Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch!

"Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!"

Can anyone guess the source of the quote? Who is this hideous monster, Moloch? And who wrote about him?

Points for trying if you said The Bible. Close, but no cigar.

If, like me, the first thing you thought of was "I Robot, You Jane" (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1), you don't get any points at all.

The winner is: Allen Ginsberg writing Part II of his famous poem, Howl. Yes, you've heard of it. Let me quote the more famous opening of Part I:

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked."

And if all that brings to mind is "I Should Be Allowed To Think" by They Might Be Giants, then you really should read Howl in all its depressing Beat Generation rage.

So, if Ginsberg isn't referring to Buffy or They Might Be Giants, who is this Moloch he's talking about?

Ginsberg's reference to Moloch no doubt comes from The Bible. Moloch had his origins as an old tribal god, whose various names float around the letters "M," "L," and "K.". Moloch's favorite supper was roasted baby- and the Old Testament does its best to discourage the Sons of Israel from letting Moloch burn and devour their children. As a result of his bad reputation in the Old Testament, Moloch became associated with demonology.

So what is Moloch doing stalking the streets of Manhattan in Howl? Well, my husband and wikipedia both agree that Moloch is standing in for American consumerism. I'd agree...but I'd say Moloch the Corrupter runs even deeper than frustration with capitalism.

Human beings have to do a lot of disagreeable things in order to survive. True, the skyscrapers, electricity, and banks mentioned in Ginsberg's poem are particular traits of American consumerism. But what about those armies? Even back in the Old Testament we read about fighting wars. Money is hardly new, and even banks have been around for a good, long while. So, humanity has always been making compromises- killing animals for food, killing other men to defend their families, struggling day-to-day to survive conditions of "filth" and "ugliness."

There's no doubt that the American lifestyle beginning to make itself evident in the 1950's was taking the old Moloch and turning him into a huge, smoking, mass-produced nightmare, so big that he was impossible to ignore. I don't doubt that it was enough to make Ginsberg scream- and he chose to do it in meter.

One last point before we get too hard on the U.S. of the mid 1950's. Let's remember that a certain Englishman by the name of Tolkien was publishing The Lord of the Rings right around the time that Howl was first performed and published. Tolkein's cry for the lost innocence of an unindustrialized civilization in England was rendered far diferently than Ginsberg's howl at American consumerism- but both men were reacting to the same contemporary problems.