Mandeville, LA — Another mass homicide, another media frenzy, with a twist: The “if it bleeds, it leads” sophists masquerading as media operatives are the ones bleeding. The same hacks now existentially search for answers to solve problems they assisted in creating.
Alas, pitting more gun control advocates against outnumbered open carry fans will only exacerbate the horror. While one side peeks at the truth through the cardinal virtue of justice and the other through fortitude, neither seeks the ultimate cause of it: denial of the Truth that recognizes supernatural authority over the natural world. The moral code exists above and is superior to the law, indeed, it is defended by the laws but ultimately enforceable by God alone. No, such an insight would elicit crickets and anemic ratings — in other words, “leading by bleeding” cannot be replaced with “leading, while bleeding” on Calvary.
Prudence (another cardinal virtue) dictates that some men shouldn’t be walking among the mentally sane and if those same men are brandishing legally obtained, loaded guns, we might then ask: who should the sane be walking among since the insane are already spoken for? In the same sense then we should recognize that modern mass-murderers perpetrating their acts against the unarmed have digested, come to believe and are now apostles for the worst part of what author Solange Hertz terms the Heresy of Americanism: a job worth doing is only worth doing if it can be done easily. Imagine having to take the lives of your victims by chasing them down and engaging in old-fashioned strangulation?
Note that in role playing, mass murder, video games, the weapon you begin your “quest” with is just your bare hands, or something obsolete to modern, American man, like a hammer. To sow confusion among Millennial gamers, programmers then make the hammer inoperable as a weapon by requiring nails to be acquired as well. “Hey, what are those things for?” The game’s quest is then to replace the hammer with firing weapons of increasing calibre and efficiency. Killing is thus put on the same level as, say, peeling garlic pods. You could do it by hand and enjoy the aroma and texture of the event and the personal joy of cooking, but why bother when laborers have picked, shorn and diced the garlic for you? I digress, but not nearly as much as moral certainty against killing and for the economy of home (the Greeks understood it as οικονομία) has.
Say what you will of this observation but mobility and physical fitness limited the Boston Strangler’s victims to individual homicides — i.e. the Strangler at least had a work ethic and didn’t outsource the deed to Smith and Wesson. I can almost hear the old-timers at the barber shop now; “back in my day if we wanted to kill someone we’d do it the old-fashioned way.” You might imagine him talking about walking 8 miles to the murder site, in the snow, uphill both ways. But still, the octogenarian has a point doesn’t he? In the world of our killer, V. L. Flanagan, walking uphill 8 miles was having to hit caps lock on his social media input device and type “WHY I DID IT.” Oh, the outrage of a “Like” counter!
This is the point I alluded to about the supremacy of order, superintended by the supernatural Grace of God. The only “Like” that matters is the one that will register in what St. John called The Book of Life. Imagine the media outrage when that is opened for public inspection. But there is no time to contemplate such things in modern ‘Muricah, God’s outrage be damned.
As a matter of fact, the last time our media sophists obsessed over the outrage of an old-fashioned killing was when the NYPD strangled Eric Garner to death. You could hear this outrage in some sophists voices as they shrieked of the injustice of Garner being killed by an officer “with his bare hands!” This is what Chris Cuomo of CNN fame calls “excessive force,” which is a staple of the newscast that bears his name and I have characterized as an “excessive farce.”
While we heard demands to get the root causes of the police version of “excessive force” we’ve heard nothing of getting to the ultimate causes of do it yourself, mass murder: among these, the murderers do not see the beauty of God in each created human being; instead they see what the Cuomos of the world have helped program them to see: race, gender (if one is currently selected), social status and Tinder “swipe” potential.
To this end there is the fifth century story of St Alexius of Rome who was born to a noble family of great wealth and then married to a woman of similar means and dowry. On his wedding night Alexius told his bride he could not accept the opulent life planned for him, that it would corrupt his soul and thus he gave his wife their wedding ring and left for Syria. After 17 years of living as what we would call a bum’s life, Alexius returned to his father in tattered clothes, unshaven and emaciated. His father did not recognize him but saw a kindness and beauty in this vagrant and allowed him to stay in the closet beneath the staircase leading to his home.
There, for 17 years Alexius stayed, only venturing out for daily Mass and to teach the local children, who came to love him, about the gospels. At his death, miraculously, the bells of St. Peters Basilica began to toll and a loud voice could be heard echoing throughout Rome. “Seek the man of God, that he may pray for Rome.” Tradition says he was found in the cubbyhole where he lived, with a scroll placed on his tunic that revealed his true identity. The servants of Alexius’ father had beaten, mocked and denied him company, seeing only what Roman society judged as wretched.
How many more lazy, heretical, mass murders will Westerners endure before turing their feigned outrage to the all too real source? How many more poor, doomed souls will killers look at, seeing only the atomized and balkanized septic tank we call a culture, so exploited then discarded by the media Cuomos of our day, instead of seeing the beauty that is their unique human souls? Even if they look like the beggar St. Alexius?