of the pollution of our environment, and of the urban crises” (Report 31). But in Nixon’s thinking it was more expedient to characterize drug users as pitiable moral failures, who drove up crime rates and caused untold deaths through actions “shrouded in secrecy” (Nixon 1971). Secret or not, the details hardly mattered. He admitted his government lacked reliable information on the scope of the problem. The solution was not for government to uplift communities or help addicts, but to criminalize and punish individuals who bought and sold drugs (Nixon 1971). The bulk of funding poured into the War on Drugs went to law enforcement rather than large scale rehabilitation and education initiatives. Ten years later, a disavowal of collective responsibility was central to President Ronald Reagan’s neo-liberal policy proposals. Americans should be left in charge of their own individual fates. Hence, Reagan famously proclaimed in his Inauguration Address that “government is not the solution to [America’s] problems; government is the problem” (Reagan 1981). The flipside of the insistence on personal responsibility, however, was a denial of systemic culpability for social problems such as poverty or addiction. As Moss’s discovery of a $2.4 million drug deal gone bad suggests, Terrell County is on the front lines of the War on Drugs. What Chigurh represents within this context is key to understanding the novel’s broader critique of rugged individualism. To the Cowboy who refuses to concede his own vulnerability and moral responsibility, he is the relentless killer who exacts consequence of a bad personal decision. To the lawman who believes in and enforces policies that refuse to concede systemic culpability, the killer represents a collective affliction that he is unable to understand never mind contain. Chigurh represents the inevitable, unavoidable consequences from which neither morally bankrupt individuals nor civil infrastructures are immune. Just as the causes of the drug epidemic cannot be pinned down one person, place, or time, so Chigurh resists to capture. He is a reckoning that affects individuals and society at the same time. Almost simultaneously, he slays Mexican gangsters in Dryden, Texas (57), rummages through elderly people’s houses to look for information in Odessa (59), and forces a gas station attendant to choose between heads and tails (204). His movements defy patterns; his motives defy reason. Chigurh can be anywhere, anytime, killing people on the basis of “principles that transcend money or drugs or anything” (McCarthy 153). Sheriff Bell and his exasperated law enforcement infrastructure – ostensibly America’s soldiers in the War on Drugs – are ill-equipped to address it in all its complexity. It is their state of bewilderment and paralysis that afford the killer the perfect conditions to thrive. A society that will not take collective responsibility, cannot unify against a common enemy. That’s how the killer slips through cracks time and again. Faced with threats that requires a coordinated response, a fractured, individualist society can only throw up its hands in exasperation. As Chigurh himself notes: “People don’t pay attention. 103
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