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' 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 2 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 Dec. 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,
Arizona, 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, Colorado, 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," "semi-automatic" 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 pre-emptive 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 Mohammed 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.
OK,
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 past 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."
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