The Devil's Pleasure Palace (29 page)

Certainly, Satan requires love as much as God does and is wounded when he doesn't get it. His brave bluster at the beginning of
Paradise Lost
—“better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”—is the boast of a loser. He is up and out of the Lake of Fire and through the Gates of Hell, pronto, ready to begin his long guerilla war against man and God. Here he is in Book Four, surly and petulant and brimming with false confidence as he confronts his former friend, now foe, the Archangel Gabriel:

       
Gabriel, thou hadst in Heav'n the esteem of wise,

       
And such I held thee; but this question asked

       
Puts me in doubt. Lives there who loves his pain?

       
Who would not, finding way, break loose from Hell,

       
Though thither doomed? Thou wouldst thyself, no doubt,

       
And boldly venture to whatever place

       
Farthest from pain, where thou might'st hope to change

       
Torment with ease, and soonest recompense

       
Dole with delight, which in this place I sought

       
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

       
. . . Let him surer bar

       
His Iron Gates, if he intends our stay

       
In that dark durance . . .

Call it what you will—the Devil's Pleasure Palace, Xanadu, the Venusberg, the land of the Sirens, the Ministry of Love, his own kingdom—Satan's residence is an unhappy place, and he would gladly trade it for ours. For as much pleasure as it gives him to torment us, in the end there can be no happy ending for him; like the rest of us, he is just a pawn in God's hands, except that his free will, unlike ours, is just another illusion. Even the Devil fails to “see how the Devil may joke.”

One of the most contemptible of human beings is the man who constantly tries to fool you and trick you and cheat you out of what is rightfully yours. The mountebank is justly scorned by society, shunned
and avoided whenever possible, jailed when not. The members of the Frankfurt School expended a great deal of squid ink in the defense of the indefensible—they were, proudly, cultural seditionists, operating in the no-man's-land between culture and law, advocating destruction and anarchy without ever quite calling for it. Yipping dogs in the manger, they chased the cars of the American caravan. Now that they've caught them, what?

“Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination,” wrote Marcuse in
One-Dimensional Man
. “The people recognize themselves in their commodities; they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi-set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism which ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs which it has produced.”

This was published in 1964, in a decade that started, culturally, after the death of John F. Kennedy. This was a time when Marcuse's rhetoric might—might—have sounded plausible to the Baby Boomers (my generation) who had grown up in the security of the Eisenhower administration, only to be rudely thrust into the Age of Anxiety: nearly three years of the Kennedy administration's brinksmanship, including the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Berlin situation, the Vienna summit with Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. We learned to duck and cover, and images of nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll were a regular feature of our classroom instruction. The center, which had once seemed so secure, was falling apart.

But look more closely as Marcuse's argument and you can see immediately how simplistic and flawed it is. For one thing, it could only have been written by a resentful foreigner—worse, a German. German notions—especially postwar German notions—of creature comforts were, shall we say, severely restricted. Having been bombed back to the Stone Age by the Russians, the British, and the Americans, and being congenitally suspicious of urban environments in general, German Communists such as the Frankfurt School adherents hated and resented both American hegemony and American technology, which they viewed as soulless and vulgar. They could not make allowances for the bias of their own background: that the people, whom they theoretically championed, actually liked their cars and gadgets and homes; that
Americans, living in a country vastly larger than Germany, did not want to be confined to streetcars and trains, hemmed into small apartments in confined cities, and forced to live under the mentality of both wartime and postwar shortages. For them, philosophically, it was turtles all the way down—they had no understanding of the assumptions on which they grounded their theories.

Further, there's no lecturer like a German—one of their least endearing national characteristics. To live in Germany is to be subjected to near-constant, unsolicited hectoring about the state of the world, including the environment (
die Umwelt
), politics, America's cultural hegemony, and why crossing against the stoplight should be punishable by death. Within all the Frankfurt School writings swirls an arrogant incomprehension of the American world, a resentment at having been forced to engage with it, and a passionate wish to be free of it, once and for all. Ingrates indeed.

Marcuse found easy prey on these shores. Many of his comrades returned home to Germany after the American Army had done their wet work for them, but Marcuse stayed, gleefully voiding poison into the American intellectual water supply. In 1972's
Counterrevolution and Revolt
, he wrote:

At the highest stage of capitalism, the most necessary revolution appears as the most unlikely one. Most necessary because the established system preserves itself only through the global destruction of resources, of nature, of human life, and the objective conditions
[nice touch of Marxist cant there]
for making an end to it prevail. Those conditions are: a social wealth sufficient to abolish poverty; the technical know-how to develop the available resources systematically
[more “scientific” jargon]
toward this goal; a ruling class
[yet more Marxist boilerplate]
which wastes, arrests, and annihilates the productive forces; the growth of anticapitalist forces in the Third World which reduce the reservoir of exploitation; and a vast working class which, separated from the control of the means of production, confronts a small, parasitic ruling class.

Stipulated: This reads like a parody of every Communist cliché, not only from 1972 but from today. But it's not, and it indicates how successfully the Unholy Left transferred its absurd obsessions into public policy
in our own time. It's insane but extraordinarily potent, in the manner of true madness.

The proper response to this over-intellectualized twaddle is laughter. And therein lies the rub, for laughter—or, better expressed, disbelief that anyone could take this seriously—is what they count on. Surely, no one could take the idea of political correctness seriously, since it runs counter to every strain and fiber of the American character: How dare you tell me what I
can't
say? In its earliest incarnations, the PC code was considered so risible that it was even mocked by the libertarian Left, in the form of Bill Maher's television show,
Politically Incorrect
, and in books hawked at San Francisco's famous Beat bookstore City Lights, such as
Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times
(1994). Here is this book's description, as provided by the publisher:

Before the notion of “political correctness” encroached on the ways people spoke, wrote, and conducted themselves in public and private, some of American's best writers embraced unsafe sex, excessive alcohol, and a good cigar. From the classically libidinous Henry Miller to the hilariously contemporary Fran Lebowitz,
Drinking, Smoking, and Screwing
includes novel excerpts, essays, poems, and short stories in a bawdy and thoroughly entertaining anthology with no warnings—and no apologies.

Ha ha ha. Apologies aplenty now issue from the Left. Like the hapless Chinese and Cambodians in reeducation camps, they fall all over themselves to disavow their former behavior; surrounded by the darkness at noon, they have now seen the light and retroactively understood that their past actions—which were meant in support of the Revolution!—were misguided and probably corrupted by capitalist piggery. They throw themselves on the mercy of the People. “Trigger warnings” must now be posted on college campuses, lest someone stumble unawares across some sort of offense. Repeated consent must be given prior to and also throughout any sexual encounter, preferably in writing. And nobody in Hollywood drinks at lunch any more, much less smokes, which is now illegal, though the product itself, because of its position as a tax-cow, remains, for the moment, legal enough. How quickly the leftist paradigm, like Mephistopheles molting from a poodle into his own diabolical self in
Faust
, shifts shape.

In the Devil's Pleasure Palace, though filled with writhing naked nuns and fleshly temptations of every kind, there is no room for fun. Its pleasures, like those of the Cenobites in the 1987 film
Hellraiser,
lie in the infliction of pain. The flesh that shall be torn is ours. Jesus wept.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

T
he current struggle between Right and Left, like the conflict between occidental civilization and oriental Islam, is in part a battle over terms. The two sides do not speak a common language, nor, as we saw in
Chapter Ten
, do they take the same words to mean the same thing. “Peace” to an Islamic jihadist means the absence or submission of Christians, Jews, and all other infidels. It is, literally, absence of conflict between
Dar al-Islam
and
Dar al-Harb
, between the world of perfect Islamic peace and the world of chaos and war, once the latter has been conquered. Similarly, the modern Left's ideas about “justice” have nothing to do with justice as most Americans traditionally understand it (blind, impartial, procedural) and everything to do with payback (social, economic, results-oriented). Both Muslims and leftists, in the furtherance of their aims, rely on their common enemy's good-natured misunderstanding.

Both, as noted, also proceed from a position of weakness, hoping, judo-like, to flip their stronger opponent by using his strengths against him—another characteristic of satanism, as Satan is always the weaker combatant against God. To take just one political example: In nearly every recent election, the Democrat-Media Complex has insisted, no matter what the electoral results, that what the American people are “really” (there's that word again) saying is that they want the two political parties to “work together.” On the surface, this seems reasonable enough: Who
could object to “bipartisan” cooperation on urgent matters of national urgency? But, like Marcuse's blather on capitalism, nothing about this bromide makes any sense.

I have coined the phrases “the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Government” and “the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party” to describe this phenomenon. But what is “bipartisanship”? “Bipartisanship” is just another word for monochromatic government. Further, “working together,” as currently practiced, means only one thing: that the party of the Right must abandon some of its bedrock principles to “compromise” with the party of the Left for the furtherance of some pet social program—and the only “compromise” will be over details of the program, not the idea itself. Thus the recent battle over national “health care.” In reality, it's a tax increase in the service of a welfare scheme for largely subsidized recipients that benefits only a small fraction of the population at the expense of the many—a classic example of the Marxism dictum “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Phrased like that, it never would have passed even a Democratic Congress; but disguised as “compassion,” “insurance,” and “health care,” it just barely squeaked through by means of manipulation and outright deception, from the presidential level on down.

What earlier generations understood is that there can be no compromise with evil, only its unconditional (if temporary) surrender. The better elements of German society tried repeatedly to negotiate terms of surrender with the Western allies, to no avail. The Americans under President Truman understood that there could be no separate peace with the Bushido fanatics of Imperial Japan; indeed, once the emperor had accepted the terms of surrender of the Potsdam Declaration, there was a brief rebellion by some of his officers, the so-called Ky
j
Incident in mid-August 1945. But mindful of the Allies' promise that Japan would face prompt and utter destruction should it choose otherwise, the Empire of Japan sent its representatives to surrender two weeks later.