Like most lifelong civilian Americans, I have never fired a gun in my life. I owned a BB gun when I was a kid and often fired my brother’s pellet gun. My experience with firearms is entirely second- or third-hand via the movies, which give me the illusion that I know something about guns. My father kept his .45 automatic pistol and a box of ammunition, both dating from his time in the Army Air Corps during World War II, in his bottom dresser drawer. We hefted it and admired its seriousness when no one was home.
On Friday I received an email from a guy I don’t
know but who presumed to know me. He urged me to advocate for the repeal of
the Second Amendment from the Constitution. It didn’t seem to be a form-letter.
His message was long and personal and carried a tone of barely suppressed
hysteria – precisely the approach we ignore when any cause du jour is involved. He didn’t seem stupid but he
did seem nearly fanatical, and for no personal reason (the gun death of a
family member?) that he mentioned.
In 1943, at the age of forty-three, Yvor Winters
was safely beyond draft age but he tried to get a commission in the Army. He
was turned down because of the tuberculosis he had contracted two decades
earlier. He was nagged by a guilty sense of patriotic obligation, joined the Citizens’ Defense Corps and served as its zone
warden for Los Altos, Calif., where he lived. Winters wrote “To a Military
Rifle”:
“The times
come round again;
The private
life is small;
And
individual men
Are counted
not at all.
Now life is
general,
And the
bewildered Muse,
Thinking
what she has done,
Confronts
the daily news.
“Blunt
emblem, you have won:
With carven
stock unbroke,
With core of
steel, with crash
Of mass, and
fading smoke;
Your fire
leaves little ash;
Your balance
on the arm
Points
whither you intend;
Your bolt is
smooth with charm.
When other
concepts end,
This
concept, hard and pure,
Shapes every
mind therefor.
The time is
yours, be sure,
Old
Hammerheel of War.
“I cannot
write your praise
When young
men go to die;
Nor yet
regret the ways
That ended
with this hour.
The hour has
come. And I,
Who alter nothing, pray
That men,
surviving you,
May learn to
do and say
The
difficult and true,
True shape
of death and power.”
I would ask my
correspondent to consider five simple words from Winters’ poem: “And I, / Who
alter nothing . . .”
2 comments:
Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman-philosopher and author of the ever-timely book, The True Believer, tried to enlist in the military in his 40s, during World War II, but was rejected due to a hernia.
What a great poem. And those five simple words are, indeed, essential.
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