Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Tuesday
“The Supreme Court just effectively legalized machine guns,” read the Vox headline while Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote, “Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word ‘function.’” At issue was a 6-3 ruling by the Court’s rightwing justice overturning a Trump-era ban (!) on bump stocks.
In 2017 a Las Vegas killer carried out America’s deadliest mass shooting in its history (which is really saying something) after using a bump stock to convert his rifle into a super deadly weapon. He killed 58 people and wounded over 500 in mere minutes.
I think of a poem that my father wrote years ago critiquing the NRA. Due to corrupt leadership, the NRA is now only a shadow of its former self, making the poem somewhat dated, but the organization succeeded in its major mission, which was getting the GOP to internalize its fanaticism. It even got the rightwing members of the Supreme Court to sign on.
Referring to a 1986 law banning machine guns, liberal Justice Sonia Sotamayor lambasted her colleagues for using an “artificially narrow definition” to “hamstring[ ] the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She predicted “deadly consequences.”
I’m reposting my father’s poem, along with my previous commentary. He was familiar with toxic masculinity, having seen instances of it when a soldier in France and Germany during World War II.
Reprinted from Oct. 3, 2017 (slightly amended)
I share today the angriest poem my genial father ever wrote, which takes America’s leading gun organization to task. In “Ballad of the National Rifle Association,” he unloads on the gun group for the ways that it exploits white male anxieties. The poem was “triggered” by a gun ad in Gun World that guaranteed “shooting satisfaction.”
“Ballad” is a complex mixture of fantasies and fears, combining macho displays of supremacy, erotic dreams of manly sexual performance, and various emasculation anxieties. Stanza two is filled with power rape fantasies (“Whang her bang her get your action”).
At one point my father imagines Hollywood scenarios of protecting virginal daughters while cleansing the world of urban “putrefaction.” In this drama, which one sees in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the virginal daughters are the longing for a lost innocence while putrefaction is the black Other that makes anxious whites feel small and fearful. Donald Trump, of course, plays on fears of threatening African Americans (for instance, his description of urban neighborhoods as “hell holes”), and, right on cue, after the Las Vegas shooting Trump spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders mentioned Chicago violence as a reason not to enact gun control measures.
The poem’s deep dive into the psychology of gun fanatics also examines revenge fantasies against chaotic nature and against parents—which is to say, against the fathers who mock their sons’ sensitivity and the mothers whose sensitivity they both long for and hate (because it makes them feel vulnerable). “Pistol Pentheus” is Euripides’s uptight control freak in The Bacchae, who tries to assert his manhood and is torn apart by his Dionysus-crazed mother. There is also an Oedipal reference to shooting the castrating father before he shoots you and adds your “skin” to his collection.
The utopian vision of a new Jerusalem is a power fantasy designed to override anxieties: a militarized America is very good at “winging rockets,” whether at enemies or at the moon. (“It’s natural the boys should whoop it up for so huge a phallic triumph,” W. H. Auden wrote about the moon landing.) My father’s ballad was written in the 1990’s but is impressively prescient given how commonplace apocalyptic language has become among many Christian gun-toting enthusiasts.
My father writes the poem in a southern accent. Having spent most of his life in southern Tennessee, he saw up close how susceptible poor Appalachian whites are to NRA fear mongering. The poem appeared in his collection The ZYX of Political Sex (Highlander Research and Education Center, 1999) so expect the language to be explicit.
Incidentally, Lucille Thornburgh, to whom the poem is dedicated, was a longtime union activist.
Ballad of the National Rifle Association
By Scott Bates
In memory of Lucille Thornburgh, dedicated worker for social justice, who liked this poem.
“For your shooting satisfaction . . .” –from an ad in Gun World
Pistol small arm handgun gun
Trooper Trailsman Frontier Scout
Smith & Wesson Remington
Combat Cobra Knockabout
Browning Sheridan Colt Snap-Out
Single-six and Double-action
TOP PERFORMANCE SUPER CLOUT
Give you shooting satisfaction.
Pistol short arm peter prick
Rod avenger redmeat dong
Johnnie joystick reamer dick
Dummy fixer hicky prong
Swinging sirloin two feet long
Have a similar attraction
Every boy can be King Kong
With a shooting satisfaction.
Pistol-heist her hunt her down
Line her up and ream her right
Ride her home get off your gun
Shag her shoot her up tonight
Jump her hump her out of sight
Whang her bang her get your action
Fill her full of dynamite
For your shooting satisfaction.
Pistol Po-lice save your pity
For the dirty rotten hood
Gun him down in Inner City
Like they do in Hollywood
Save your daughter’s maidenhood
And pulverize the putrefaction
Trash him baby trash him good
For your shooting satisfaction.
Pistol Pentheus git yer maw
Afore she tears you limb from limb
Beat yer pappy to the draw
And incidentally get him
The sonavabitch who wants yer skin
To add it to his rug collection
Blast yer pappy Jungle Jim
Fer yer shootin’ satisfaction.
Pistol Patriot shoot your wad
The world the moon your mouth your brother
Build Jerusalem by God
Winging rockets at each other
Love your country like a mother
Love your enemy dog-fashion
Love your neighbor till he smother
In your shooting satisfaction.
Envoy
Pistol pirate cool tycoon
Do us all a benefaction
Go take a flying fuck at the moon
For our shooting satisfaction!
