Feb 1, 2025

From Transmetropolitan Review
Click here for the full text (in pamphlet form only)
One of the few contemporary writers he liked and knew well was Edward Abbey, author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, which, despite it’s many flaws, was highly influential among anarchists in the United States, given it encouraged industrial sabotage in defense of the earth.
Just before he passed away, Edward Abbey contacted Cormac McCarthy with plans to covertly reintroduce the Mexican gray wolf back into southern Arizona, although it’s unclear if they achieved any success before Abbey’s death in 1989. Whatever the case, the Mexican gray wolf population has slowly been growing over the past decade, and at the time of this writing, there are almost 300 wolves freely roaming the Arizona desert.

In his novel No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy depicts a Vietnam veteran from Texas stumbling across the aftermath of a desert shoot-out in the year 1980. When he finds one of the victims still breathing inside a truck, this wounded man asks for agua, only the white man doesn’t have any water. Before he goes, the wounded man asks him to close the truck door, saying hay lobos, or there’s wolves. The white man just scoffs. He says, there aint no lobos.

Unlike in Arizona, the Mexican gray wolf was exterminated across southern Texas, and it’s during this wolf-less 1980 that McCarthy set No County For Old Men, the closest he ever came to writing a pure thriller. However, despite the propulsive language and gripping plot, this novel also tells the story of how the CIA took over the cross-border drug trade in the 1980s, pushing out the Mexican cartels so they could sell Colombian cocaine in the US, thereby generating funds for anti-communist death-squads in Nicaragua, otherwise known as the Contras.
The main villain of this novel, Anton Chigurh, is a CIA-asset, although McCarthy made sure to covertly pepper the details of this character’s past into the text. He did this because being overt about politics was considered to be in poor taste among the mainstream literary world, and the reason overt politics were in poor taste was because the CIA itself had created and shaped the mainstream literary world in the US, primarily through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Cormac McCarthy never went to this workshop, but he did accept a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1966, enabled to live and write in Europe with his then wife. While he was busy writing Outer Dark, he was also a pawn of the CIA, who used the Rockefeller Foundation as a front. In this case, they wanted to show the world that the US had literary talent, that its free people could write whatever they wanted, and McCarthy, unwitting or not, furthered these aims of the CIA.

However, given his subsequent poverty and secretiveness, it seems McCarthy got wise to the whole scheme, and he got his revenge with No Country For Old Men, which used the CIA literary dictate of show don’t tell to show exactly how one of their assets operated on the Texas border in 1980. Anton Chigurh is a bloodthirsty villain, but he has a specific past, and to help break the stranglehold of the same literary establishment McCarthy despised, the following essay provides all the details which reveal Anton to not be a metaphor of something, but an agent of the US government, which has never stopped waging war against its own citizens.
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