The Flying Gunman - Regarding Adam...
This past week twwenty children at a Connecticut school were shot in cold blood. The shooter also smoked the human evidence as well, blowing away his Mum and himself in the fusilade. He wasn't in touch with his estranged father. Sweet estrangement lie down by me.
Tiny little six year-olds and their teachers.
In the picture launched directly into the retinas of the millions who could not turn their eyes away from this trainwreck of a soul, the shooter's face, Adam Lanza's face appears to be astonished at something no one else but he can see. It is the same face seen in Russian icons of unknown provenance; stripped of connections to the world, long, pale, crowned with a tangled thatch of brambles. His eyes are enormous, cornered, swollen with terrible things they have seen or scenes his imagination has served up. His mouth with silent, sensual lips seems unfit for human speech - maybe angels or the citizens of a surreal island forever under sail.
But the NRA is right: Guns don't kill people; people kill people. to claim otherwise is to retreat into the hazy American mind of Endless Childhood, where no one is responsible and there are never any consequences - apart from the bodies left behind in the Real World. But no. Americans are children, creating bad things ouyt of bad ideas and then feigning helpless in the ugly face of their mindless machines. People make guins. People sell guns and people buy them. Legislators pass laws alowing the ggun to become the constant companion, the romantic's erotic dream of sex and death; thje American Dilemma: Give me sex or give me death.
Perhaps it began in the psychosis of Vietnam when soldiers were induced to fetishize their weapons: name them, sleep with them, stroke them, bath them in oil and tears and blood.