M2RB: Jenn Bostic
I didn't know today would be our last
Or that I'd have to say goodbye to you so fast
I'm so numb, I can't feel anymore
Prayin' you'd just walk back through that door
And tell me that I was only dreamin'
You're not really gone as long as I believe
There will be another angel
Around the throne tonight
Your love lives on inside of me,
And I will hold on tight
It's not my place to question,
Only God knows why
I'm just jealous of the angels
Around the throne tonight
The Newtown killings ought to occasion a little modesty and circumspection.
By Mark Steyn
Lullay, Thou little tiny Child, by by, lully, lullay . . . ”
The 16th-century Coventry Carol, a mother’s lament for her lost son, is the only song of the season about the other
children of Christmas — the first-born of Bethlehem, slaughtered on
Herod’s orders after the Magi brought him the not-so-glad tidings that
an infant of that city would grow up to be King of the Jews. As Matthew
tells it, even in a story of miraculous birth, in the midst of life is
death. The Massacre of the Innocents loomed large over the Christian
imagination: In Rubens’s two renderings, he fills the canvas with
spear-wielding killers, wailing mothers, and dead babies, a snapshot,
one assumes, of the vaster, bloodier body count beyond the frame. Then a
century ago the Catholic Encyclopedia started digging into the
numbers. The estimated population of Bethlehem at that time was around a
thousand, which would put the toll of first-born sons under the age of
two murdered by King Herod at approximately 20 — or about the same
number of dead children as one school shooting on a December morning in
Connecticut. “Every man a king,” promised Huey Long. And, if it doesn’t
quite work out like that, well, every man his own Herod.
Had my child been among the dead of December 14, I don’t know that I
would ever again trust the contours of the world. The years go by, and
you’re sitting in a coffee shop with a neighbor, and out of the corner
of your eye a guy walks in who looks a little goofy and is maybe
muttering to himself: Is he just a harmless oddball — or the prelude to
horror? The bedrock of life has been shattered, and ever after you’re
walking on a wobbling carpet with nothing underneath. For a parent to
bury a child offends against the natural order — at least in an age that
has conquered childhood mortality. For a parent to bury a child at
Christmas taints the day forever, and mocks its meaning.
For those untouched by death this Christmas, someone else’s bewildering,
shattering turn of fate ought to occasion a little modesty and
circumspection. Instead, even by its usual execrable standards, the
public discourse post-Newtown has been stupid and contemptible. The Left
now seizes on every atrocity as a cudgel to beat whatever happens to be
the Right’s current hottest brand: Tucson, Ariz., was something to do
with Sarah Palin’s use of metaphor and other common literary devices —
or “toxic rhetoric,” as Paul Krugman put it; Aurora, Colo., was
something to do with the Tea Party, according to Brian Ross of ABC News.
Since the humiliations of November, the Right no longer has any hot
brands, so this time round the biens pensants have fallen back on “gun
culture.” Dimwit hacks bandy terms like “assault weapon,” “assault
rifle,” “semiautomatic,” and “automatic weapon” in endlessly
interchangeable but ever more terrifying accumulations of high-tech
state-of-the-art killing power. As the comedian Andy Borowitz tweeted,
“When the 2nd Amendment was written the most lethal gun available was
the musket.”
Actually, the semiautomatic is a 19th-century technology, first
produced in 1885. That’s just under half a century after the death of
Madison, the Second Amendment’s author, and rather nearer to the
Founding Fathers’ time than our own. And the Founders were under fewer
illusions about the fragility of society than Hollywood funnymen: On
July 25,1764, four Lenape Indians walked into a one-room schoolhouse in
colonial Pennsylvania and killed Enoch Brown and ten of his pupils. One
child survived, scalped and demented to the end of his days.
Nor am I persuaded by the Right’s emphasis on preemptive
mental-health care. It’s true that, if your first reaction on hearing
breaking news of this kind is to assume the perpetrator is a male dweeb
in his early twenties with poor socialization skills, you’re unlikely to
be wrong. But, in a society with ever fewer behavioral norms, who’s to
say what’s odd? On 9/11, the agent at the check-in desk reckoned Mohamed
Atta and his chums were a bit strange but banished the thought as
shameful and discriminatory. In a politically correct world, vigilance
is a fool’s errand. The US Airways cabin crew who got the “flying imams”
bounced from a Minneapolis plane for flamboyantly, intimidatingly wacky
behavior (praying loudly, fanning out to occupy all the exit rows,
asking for seatbelt extenders they didn’t need) wound up in
sensitivity-training hell. If a lesbian thinks dragging your wife around
in a head-to-toe body bag is kinda weird, she’s being “Islamophobic.”
If a Muslim thinks taking breast hormones and amputating your penis is a
little off, he’s “transphobic.” These very terms make the point that,
in our society, finding somebody else odd is itself a form of mental
illness. In an unmoored age, what’s not odd? Once upon a time, TV
viewers from distant states descending on a Connecticut town to attend
multiple funerals of children they don’t know might have struck some of
us as, at best, unseemly and, at worst, deeply creepy — a Feast of the
Holy Innocents, so to speak.
Okay, what about restricting it to wishing murderous ill upon someone?
In her own response to the Sandy Hook slaughter, the novelist Joyce
Carol Oates tweeted that hopes for gun control would be greatly advanced
“if sizable numbers of NRA members become gun-victims.” Who’s to know
when violent fantasies on social media prefigure a loner getting ready
to mow down the kindergarten or just a critically acclaimed liberal
novelist amusing her friends before the PEN Awards cocktail party? As it
is, in American schools, mental-health referral for “oppositional
defiance disorder” and the like is a bureaucratic coding racket designed
to access federal gravy. Absent widely accepted cultural enforcers, any
legislative reforms would quickly decay into just another capricious
boondoggle.
It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever broker America, with
more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social
restraints, and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more
young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as
extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to
pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own
personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody
else’s, until after Christmas — except to note that the media’s stampede
for meaning in massacre this last week overlooks the obvious: that the
central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod
and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude
political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely
conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide.
Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism —
19th-century technology in the service of a very contemporary
sensibility.
Meanwhile, the atheists have put up a new poster in Times Square:
Underneath a picture of Santa, “Keep the Merry”; underneath a picture of
Christ, “Dump the Myth.” But in our time even Christians have dumped a
lot of the myth while keeping the merry: Jesus, lambs, shepherds, yes;
the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, kind of a downer. If the
Christmas story is a myth, it’s a perfectly constructed one, rooting the
Savior’s divinity in the miracle of His birth but unblinkered, in
Matthew’s account of Herod’s response, about man’s darker impulses:
Then woe is me
Poor Child, for Thee
And ever mourn and may
For Thy parting
Nor say nor sing
By by, lully, lullay.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
Jealous Of The Angels - Jenn Bostic
I didn't know today would be our last
Or that I'd have to say goodbye to you so fastI'm so numb, I can't feel anymore
Prayin' you'd just walk back through that door
And tell me that I was only dreamin'
You're not really gone as long as I believe
There will be another angel
Around the throne tonight
Your love lives on inside of me,
And I will hold on tight
It's not my place to question,
Only God knows why
I'm just jealous of the angels
Around the throne tonight
You always made my troubles feel so small
And you were always there to catch me when I'd fall
In a world where heroes come and go
Well God just took the only one I know
So I'll hold you as close as I can
Longing for the day, when I see your face again
But until then
God must need another angel
Around the throne tonight
Your love lives on inside of me
And I will hold on tight
It's not my place to question
Only God knows why
I'm just jealous of the angels
Around the throne tonight
Singin' hallelujah
Hallelujah
Hallelujah
I'm just jealous of the angels
Around the throne
Tonight
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