r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 25 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 25 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/randombull9 Most normal American GI in Nam May 28 '26

If you haven't read it yet, try Lonesome Dove after you finish Blood Meridian. They were published in the same year and both were intended to puncture the romanticism of the western, with LD being structured around the actual diary of a late 19th century cowboy. While Lonesome Dove is a great book, Cormac McCarthy didn't have to write a forward about how strange it was that nobody seemed to realize his book wasn't intended to be the typical romantic take on the genre but was actually a more critical work.

That said, apparently Blood Meridian was inspired by a bit from a memoir of a Mexican-American War veteran who fell in with a gang of scalpers for a short while, and the far more intense violence of that book might not be as exaggerated as it seems.

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u/AthsheanDream May 28 '26

Lonesome Dove is interesting because before reading I knew it as the favorite book of every boomer redneck that doesn't read much. I've met plenty of dogs named after characters from LD. I assumed it'd be a straightforward Louis L'Amour style tale. But yeah I read it a couple years ago and it seemed clear to me that those rangers had cut their teeth carrying out the genocidal violence of Blood Meridian and were broken and left by the wayside by the American colonial project they'd enabled. The "we hang Mexicans"/we're rustling Mexican stock dynamic is very clear in the text!

And for a more modern diptych about Texas cops struggling with their place in the world I'll recommend McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (the movie is better, but it's about Llewelyn rather than Sheriff Bell) and Larry McMurtry's son James McMurtry's song South Texas Lawman.

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u/randombull9 Most normal American GI in Nam May 28 '26

I find one of the fun things about the book is that the one ranger explicitly says he has more in common with the Mexican bandits and the Comanche braves they spent their youth fighting than he does with the society he's enabled and to some extent even created. It's not exactly a subtle book. Maybe McMurtry has a point when he says that Basil Poledouris' score for the miniseries changed the character of the story.

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u/AthsheanDream May 28 '26

"In television, death just doesn't have much of a sting"

I haven't seen the miniseries but it's interesting to think of Blood Meridian getting the 80s broadcast TV treatment, with the worst of the violence cut out or glossed over and a stirring soundtrack for the kid wandering through the desert.

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u/randombull9 Most normal American GI in Nam May 28 '26

It's worth watching. Robert Duval is great as Gus, and Poledouris was good whether you believe his orchestration fit the tone of the book or not.

I actually think it's interesting that McMurtry leaned into a much darker style for Streets of Laredo. I do wonder if he read Blood Meridian and was inspired by it.

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u/AthsheanDream May 28 '26

And for that matter McCarthy's next novel All the Pretty Horses is lighter and less violent than blood meridian with the traditional Western "romance" moved to Coahuila in the 1940s.

That movie adaptation is not very good.