"THE LAMB OF GOD"
01/28/00

This self-portrait is entitled "The Lamb of God." Some may find this picture to be a violent endorsement of guns or a suggestion of negativity. I pity those that do, for they have a cracked ugly mirror to look into everyday, and the ashes of burned books on their hands. This is you, this is MARILYN MANSON and this is the youth of America.

What you see is an image of EVOLUTION. In my hands I hold justice. Creation and destruction, god and Satan, the animal and the machine. We are trapped in a guilty sin and repent cycle. We must realize with no doubt that you cannot create without destroying. We cannot deny our true nature of violence, the law of evolution. Even cells destroy one another. A lion isn't "evil" because she kills to feed her young. She is what your god made her.

Can I make a pencil without cutting down and mutilating a beautiful apple tree? Can I build a guitar or carve a spear, or use that wood to make this rifle my father took from a Viet Cong soldier in a pretend war? That "innocent" tree, alone in Paradise becomes the cross you hung Christ on. The Holy Wood. Its branch was Oswald's weapon to slay the king of Camelot and the timber to build a church for you to sell all those poison apples and fear to your children.

Then hanging in the balance is the lamb. Is it life or death? I think the lamb is me, it's the son of a god that had forsaken him. It is JFK and it is your United States of Exploitation. It is your martyred dollar bills that we use as tissues to wipe away our theatrical tears. This is a place where you kill a horse to feed your babies bubble gum. We raise them to aspire to be just like Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther, JFK, John Lennon and Marilyn Monroe…dead.

American culture is drunk on the blood of its children.

But shouldn't we all just hold hands and kiss? It's certainly the G-rated thing to do. In my opinion, peace and unity is tired rhetoric and naive idealism. Harmony is absurd and a monkey wrench in a wheel of evolution we did not create. However, mankind's inborn need to destroy, compete and fight one another CAN be solved in more powerful ways. The mind is the greatest bomb.

We must wage a war of knowledge, a war of art and a war of economics. Maybe this can satisfy the "evil" we are born to dispense to each other. It's time to stand upright and stop living like apes. This is in our hands.

In Genesis god told Noah, "The end of all flesh is come before me for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold, I will destroy them with the earth."

Mankind needs a god but god does not need mankind.

MARILYN MANSON THE THIRD AND FINAL BEAST