Huckabees sucks.

Or I don't think it should be, anyway.

Sorry for the self chat.

Oh, and I wouldn't exclude religious texts from the list of "important" books the truth of which people all too often mistake for truth truth.

Strike logic from the above.

Donna's comment about truth brings to my mind one of the things that sometimes bugs me about literature.

Could there also be a little bit of the kid's past evils coming back to haunt him in that passage? Like, "Hey, I'm good now. I want to he…oh crap."

(Man! I haven't been this full of half-baked ideas since college! I'm enjoying this book club thing!)

writers *of* "serious" literature, rather.

And if anyone has been seduced by the allure of western civilization and it's 10 cent words, it's writers or "serious" literature.

Here's something to think about: With his florid and sometimes archaic prose, McCarthy seems to be intent on emulating the Bible, Moby Dick, Milton, and various other "heavy hitters" of the western literary Canon.

As another poster pointed out, the gunpowder part seems to be a nod towards Satan showing the secret of gunpoweder in Paradise Lost.

There are plenty of books that say, "Western civilization is hypocritical and barbaric" and "war is bad".

(Reposted from Leonard's thread)

It's been so long since I read this I can't comment too learnedly on it, but I remember feeling McCarthy did an awesome job nailing the sort of dark allure of violence.

Sure, North Korea *could* be a threat, as could China, Russia, hell, some disgruntled coworker or a guy on a bus.

@Emperor Jim: Dude. You seem to know very little about the history of the war(-s) you volunteered to fight in. That kind of makes you a chump.

"My only argument here at all was that the middle ground might be defendable because Iraq was dragging their feet with verification that their Anthrax and VX stockpiles were destroyed."

AIDS AIDS AIDS!

The war on terror is a giant, messy, historically complicated, often tragic thing. Meaning, it's super-ripe for comedy gold.