James Lee Burke warns us against MAGA

The problem of evil,  of humankind’s capacity to behave in shockingly evil ways, has troubled all of us and not only theologians; perhaps quite explicitly since at least the time (or the myth) of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.

One of the attractions of the literary genre of crime or mystery stories lies in the characters, on who we can rely on to see that Good will triumph in the end, even as the imperfect actors may employ all sorts of unorthodox and even shady means.

Those “hero” characters in stories of criminality may have originated with Sherlock Holmes and Arsѐne Lupin, and certainly include Father Brown and Leslie Charteris's Simon Templar (“The Saint”). Contemporary examples include Robert Crais’s “Joe Pike”, Lee Child's “Jack Reacher”, and James Lee Burke's “Dave Robicheaux”.

The latter is one of my favorites. I was quite surprised, however, at how explicitly his activities grapple, in the 2020 book A Private Cathedral, with the eternal battle between the good and the ugly evil, for the latter displayed  for instance in the manner in which political populism can trade on real and imagined grievances to bring all sorts of otherwise ordinary individuals to commit evil acts.

I was surprised at how directly Burke points to contemporary conditions in the United States:

Pp. 2-3: “Back in that other era, America was still America . . . . Men such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were president; we didn't have the daily arrival of the clown car.” 

P. 270: “As I mentioned earlier, I have long believed that my generation is a transitional one and will be the last to remember what we refer to as traditional America. [I sense] a harbinger of a sea change, perhaps a tectonic shift in the plates on which our civilization stood.”

And the book includes frequent references to Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, and others of that ilk throughout millennia of history. Finally, in the book’s Epilogue, there comes a description that could not be more explicit:

P. 366: “A collection of neo-Nazis and Klansmen had assembled in a city park, supposedly to oppose the removal of Confederate statuary. In a torchlight march, they chanted an anti-Semitic mantra of hatred and paranoia and carried the battle flag of Robert Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia next to Hitler's swastika. The next day one of their members plowed his car into a crowd, injuring many and killing a young woman.”

I wondered rather naturally whether this perfectly explicit warning against the evils that could be stirred up by the likes of populist Donald Trump and MAGA had been mentioned in reviews of the book. Although I found a dozen or so reviews, none of them said anything about this surely-clear message of the book.

In my view, James Lee Burke's intention could not be plainer. The book was published in 2020; and the chronology internal to this series of books featuring Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcel is rather unnatural, even garbled. My interpretation is that James Lee Burke had been seeking a suitable vehicle for expressing his worries about our contemporary political circumstances as exemplified in the first term of President Donald Trump.