The Stranger

“There’s nothing more frightening than a man with a gun in his hand, and nothing more helpless than a man without one.”

   —the worst bad-guy in “Godless”

“Godless,” the name of a new tv series, describes the territorial American west where it is set and most of the men who drift and plunder there. Inevitably, in the way of these stories, we root for the least-bad bad-guy. Sure, he’s killed some men, but he teaches a boy to ride and be a good man and he defends a town against ravaging marauders.

It’s any Clint Eastwood spaghetti western. It’s the Magnificent Seven.

But something about the way “Godless” is told brought home to me in a way none of those epic westerns ever has how close we are still to those fearful times. When a stranger comes to the door in “Godless,” he or she is greeted with a gun; and if he doesn’t account for himself quickly enough, he is shot. Not just by the hard guys, but by most anybody. Even Michelle Dockery, for Pete’s sake—Downton Abby’s Lady Mary after a long and harrowing journey west.

In the west of “Godless,” it didn’t pay to give a stranger the benefit of the doubt.

The stranger killed a whole town, just because they harbored someone he had a grudge against. (A nod to the way the Nazis handled towns harboring Jews, now that I think of it.)

The stranger came to your campfire and took your woman for the night. In the morning, he ridiculed you for not laying down your life for her.

The stranger hid in the dark bar and lit the lamp so the sheriff got one last look at who was about to kill him.

It’s tempting to say that Donald Trump is the murderous stranger who has taken us back to the land of “Godless,” but all he did was lead us out of town and set us down around a campfire with darkness all around and start making noises like someone was coming for us. It didn’t take much to stimulate our primitive fears, the conditioned reflex that has in dark times permitted us to survive.

Are these dark times? Do we have that much to fear? Is the stranger coming for us?

That depends. Not on Trump, but on us. Will we fall for his demagogic rants that we are in mortal danger from the other? Will we allow ourselves to be whipped into a murderous frenzy by his taunts and humiliations? 

Or will we realize that the stranger is not someone with a different skin color or a different religion, or even someone who undoubtedly wishes us ill but who from a practical standpoint is unlikely to be able to harm us? Will we take a step out of the darkness and see that, each to the other, we are ourselves the stranger? That, to paraphrase FDR, we have nothing to fear but ourselves.