First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,
Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud
Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire
To his grim idol. (Paradise Lost 1.392-96)
Read again those lines, with recent images seared into our brains—“besmeared with blood” and “parents’ tears.” They give the real meaning of what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary School Friday morning. That horror cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).
Read Garry Wills' entire op-ed and see what we have become as a country.
Below are the firearms found at the scene in Sandy Hook Elementary School. The Bushmaster was used in the killings.
Descriptions of the guns may be found here.
An AR-15 is usually capable of firing a rate of 45 rounds per minute in semiautomatic mode.
Lanza used one of the pistols to kill himself.
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| Bushmaster .223 caliber Remington semiautomatic |
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| Sig Sauer 9 mm |
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| Glock 10mm pistol Auto |
When I think of Moloch, I think of this:
ReplyDeleteMoloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch#in_Allen_Ginsberg.27s_.22Howl.22
Segues pretty (ugly) perfectly w/ your post, IMO.
Segues pretty (ugly) perfectly w/ your post, IMO.
DeleteYes, it does, JCF.
Posted for Charley F B:
ReplyDelete"How do you eat an elephant? A little at a time!" And I expect that'll be the way with gun control. Perhaps a limit on magazine capacity and the sale of dum-dum bullets, and if you're lucky, some restriction on assault rifles. It'll be a little at a time and I don't suppose any of us will live to see anything really effective in place - but that's still the way to do it. It'll satisfy no one, of course, the murders will not be reduced so the anti-guns will cry "not enough" and the gun fans will say that it shows that gun controls make no difference. But its still the way to go.
And now I going to say something dreadful. Not enough people have been killed. Not just the dreadful drip of the murders in the streets that the media hardly notices but what you need (yes! really need) is what the IRA called "spectaculars", the Newtowns, the Columbines. More of these and something might, just might, be done. And these events, well yes, they will come.
Yours in sorrow, Charley Farns-Barns.
Ah Charley, I hope you're wrong, but I fear you're right.
Delete