The Devil's Pleasure Palace (33 page)

In the early 1960s, a Communist (Trotskyite) front organization in the U.S. called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was supported by a parade of leftists, including the writers Norman Mailer and James Baldwin, and the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Its most notorious member was a New Orleans–born defector to the Soviet Union named Lee Harvey Oswald, who had returned from a short stay in Minsk with his Russian wife.

Who could be against “fair play?” That's un-American! Journalistic convention helped, for it was axiomatic that there must be two sides to every story (whether one was true was a matter of “judgment” and not for the reporter to decide). Living in the Land of No Consequences that was America before the Kennedy assassination, and before the new waves of immigration from non-European countries, most Americans at the time could not conceive that anything essential about the nation could ever be changed; so a little good will toward even the delusional would be tolerated in the name of fair play.

But young men are dangerous, because they are young men. They are soldiers and criminals, inventive artists and moral monsters, capable of astounding heroism and utter brutality. It's no accident that the young men Mephistopheles bewitches in
Faust
in the
Auerbachs Keller
(the second-oldest restaurant in Leipzig) are students, the future leaders of German society, the “intellectuals.” Mephisto, however, does not appeal to their intellectual vanity; rather, he tests them with coarse, bestial pleasures and punishes them with fire for their gullibility.

Lee Oswald, only 24 when he died, was a dangerous young man who changed the course of American history with three shots from a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Shortly before he died, he translated Prince Yeletsky's aria “
Ya vas lyublyu, lyublyu bezmerno
” (“I love you, love
you immeasurably”) from Tchaikovsky's opera
The Queen of Spades
and left it for his Russian wife, Marina, to find:

       
I love you,

       
Love you immeasurably.

       
I cannot imagine life without you.

       
I am ready right now to perform a heroic deed

       
Of unprecedented prowess for your sake.

       
Oh, darling, confide in me!

Not even a leftist like Oswald could deny the power of illusion, or its oft-beneficial effects. Illusion was such a powerful force acting upon him that he got it into his confused mind that a heroic deed had to be done, and shooting the president of the United States would be it. (Many assassins are driven by love, like John Hinckley, who shot President Reagan to impress an actress he had never met.) Illusion is the very stuff of Hollywood—although “Hollywood” itself is an illusion, as anybody who has ever worked there quickly comes to understand. Illusion is part of storytelling, and storytelling, as we have seen, is innate. But illusion is only the surface of storytelling, not its heart. Its heart is Truth.

Note that it was Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who introduced the notion of the uncertainty of Truth. (He, not the Jews, is also the weak man who passively condemns Jesus to death.) If we can argue about what the truth is, then we can argue about anything. That is what the Left has counted on since Rousseau. It is the essence of the Frankfurt School's program. When anything is subject to debate, then everything is; and when that thing is something as essential as Truth, then nothing is sacred.

But that is precisely the point. The sacred verities of Western civilization did not survive the hellish trenches of the First World War. The period 1914–1918 was the time when culture fractured, when the eternal verities that had built a civilization from the Holy Roman Empire to the Edwardian era came apart—over a family squabble among three members of Queen Victoria's extended family. In the end, it was a destructive, internecine war of cousin against cousin, a family tragedy, much like Wagner's
Ring
. Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny.

Nowhere was this family tragedy more vividly illustrated than in
poet Robert von Ranke Graves's memoir of the Great War,
Good-Bye to All That
, written after his return from the trenches and published in 1929. Graves was Anglo-Irish on his father's side and minor German nobility on his mother's; nevertheless, like the cream of young British men, he went to war against his Hun cousins willingly, enlisting in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and seeing action at the Somme, where he was badly wounded.

World War I has not received the attention it deserves in American popular culture. This is partly because the war was very controversial among Americans on the home front: At the time of the war, the largest ethnic minority in America was German (as it continues to be, depending on how one counts the peoples of the British Isles), and the sudden possibility that the nation's largest “minority” could be seditious had a profound effect on Wilsonian America. Fear of Germans led to such oddities as “Liberty cabbage” and “French toast,” the new names for sauerkraut and what had hitherto been “German toast.” A more serious consequence was Prohibition, the revenge of Protestant America on the more recently arrived German and Irish Catholics—the “drinking class” of Oscar Wilde's famous aphorism—and their Jewish liquor-selling enablers. Whereas World War II offers a handy program of Nazi and Japanese villains and British and American heroes, World War I has murky, familial, Wagnerian, even biblical origins: Who, exactly, begat whom? And who forced himself on whom?

Graves understandably reacted to the disillusioning horrors of the Great War, with its unholy, useless carnage—the Devil's Charnel House disguised as the Pleasure Palace of the Arc of History. There was precious little individual heroism in World War I (for the Americans, it was the Tennessee country boy, Sergeant Alvin York, the conscientious objector turned Medal of Honor winner), just the endless grind of the trenches, random death, pointless charges. (One is also tempted to add, impiously, the great line from the final season of
Blackadder
: “the endless poetry!”) What nobility there was died at the point of fixed bayonets in no-man's-land. But let Graves tell the story:

There had been bayonet fighting in the wood. There was a man of the South Wales Borderers and one of the Lehr regiment who had succeeded in bayoneting each other simultaneously. A survivor of the fighting told me later that he had seen a young soldier of the Fourteenth Royal Welch
bayoneting a German in parade-ground style, automatically exclaiming as he had been taught: “In, out, on guard.” He said that it was the oddest thing he had heard in France.

By the book. And yet that was how you did it in a Dickensian world of how not to do it. To put it in slightly more modern terms, those steps would be: in, up, sideways (to the heart), out. And then watch him die as you get ready to kill the next bastard in line. Unless he killed you first. Someone was always dying for King or Kaiser.

These words sound cruel, and they are. Death is always cruel; inflicting it depends on whether you have the stomach for it. Our enemies today do not flinch at cruelty—they behead little girls—but we do. Americans are not innately cruel; unlike the German forces on the Eastern Front in World War II, we do not send flying squads of mobile killers ahead of our lines to eliminate “undesirables.” We do not, as a matter of national policy, unlike the Russians in World War II or the Muslims today, send troops to rape, loot, and pillage as instruments of the state, to corrupt the blood of the subject peoples and turn their children into us. We do not line up the severed heads of our enemies on the ground for a photo-op.

In other words, we have standards—observed in the breach, perhaps, but standards nonetheless. The history of America, unlike the history of Europe and elsewhere, is in fact one of magnanimity, although coupled with righteous anger when necessary, when attacked, when challenged on moral grounds. Standards, not behavioral impulses, are what set us apart from the chimps, who have only the latter, now matter how much projection and anthropomorphic wishful thinking we might direct their way. Call it happenstance. Or call it the Breath of God, which gave
Ur-Vater
Adam life and brought forth
Ur-Mutter
Eve to make us fully human. So which myth would you rather believe?

But righteous anger is now forbidden as the relic of an earlier time, as if only the anger were at issue, not righteousness. In the world of Critical Theory, there is no righteousness except the angry righteousness of Lucifer; there is no enormity we need address except imaginary outrages. And those outrages are endless. As Ted Kennedy famously said, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die”—the leftist manifesto, in a few phrases.

No more chilling words have been spoken in modern American history. “The cause endures”? What cause? Certainly not the constitutional cause of fidelity to America's founding documents. Speaking in a code he was sure his audience would understand (a “dog whistle”), Kennedy telegraphed to his convention-center audience in New York City in 1980 that the Unholy Left was not about to give up, that
la Causa
—as the Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War so proudly proclaimed in the run-up to World War II—would go on until the Manichaean conflict was at last resolved. It was a war cry that few on the Right heard, drowned out by the crushing defeat Reagan inflicted on Jimmy Carter shortly thereafter.

It is time to say good-bye to all that, to the philosophical detritus of post–World War II America, to the second Age of Anxiety, to being frightened of signs and portents and shadows and dog whistles, to the bands of illusions, to the negation of our entire cultural patrimony. Out of the goodness of its heart, America welcomed vipers into its breast and then raised a second generation of its own snakelets. It embraced Chesterton's heedless fence-cutters, bent on mindless destruction. Eden, just as it did in
Paradise Lost,
gave way to Chaos.

In Milton, Eve's rapture upon tasting the forbidden fruit (“Greedily she engorged without restraint / And knew not eating death”) foreshadows Brünnhilde's call to the Light in Act Three of Wagner's
Siegfried
: “
Heil dir, Sonne! Heil dir, Licht!
” she cries, after the hero has awakened her with a deeply sexual kiss. Wagner surrounded his heroine with magic fire created by Loge, an ally of the gods; God sent Raphael and Gabriel to protect Adam and Eve, a job at which they signally failed. After tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Milton's Eve rhapsodizes:

       
. . . henceforth my early care,

       
Not without song, each morning, and due praise,

       
Shall tend thee, and the fertile burden ease

       
Of they full branches, offered free to all;

       
Till, dieted by thee, I grow mature

       
In knowledge, as the Gods who all things know
.

Brünnhilde's awakening also signals her descent from demi-goddess to human woman; she consummates it by having sex with Siegfried (it's
his first time, too); their knowledge of each other is carnal. Eve's revelation is at first spiritual, but when Adam joins her (because he cannot bear to be without her), their first act is to make love. Sex, in the work of these two great artists, is what makes us fully human.

But sex comes second—in
Paradise Lost
it is the transcendence of the spirit, not the concupiscence of the flesh. What comes first is the violence, the prolonged Battle in Heaven, the various thefts and murders that mark the first half of the
Ring
. The angels and the Germanic gods are a violent bunch, but humanity does not kill until after the expulsion from the Garden. Sex and violence, Eros and Thanatos.

It's no accident, then, that the assault on American culture has come precisely in these two areas: the diminishment of sex (its “liberation”) and the, so to speak, violent War on Violence. For the Left, there is nothing more abhorrent than violence; even the hint of it ought to be actionable. Unless they are the ones doing the attacking, violence is always unacceptable, especially when used against them. Their bodies are their own private, personal temples.

Much as Lukács had hoped, the result of this sex reversal has been to emasculate and feminize males and turn women into ersatz men. With the masculinization of women, unsurprisingly, birthrates have dropped; and the entry of women into the workforce has resulted in, practically, the halving of men's income, since it now takes two incomes to provide a standard of living equivalent to what the middle class enjoyed in the scorned 1950s and '60s—and which generally supported far larger families.

Innovation, once the hallmark of American society, has slowed dramatically except in the areas of medicine and consumer electronics. Personal computers and other devices have changed the way we work, and advances in medical science have prolonged lives and reduced suffering. At the same time, though, infectious diseases thought wiped out generations ago have made a comeback, in part owing to a newly primitive, superstitious fear of vaccines—a fear that Americans for much of the twentieth century would have regarded as insane, since their children had been saved from polio thanks to Jonas Salk.