The Devil's Pleasure Palace (30 page)

The lack of American success in subsequent wars—largely wars of choice, not necessity—has been instructive, because there have been no bedrock principles at stake. Korea was and remains a standoff, a failure of ongoing, eternal “diplomacy” that seeks no real end, only a continuance of process. Vietnam was no natural threat to the territories of the
United States, yet we lost 50,000 men there anyway in the service of an Ivy League theory about the “domino effect” of a Communist victory in Southeast Asia. The Cold War was played, by contrast, in deadly earnest, but mostly in the shadows, in the air, and under the seas. It was a Great Game between one side that played chess and another side that played poker; the latter won. Faced with what appeared to be certain economic defeat (entirely attributable to the inherent inadequacy of Marxist economic theory) and unused to the concept of bluffing one's ass off, the Soviets simply turned over their queen and folded.

The Islamic wars since then have also been instructive, in the way of Dickens's Circumlocation Office in
Little Dorrit
: “Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving—how not to do it.” Thus, the now all-but-forgotten first Gulf War, which ended in the expulsion of Iraq's Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, failed to change the balance of power in the Middle East, because the mission was how not to change things. The aftermath of 9/11 saw the quick defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, whence the attacks had been planned, but not the crushing of Saudi Arabia, whence most of the hijackers originated. Instead, the U.S. got bogged down in an ultimately fruitless war in Iraq and a Vietnam-like morass in Afghanistan.

The principles behind these Middle Eastern wars should have been simple: to inflict an Omdurman-like defeat on Islam post-9/11, one from which it would have taken a century or more to recover, if ever. But America's very own Circumlocution Office—otherwise known as the Department of State—intervened. For them, diplomacy is war by other means, which means full employment for the striped-pants set, who can always be counted on to find another reason why not to change things. The only victory came in the Cold War against the Soviets; when asked his strategy for winning the Cold War, Ronald Reagan replied, “We win, they lose.” Patton couldn't have put it better.

But a principle, once hobbled, cannot be freed for a very long while. The Left seizes upon every rollback to demand a newer, fresher accommodation, all in the name of reason and compassion and tolerance and diversity and whatever the new buzzword of the day is. They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Constantly on the attack (as they must be, since they have nothing to defend), they constantly probe for
weakness, for softness; frustrate them here and they will pop up there. Any inch forward is a victory, and tomorrow is another day.

In the face of this constant provocation, the Right has had almost no comeback. Why not? In part because the Left accuses the Right of what it itself, in fact, is either doing or planning to do; to use one of their favorite terms, they “project.” A blank canvas, such as the mind of a young person, is one of their favorite things: everything to learn and nothing to unlearn. Only undermine the innate sense of morality—the ur-Narrative—and you're more than halfway there. Meanwhile, they constantly lob accusations of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia, whatever—the list is endless and constantly refreshed by the outrage of the day. It would be comic were the results not so tragic.

Still, the unwritten rule (enforced by a complicit media) is that no leftist provocation, however actually violent, can be reacted or responded to in kind, whereas any pushback from the Right is regarded as the second coming of Nazism. The Left has a need to feel oppressed, threatened, unloved; leftists are sure that a Christian theocracy is just around the corner, given half a chance, and they are utterly convinced that they can read the thoughts of conservatives and sense what they're planning to do.

As the novelist and journalist Tom Wolfe wrote in
Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine
(1976): “He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Wolfe also quotes the German novelist Günther Grass: “You American intellectuals—you want so desperately to feel besieged and persecuted!”

Descendants of Rousseau, grandchildren of Gramsci and Lukács, children of Marcuse: Like little kids at a horror movie, they live for the imaginary threat, the frisson of danger, secure in the knowledge that nothing really bad is going to happen to them. They want to be the heroes of their own movies, even when they are only the extras in a bad remake of Fellini's
Satyricon
.

But, then, we all want to be heroes—that is the natural lot of man, and the subject of every boy's fantasy—but only one side will admit it, because only one side will admit the existence of heroism as a concept that exists outside literature, poetry, or the movies. It is something of a mystery why some leftist writers and filmmakers spend so much time
denying the existence of heroism and then make a living by creating it, fictionally. Surely they cannot have that much contempt for their audience, because many of them are very, very good at it; their work has the resonance of authenticity, even if it is just fantasy. On some level, they must
believe
it.

Fantasy, however, is what we put on the page and up on the screen—fantasy, yes, but a fantasy that draws upon the deepest longings of the human heart, longings for love, glory, honor, family, friends, posterity. No matter how many times the Unholy Left derides these virtues, they continue to exist; no matter how many times the Left denies them, they pop back up; no matter how many times it tries to kill them, they live on, firing the imaginations of a whole new generation that, absent the sapping of the Critical Theorists, grows up
believing
. If this were not so, Disney would have been out of business decades ago; indeed, at the heart of nearly every Disney fable is the lesson that one must believe, against all external evidence to the contrary, in the rightness of one's chosen path.

Elementals, basics—these are the building blocks of culture, not the other way around. These are the essential themes, the innate beliefs, of everyone, and the Left cannot do away with them; they are too deeply ingrained. And they must come from
somewhere
.

Thus, principles matter. They are foundational, not arbitrary, as Critical Theory would have us believe. The Devil, the lawyer from Hell, may be in the details, but God establishes principles. If you don't believe it, ask any astronomer or scientist, even with his necessarily imperfect understanding of man and the universe, whether he detects an ordered hand or the Call of Cthulhu in the music of the spheres; many reject religion, but few advocate Chaos and Pandemonium. To defend a foundational principle is not arbitrary, it is mandatory.

Thus, no quarter. From the evidence above, it should be clear by now that both sides are Manichaean in their outlook. Neither, at this point, can give an inch, although one side constantly demands it, in the same of “compassion,” “compromise,” “fairness,” “tolerance,” or “Allah,” as the spirit moves them. Details may be negotiated without affecting principles on either side, but details must never be primary. That way lies death by bureaucracy, something that, ironically, helped kill the Soviet Union and that promises to be the death of the United States unless it is pruned back in time. Jesus did not promise that clerks would inherit the earth.

Therefore, there can be no such thing as “progressivism,” the once-and-future label under which society's sappers have chosen to take refuge. Instead, there is only regression to an ugly and sordid future that, satanically, squeezes the humanity out of the human, sometimes literally. As Mary McCarthy said of the American Communist writer Lillian Hellman: “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and' and ‘the.'” (The witticism provoked a $2.5 million libel suit—an Oscar Wilde moment for Hellman, fatally damaging to her overblown reputation.)

Why on earth is the Unholy Left trying to re-create the Garden of Eden, something whose existence they passionately deny, both literally and symbolically? Welcome to the dystopia of numerous futures imperfect—not just
1984
but
Brave New World
,
Fahrenheit 451
,
Atlas Shrugged
, Kurt Vonnegut's “Harrison Bergeron,” et al., not to mention countless motion pictures, among them
Brazil, The Matrix,
and
Dark City.
Futures all too easily imagined and innately feared, like snakes.

This regression is accomplished by death through a thousand details, regulations, and bureaucratic boilerplate, administered by drones whose only function is the administration of process: everything within the Circumlocution Bureau, nothing outside the Circumlocution Bureau, and with a liberal application of molasses to gum up the works just to make sure nothing does work. They care nothing for humanity, and in that they fully partake of the spirit of Mephisto—amoral, callous, deceitful. As Faust shouts when he finally realizes, too late, with Gretchen condemned to death and languishing in prison, the depth of the Devil's depravity:

FAUST

Dog! Abominable monster! Transform him, oh Infinite Spirit! Transform this reptile again into his dog-shape, as he often pleased nightly, trotting up before me, growling at the feet of the harmless wand'rer, and hanging upon his shoulders when he fell. Change him back into his favorite shape, that he may crawl upon his belly in the sand before me, that I might trample him, the cast-out, under foot!

MEPHISTOPHELES

Now we are already again at the end of our joke, where the mind goes mad for you humans. Why did you make this common cause with us if you can't
see it through? You want to fly, but are unsure because you're dizzy? Did we force ourselves upon you, or you upon us?

Scales fall hard, even those of serpents, but they do fall.

Is this the future we want for our children, should we choose to have any? Is this the present we want for ourselves? Best to reject not only the Left's prescriptions for a “better”—a fundamentally transformed—America, but the very terms of their argument. Up is down. Black is white. Freedom is slavery. War is peace. And ignorance is what they count on. Nothing is what it seems at the Devil's Pleasure Palace, especially the pleasure.

“Did we force ourselves upon you, or you upon us?” What a question.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

OIKOPHOBES AND XENOPHILES

I
n his first homily as pope, Francis invoked the saying of Léon Bloy: “Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil.” Then he got even blunter: “When we do not profess Jesus Christ, we profess the worldliness of the devil, a demonic worldliness.” The first Jesuit pope was proclaiming his profound disinterest in the political divisions of our day in order to concentrate on the essential dichotomy of human existence in a world that either does or does not believe in God.

Can one believe in nothing, as some atheists would have it? As G.K. Chesterton apparently never quite said (the aphorism seems derived from several different writings, including his
Father Brown
stories): “The man who no longer believes in God does not believe in nothing; rather, he will believe in anything.” The Satan of
Paradise Lost
very much does believe in something: the necessity of revenge, a desire so great it overcomes even his lust for Eve's perfect female body. Like the flames of Hell, it consumes him without killing him; it literally fires him to effect his vast plot against mankind. Much of today's Unholy Left seems motivated by the same emotion: revenge on the country that gave them either birth or shelter. They are at once oikophobes (fearing their home)
and xenophiles (loving what is foreign)—particularly untrustworthy specimens of humanity.

The Left's is not a classic Third World revenge, best expressed by Inigo Montoya in
The Princess Bride
: “You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Instead, it seeks a larger, dare one say, “comprehensive” target: a revenge on a society that remains distressingly what it is and that adamantly refuses to become what, by their lights, it
should
be. At root, their beef is not with Man but with God; even if they refuse to admit he exists, they still want to fight him anyway.

As refugees both luxuriating in and resenting their outsider status, the wise men of the Frankfurt School were infuriated by the non-state control of Hollywood and the national and local media they encountered in New York, New Jersey, and California. They scorned what they dubbed the “culture industry” and seethed with contemptuous rage against a land that cared very little for what they thought. Except of course for academia.

Most of today's “vilenesses various” (in J.P. Donleavy's phrase from
The Unexpurgated Code
) derive from this deep-seated resentment. P.J. O'Rourke's famous characterization of the Left—“a philosophy of sniveling brats”—is spot-on. As Mephistopheles observes in Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus
: “
Solamen miseris, socios habuisse doloris
.” (“It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.”) For those of us who came of age during the tumultuous 1960s, who saw said sniveling brats trade in their knee pants for the tie-dyed jeans and ponchos of Woodstock, for those of us who never joined them in their posturing anarchy and supererogatory celebrations of self, the Left has been a continuing mystery, perhaps most especially in its remarkable success at making a parasitic living from a society its claims to despise. Like the bank robber Willie Sutton, modern leftists went where the money was: at Gramsci's behest, into academia; prompted by Adorno's ire, into the “culture industry”; and at Marx's insistence, into the machinery of the state.