Word: moloch
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...Europe, World War I -- history's first fully mechanized conflict, a production line of death -- had given climactic form to the image of the bad machine, a Moloch bent on destruction and alienation, that had haunted the imagination of artists and writers through the 19th century. No one was going to see the machine as an unqualified good. But America's role in that distant war had been small, its trauma of human loss slight. With industry booming, Americans found it not just easy but almost obligatory to believe in machine- created Utopias. Their country, wrote the photographer Paul Strand...
...Hawksmoor are the evocations of 18th century London street life, with its whores and beggars, its hordes of homeless, its "Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch." In the eerie interplay between the earlier age and our own, Ackroyd has fashioned a fictional architecture that is vivid, provocative and as clever as, well, the devil...
...have adjusted in Ginsberg's favor since 1956, when he disturbed the peace with Howl. It was a poetic tantrum thrown at the Eisenhower years, at an academic system that rejected his rude unconventionality, at an encompassing conspiracy he imagined had driven his mother and his soul mates crazy. "Moloch! Moloch!" he cried. "Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses...
Some, perhaps, do not understand the poem. After a long litany using the name Moloch, a biblical god demanding human sacrifice, to invoke nearly every American banality and evil, two girls turn to ask a man behind them, "What is a Moloch?" Others, perhaps, are reflecting on their own older-but-wiser bemusement about antiwar and anti-Establishment excesses of the 1960s, a decade later than the poem. But Ginsberg's humor is intentional. His contemplative, rounded voice has tightened into singsong waggery...
Milton Viorst knew King, he knew some of the heroes, talked with them, held hands with them, wrote a book about them. But Milton Viorst's a liberal, and there is one thing he never shared with them--he never confronted Moloch...