A Prolegomena of Human Conscience

Abstract

First, Flannery O’Conner’s pet Colonet Eggbert, and then tens of billions of such chickens grotesquely murdered and forced to suffer annually; the tens of millions of benighted Brighty’s; and how many Bambi’s murdered by an impulse synonymous with cowardly insanity by our species each year? A number approaching the unimaginably insane arithmetic of Holocaust victims, over six million; 140–155,000 annually just in the state of Minnesota; a massive killing of the innocents that has been celebrated, even taken for granted, by both Republican and Democratic candidates for the Presidency in early 2016 when the Governor of Maryland chimed in on gun control and said that he had never met a “self-respecting deer hunter who needed an AR15” to kill a deer, as his two Democratic competitors on stage smiled. All three avowed, in so many inferences and concessions, the old American tradition of slaughtering Bambi. The original novel, Bambi—Lebensgeschichte aus Dem Walde, by Felix Salten was composed in the Vienna of the 1920s, in the heart of an artistic renaissance that was a near immediate precursor to the rise of Nazism. Salten, a true ambassador for deer, wrote of Bambi in the same Viennese Woods of the 19th District where Beethoven had composed his Pastoral (6th) Symphony. The same Vienna, and time in history, that nurtured Gustav Mahler, Stefan Zweig, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Elias Canetti, and Theodore Herzl, the latter endeavoring to gain support for a Palestinian homeland for the Jews. The fact that Walt Disney chose, in his 1942 film version of “Bambi”—when the fate of the Jews was already well known—to refrain from showing the actual killing of Bambi’s mother on screen is a story that has been well documented.