Breakfast Of Champions

"... and the little kids snickered at Bug like they always did; in truth people were not so nice to Bug, which was why he became a murderer; for in later life he judged people too quickly and usually assigned them evil negative ratings, because most cases were ambiguous and he had been hurt so many times that he did not give ambiguous cases the benefit of the doubt; so he killed them, though of course he had a perfect right to do so since I, Big George, eat a thousand boys for breakfast, and enjoy it, too."

--After Bug is openly humiliated by his parents in front of his classmates for accidentally tipping his sister overboard into the ocean in William T. Vollman's You Bright and Risen Angels

Reading this frank and brutal admission of Big George's immediately called to mind a nexus of thoughts. If the reader recalls that Big George is, in the blackout narrator's view, "pure electrical consciousness," he is inadvertantly linking himself with the force of a sinister demiurge, fallen angel or profane god of Ba'al worshipped woefully by the Israelites in the Bible. Electricity is connected in this novel with the biblical, firebrand image of Moloch the brutal profane god whose cruel worshippers, balefully mesmerized and woebegone, desperately satisfied his voracious murderous appetite by sacrificing their own children.

And they built the high places of the Ba‘al, which are in the valley of Ben-hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire Mo'lech; which I did not command them, nor did it come into my mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jeremiah 32:35)

The image of Moloch - a baleful deity or idol in the Bible - has figured as a significant and damning metaphor in modern literature for countless successive generations of young spirits sacrificed in ignorance - to tyrannical ideas, technology and war. Allen Ginsberg in his poem Howl used Moloch most famously in Part Two in his snarling, bewailing cries against the modern world:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
         their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
         nation?
  Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
         tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
         stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
         weeping in the parks!
  Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
         loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
         judger of men!
  Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
         crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
         sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
         Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
         ned governments!
  Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
         blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
         are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
         bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
         tomb!
  Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
         Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
         streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
         tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
         smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
  Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
         whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
         whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
         whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
         Moloch whose name is the Mind!
  Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
         Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
         Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
  Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
         I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
         who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
         Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
         Light streaming out of the sky!
  Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
         skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
         industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
         houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
  They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
         ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
         Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
         us!