By Josh Beavers
Near the end of No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell drives out to visit his Uncle Ellis. Ed Tom is worn down. He’s been chasing a killer he can’t understand, and he’s convinced the world has gotten meaner than the one his daddy policed.
Ellis doesn’t offer much sympathy. He tells Ed Tom about their Uncle Mac, shot down on his own porch long before Ed Tom was born. Then he says, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country’s hard on people.” He tells his nephew you can’t stop what’s coming, and that thinking it all waits on you is just vanity.
I think about that scene every time somebody tells me the world is going to hell. Maybe it is, but it’s been headed that way for a long time.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600. In the play’s most famous speech, the young prince stands alone and asks whether it’s better to keep living or to end it. That’s what the speech is really about, and there’s no use dancing around it. Hamlet lays out exactly why he’s tired of living, and most of his complaints could have been posted on Facebook this morning.
He talks about “the proud man’s contumely,” which is an old way of describing arrogant people who look down on you, and “the insolence of office,” along with the way good, patient people get pushed aside by the unworthy. Yall, I heard a story Thursday afternoon from a friend that would curl your toes about the proud man and his contumely. It did not die with the Bard.
Digression. Again. Sorry.
A long time ago, during a disagreement, a boss asked me if I knew who his father was. Years later, a different boss asked me the same question, nearly word for word. Yeah, I knew who their fathers were, and so did everybody else in the building. Neither one of them would’ve been sitting behind that desk otherwise.
I also once knew a man who took over an office and told the people in it that, as far as they were concerned, he was god. I’ve met plenty of small people who treat their tiny bit of power like it’s the hand of the Almighty, and I’d bet Shakespeare met his share, too.
Hamlet complains about “th’oppressor’s wrong” and “the law’s delay.” More than four centuries later, we still watch people with money and the right last name walk away from things that would put an ordinary man in prison for years. If there were real justice, some politicians might be in those cells instead of the poor and desperate people who fill them now.
A friend asked me something recently that I haven’t been able to shake. You work forty years or more, and everything goes up except your pay. You might never be able to retire, and if you do, you might spend those years in poverty. Then you die. What’s the point? How do you respond to that? I am asking yall because this person is right. I had no idea how to respond because wisdom does not always come with age. When a 20-30 something asks the old man a question like that, it is embarrassing not knowing the answer. But again….digression.
Shakespeare had his prince ask nearly the same thing. He wonders who would “fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life.” A fardel is a bundle, the kind of load you carry on your back, and my friend was describing the same weight. Throw in “the whips and scorns of time,” the way the years wear down your body and your savings, and you’ve described most people I know over fifty.
Then there’s “the pangs of dispriz’d love.” Almost everyone has loved somebody who didn’t love them back, or who quit loving them somewhere along the way.
So when people say the world has never been this bad, I’ve felt that way myself. But Shakespeare was writing these grievances down before the Pilgrims ever landed at Plymouth, and Ellis was telling Ed Tom the same thing from a wheelchair in a dusty Texas farmhouse.
Hamlet figures we put up with it because we’re scared of what comes after, and the devil we know beats the one we don’t. Ellis is closer to acceptance. It’s always been hard, and it’s not going to quit being hard just because you finally noticed.
There’s another tired old cop in another dark movie who lands somewhere else. At the end of Se7en, after everything has gone about as wrong as it can, Morgan Freeman’s Detective Somerset quotes Hemingway: “The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” Then he says he agrees with the second part.
I’ve always loved that line. Somerset has just watched the worst thing he could imagine happen in an empty field, and he’s honest about what the world is. He decides to stay and fight for it anyway.
Hamlet set it up as a choice between suffering the slings and arrows or taking up arms against them. I don’t think it has to be one or the other. You can agree with Ellis that none of this is new and still side with Somerset about what to do with it.
The arrogant bosses and crooked oligarchs and demagogues were here long before us, and they’ll outlast us, too. I’ve made my peace with that. I just know which old man I’d rather end up being.
Josh Beavers is an award-winning columnist who earned four Best Columnist awards from the Louisiana Press Association. He traded the newsroom for the classroom in 2013, convinced that teaching young people to write, to think, and to become productive members of their community was the more important work.