rights of gun owners is just in our American culture to stay and restricting the right to bear arms is a political and cultural loser: we are a frontier people, and individualist, and we require guns to protect ourselves.  

There is much to be said for this idea.  If I had a gun and had been at the Arizona Safeway, I certainly would have used it to take down Jared Lee Loughner, that Bad Man from Bodie.  The American cowboy is always ready to draw his gun and smite all who get in the way of his and his kin as they try to scrape out a humble life for themselves on the frontier.

And therein lies the rub.  The American cowboy is dead.  The frontier is gone.  Only our individualist streak remains.  Some say that if anything is to be blamed for this tragedy it is the lack of communal support for Jared Lee Loughner.  Six weeks ago a sick twenty-two year old disconnected from reality, abandoned by his school, shunned and ostracized by his neighbors, purchased a glock pistol from someone whom he'd never met before and began planning an attack on a legislator operating in a distant capital.  

On the morning of January 8th, Loughner purchased bullets from one of the approximately 750 Wal-mart stores located in the United States and headed to a meeting called "Congress on Your Corner" hosted by Representative Gabrielle Giffords as a way to build a community with her constituents.  Loughner pulled his pistol from his clothing and shot Giffords in the back of the head at point blank range before firing into the crowd at random.  He ultimately wounded twenty and killed six, including a nine-year-old girl, before his magazine was stolen by intrepid bystander Patricia Maisch while Loughner was reloading.  Loughner was then tackled to the ground and restrained by retired army colonel Bill Badger who himself had been wounded.    

It's tempting to over explain incidents like these by saying they are determined by our culture: the dialectics of the restless American Western mythology and the static comforts of modernity; men who want to watch the world burn and pundits who traffic in firewood; an individualist ethic of self and cold, indifferent pseudo-communities.  At times, it seems like we may have even summoned the monster ourselves.

But then we must step back, remember where we are, and realize that further destruction comes when the rational controls that order our existence slacken.  Evil exists, and while it may be to our benefit to keep that evil away from guns, our best weapon against it is the fortitude within our own souls, the kind of fortitude displayed by Patricia Maisch and Colonel Badger, the kind of fortitude which we should all reflect on before descending into the madness of politics as usual.