From The Son, by Phillip Meyers:
March 10, 1916 -- Yesterday Pancho Villa crossed the border into New Mexico, killing twenty. Today, hardly a white man to be seen without a pistol or slung rifle, even to buy groceries.
The Germans have promised to reinforce Mexican troops with German infantry should they choose to cross the border. Whole town in a frenzy; we are only ten miles from the river.
I do not point out there is little likelihood of the Kaiser sending troops to McCullough Springs when he is losing them ten thousand a day in France. I do not point out that the number of Americans killed in Columbus is the same as the number of Tejanos shot in bar ditches on any given night in South Texas. I do not point these things out because everyone seems happy with the news of this new threat; neighbors who didn't speak are suddenly friendly, wives have new reason to make love with their husbands, disobedient children do their schoolwork and come home early to dinner.
The Son is fiction, but Pancho Villa's raid is not -- I remember learning about it as a child -- and the reaction of the Americans in the town of McCullough is also well grounded in fact.
It is the folly of the immature to think that what they are experiencing has never been experienced by anyone before. If fact, America has been upset by the threat of terrorism before, as this passage attests. Moreover, people who have no ability to hurt us have used that threat to sucker us before, too. The Kaiser, no less, did what ISIS does now, almost a hundred years ago.
I could to write a PhD thesis about this, but it is possible through intuition to see to the bottom of this problem without spending quite so much time. Overreaction is a very ancient response to terrorism. Even the very oldest book in Western literature, Homer's Iliad, is about this problem. The Iliad tells the story of what the Greeks do when a group of Trojan marauders steal the wife of one of its kings. Destroy a good bit of the known world seems to be the answer.
It makes me wonder. If the Bush administration knew its Homer, would it have paused before going ahead in Iraq? After all, the Greeks defeated Troy, but at the loss of Achilles, Petroclus, Ajax, and thousands of Greek soldiers in the prime of life. Ultimately their action resulted in the total destruction of Troy, which probably didn't benefit the Greeks in the long run either. It was the very mixed results and the high price the Greeks paid for victory that gives Homer's Iliad the ring of truth.
A great work of art doesn't force an ending. It recognizes that events play out in unforeseen ways, and that humans pay for their choices, even when they make the right ones.
People who don't know their fiction make big mistakes. Because, as a critic once said, fiction is a huge time saver. Only by putting yourself in the minds of many people, living and dead, can you have the breath of experiences that allow you to contend with life. You couldn't possibly live long enough to learn all the moral and social dilemmas that are out there on your own. Fiction does that for you.
Good writers know predictable plots make bad fiction. Predictable plots cheat the reader of experiencing the moral complexities that allow for growth. That is what Phillips is showing in this passage in The Son: The townsfolk, acting like bad authors of a bad novel, write a conclusion to the Villa raid, one that is not grounded in reality, and end up looking stupid.
Every decent writer knows that a predictable plot leads to absurd outcomes, outcomes that defy life experience, outcomes that don't feel right because they are too controlled. What we have in The Son is a population that manufactures its own myth to seek comfort in (that taking a gun to the grocery store will protect America from Villa), a myth that leads them to be manipulated, and made a fool of, by the Kaiser of Germany.
Fiction says life is not predictable and the truth is not obvious. Like Texans 100 years ago who were fooled by the Kaiser, people today respond to terrorism and threats of violence by foolishly arming themselves to the teeth against an enemy unlikely to harm them, and as a result fall into a false sense of security. Like the citizens of McCullough, they think carrying a gun is the talisman that protects.
Predictable behavior leads to absurd outcomes, just as predictable plots lead to absurd endings. Finding the truth means looking beyond the obvious. Good fiction teaches us this.