Timely Piece, Sort Of

Arturo Córdova published an op-ed piece this Saturday titled "The End of the World According to Cormac McCarthy", which focuses on 2007's The Road. I can't decide if it was published because of the flu (which started dominating the news cycle in earnest on Friday), or if it was just a coincidence (the word "influenza" never once appears). I'm leaning toward the latter, basically because I like real-life examples of irony. 

Here's Córdova's take:

There's a metaphor in the road: just as the two characters run across rickety busses, abandoned houses, streets without a soul, citizens today walk in silence, have lost their powers of speech and pass the time in empty suburbs where people avoid each other or cram themselves into their car as though it were a bunker. It evokes On the Road, by Keroac. But it's a counterpart [to On the Road]: it's written in a world without remedy, where solidarity has disappeared and people fight for sustenance, over air. 

On the road nothing is handed over lightly, we must recognized that it coexists in the abyss where violence dictates and establishes normalcy. It's a sketch of the cancelation of humanism and it alludes to the regime of violence under which the West has decided to place itself; it signals that the destruction of civilization is the same as the scandalous disdain for the authenticity of sensitive ties, of proximity and recognition, outside of the productivism that has us eating ourselves. 

I'm not sure I have this translated one hundred percent correctly (darn poets, why can't they just write clearly?!), but you get the gist. I'm not sure I agree with all (or even most) of it, but Córdova's the poet here, so you should probably pay more attention to him than to me on all literary questions. Whatever the case, both the piece and McCarthy's opus serve as a timely reminder of how bad things aren't right now.