BLATHER REVIEW

Lullaby

I just read THIS over at RP's:

I'm a liar.
I lied about something really important today. I told my daughter that there are no monsters in the world and that she is safe and that there really isn't anything scary. The thing is, she doesn't need, at 3 1/2, to know differently. But I know.

This woman knows:

Click on the above link to read the rest. I'll wait right here!

I wrote a song in the spring of 2000 -- about a year and a half before 9/11 -- called "Lullaby". I was working on an album-length project that was purposefully very dark. I wrote it almost as a joke, but not really as a joke; an exaggeration, maybe... hopefully.

Shortly after 9/11 I listened to it again. When the line "where fire cries and people burn" came out of the speakers I had to turn the thing off. I haven't listened to it since -- until just now.
It's a slow, quiet song - in 3/4 time. The music is a high piano riff intended to sound like a music box. The lilting lyric goes like this:

Hush my baby, sleep will come close your eyes and pray for some The day is done and now you lay where peace is just a dream away

You'll be safe, I know you will,
from gremlins who've got time to kill
Sail on and leave the land astern
where fire cries and people burn

Where monsters out there on the loose
will knife you for your tennis shoes
and demons hide in ivory towers
honing all their secret powers

Where dragons promise love forever
while one eye looks for something better
and devils, they want nothing else
then to turn you into one yourself

You must beware, the most of all,
shadows dancing on the wall
for, haunting ghosts are just as real
as anything you'll ever feel

So, hush my baby, sleep will come
close your eyes and pray for some
Your day is done and now you lay
where peace is just a dream away

Sweet dreams,
sweet dreams...

I hate this song for the same reason that I hate seeing the photos of the kids in Beslan. I hate the terrorists for destroying the illusion that people just aren't capable of committing atrocities in cold blood. Even still, I held out hope that there weren't possibly people that were worse than the few who beheaded Nick Berg. Wrong again.

Maybe before 9/11 we were all a little like the Girl Child; we didn't need to let ourselves know just how dangerous and twisted humanity is capable of becoming under certain circumstances. But 9/3 was even worse because, at least on 9/11, we knew that the terrorists knew that they'd never directly face their victims as they killed them, and would never have to face the consequences of their actions. But these %$*#&s (there is no word) in Beslan shot women and children in the back as they ran for their lives.

More than ever I believe that the culture that breeds such people is a disease that can't be allowed to continue. Containment -- quarantine -- is not an option. The disease much be dealt with directly. From the indoctrination schools, to the mosques, to the governments that both feed and fear the resentments that their people harbor toward individual liberty.

In a religious context, the word "submission" can mean a lot of things. In a theocracy it can only mean one thing: tyranny. We can either fight the tyranny Islamofascists with our belief in freedom of the individual to live in peace and freedom, or we can wallow in nuance and a naive belief that peace at any cost is a righteous goal, and watch our children die at the hands of religious tyrants.
But then, we all know this already and I'm sick and tired and going to bed.

May the sun shine tomorrow.

Posted by Tuning Spork at September 7, 2004 12:01 AM