Welcome To Monsters
On the March!
The Worst (or best) of humanity on display every day
We hope to be more timely with our updates from now on, and we sure have a crazy, monstrous, new story to comment on, but along with that we are going to keep going with our review of the history of monstrousness. I would point out that generally as we have been dealing with it, monster seems to have something very particularly to do with murderer. And while that is probably not wrong—Frankenstein's monster after all demonstrates his hopelessly monstrous nature when he kills a little girl—we certainly will keep our mind and options open for other means to anoint monsters.
Anyway, with that explained! let us move on to:
The Second Monster in History
Lamech the Swaggering Boy-killer
We began our exploration of the world’s monsters with a fellow named Cain. You have probably heard of him, even if you have not read the Bible, and anyway, you can read about him in our article on Cain the Sulky Murderer.
The second murderer turns out to be Cain's great-great-great-grandson, Lamech son of Methusael, which tells us murder and monstrousness was certainly something the Cain family handed down like a cleft chin or a cheery disposition. Now, nobody really thinks that murder went missing for three generations before Lamech. It's just that nobody did it sufficiently different or better than Cain to rate a mention in the Bible.
Anyway, Lamech was an even more prolific murderer than Cain; and yet, as we noted in the Cain article, because Lamech was #2, and even though he does get mentioned in the Bible, nobody knows his name. Poor fellow.
Lamech’s story is told in a brief fragment of verse, in Genesis 4:23-24. One day, Lamech tells his two wives (sweet!—or an endless nightmare), Adah and Zillah, to shut up and pay attention because he’s got something very important to tell them—he’s just killed two human beings, including a young boy. Unlike the Cain story, God doesn't get upset about this, and swoop down to interrogate Lamech about his less than sterling behavior. In fact, apparently, Lamech's confession is intended to initimidate and perhaps even excite his wives.
Though he hints the killings were some kind of self defense, he wants the women to understand he’s the kind of guy who will kill you just for bruising him, which he says the boy did to him. In fact, we have no way of knowing if either of Lamech's victims actually provoked him by hurting him physically. They may have simply looked at him wrong, and he killed them. By this point, being ruthless enough to kill unjustly was considered a virtue, something it has continued to be in the Middle East and elsewhere even to this day.
And also, any thoughts of vengeance against Lamech he claims will get some serious payback, because his death, no matter how good an idea killing Lamech might seem to the families of his victims, will be avenged eleven times more than that of Cain, who you might recall had a protection mark and shield from God saying Cain’s death would be avenged sevenfold. So Lamech tells his wives his death will be avenged seventy-seven times, although the Bible doesn’t say God said that, just that Lamech claimed it in his egomaniacal boasting.
The thing is, the Bible makes it pretty clear that monstrousness, and the murder which is one of its chief characteristics, was a basic component of humanity right from the start. Cain’s descendant sought to better his record, and his monstrous mark of distinction, and in fact Lamech’s son is said to have invented metalworking, including of course making those all-so-important metal weapons, that would make being a monster ever so much easier in the ancient and subsequent worlds.
Thus, this story of Lamech’s murders has come to be known as the “Song of the Sword.”
It could just as well be called, the “Song of the Monster.”
Thomas Bowdler—Monstrous Editor
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| Shakespeare, who had a small way with words, was saved from infamy by having his bad words and scenes erased by Thomas Bowdler. |
Well, that didn't take long—i.e. to find a monster who only murdered memories, instead of people. Looking about for a nice filler story to stick down in this space, I came upon monstrous Thomas, reminding me of how it was he who applied his name to the word bowdlerize, which is always an accomplishment in life, or afterward, to have your name be turned into a transitive verb.
Dr. Thomas Bowdler is famous, or infamous if you actually care about artistic integrity, for fixing Shakespeare's plays back in the early 19th century, so that they could be read aloud before women and the other children, without risking the innocents encountering a bad word or unnecessarily bad character.
As Bowdler put it, he provided Shakespeare “in which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.”
Bowdler, who had benefited from his own father editing Shakespeare in just this manner when he was a child, hoped by providing a sanitized, or bowdlerized text, which he called The Family Shakespeare, one would not require a virtuous and skilled editor as the censorial paterfamilias, but could rely on the very best of Shakespeare, with the risqué and otherwise offensive bits snipped away.
Bowdler, who naturally attracted a good bit of derisive criticism, dismissed it, since he felt he had proof of the righteousness of his work, given that his edition of Shakespeare was very popular; and he concluded that his critics were mainly people who “condemn every attempt at removing indecency from Shakespeare.” In fact, the only criticism that Bowdler felt was justified was that which would have aided the erasure from Shakespeare's work of “any improper words which were still be to be found in it.”
In fact Bowdler offered a further defense, pointing out how most plays presented in his day were cleaned up for decency's sake, and he was doing nothing more than making sure the home performance of the Bard's words would be similarly inoffensive. Chiefly though, Bowdler edited Shakespeare with a view that there were certain defects of taste in Shakespeare's time, compelling Shakespeare to add scenes of a “low and ludicrous nature,” which in the enlightened time of Bowdler, could be rectified.
What a monstrous ass! Or asinine monster!
I will simply note that so fondly is Dr. Bowdler remembered, that his online gravesite has had to disable the virtual flowers button, because, as it points out: “it was being continually misused.”
Send Us Your Monstrous Comments, Links, News!
If you know of a good tale of monsters—whether legendary or current events—let us know about it, so we can tell the world. Contact Monsters on the March!
And for cutting-edge commentary on social and political monstrousness of all sorts, be sure to check out: The Guillotine.