Old folks always be like Back in my day, iPods only held 4,000 songs, or I used to have to Netflix through the mail, and it took 3 days both ways through the rain. This country of streaming music and video is no country for men (and women) who are used to doing things the old-fashioned way.
No Country for Old Men is about even older men, men who don't even know iPods or Netflix or the Internet exist. And these men's lives have much higher stakes: they've personally known war and violence. Sadly, things keep getting worse. A war in Vietnam has given way to a new war on the home front: the Mexican drug war on the Texas-Mexico border. And this is a dirty war with terrible consequences.
As a result, our oldest of old men, Sheriff Bell, wonders what the point of fighting it is. He doesn't seem to be making any progress into making the world a better place. In one of the book's final chapters, he thinks "I know where we're headed. We're being bought with our own money"(12.2). The drug wars go both ways. There wouldn't be such a supply if there weren't such a demand.
Bell believes his country used to be a place of honor. Now it's eating itself alive. The horrors keep getting worse. He never thought someone as evil as Chigurh would hit the scene. What could be next? We're heading down a slippery slope, and there's no going back.