Category: Culture

A Very Unsentimental Christmas Poem

This little Babe so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at His presence quake, though He Himself with cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise the gates of hell He will surprise.

With tears He fights and wins the field, His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babyish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need, and feeble flesh His warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib His trench, haystacks His stakes; of shepherds He His muster makes;
And thus, as sure His foe to wound, the angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ, join thou in fight; stick to the tents that He hath pight.
Within His crib is surest ward; this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil they foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

Robert Southwell, 16th Century. Benjamin Britten brilliantly set this to properly martial music.

This is the Babe a few decades later, Christ Pantocrator (the All-Conquering):

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Mikhail Kalashnikov and culpability

Mikhail Kalashnikov, Creator of the AK-47, has died at age 94. He had little formal education, describing himself as a tinkerer. But he was an engineer at heart.

How many – millions? tens of millions? – have died, pierced by projectiles from the tens of millions of his creations? How much moral culpability should we assign to engineering sorts for the consequences of their creations?

I suggest that in all but extraordinary cases, we (whose job it isn’t to assign moral culpability anyway) shouldn’t assign much.

The world’s fraught with unintended consequences. Russia had legitimate enemies. His creation arrived a bit too late to to contribute to the defeat of Hitler, the starring role in which defeat arguably was Russia’s, but defending themselves and their citizens is what governments do. And a citizen who creates so fine a work as the AK-47 is reported to be deserves a true patriot’s fame.

Not so someone who compliantly, say, designed a gas chamber cunningly disguised as a mass shower. That’s the extraordinary case I had in mind.

Robert Oppenheimer? Maybe we should go back to Kalashnakov.

Still, I can’t bring myself to a full-throated “Memory Eternal!”

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.