The Devil's Pleasure Palace

by Michael Walsh

  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.

  America put a man on the moon in 1969; it cannot do so today. Neither could the Hoover Dam be built, nor, for that matter, the Interstate Highway System. Gulliver is immobile, pegged to the ground. The supersonic jetliner has come and gone, and air travel is noticeably meaner. The first seventy years of the twentieth century took the country from the horse and buggy to the Apollo project. What has been achieved, comparably, since then?

  Innovation is first cousin to its uglier relative, bellicosity. From the warlike impulse comes the “primitive” need for triumph, the desire to impress women in battle, the need to raise strong sons and protect daughters. We once saw child
ren as part of a family’s storehouse of wealth, a protection against old age and an investment in the future of the bloodline and the species, not burdens or biological inconveniences to be terminated on a whim. Today such notions are dismissed with snorts of derision, and for much of the upper middle class—the kind of people who read the lifestyle sections of the New York Times—children are simply ornaments, a “choice,” not a necessity. For the Left of the future, one’s existence depends entirely on the whims of one’s parents. By killing their unborn, they become like gods.

  To change the nature of the sexual relationship—and, latterly, to add new variations to it—and to saltpeter out of the males their natural instinct to fight, which includes their natural instinct to win, to build, to succeed, to create (including artistically), is a prescription for “fundamental transformation,” and not in a good way. Its proponents rely on the natural tendency of the young to see “change” as always good, to view “dissent” as always both moral and correct, and to always root for the rebels against the Empire.

  Thus, as we’ve seen, the Unholy Left, with satanic facility, manipulates language in the furtherance of its aims. Starting with the proposition that “liberal” or “progressive” equals good and “conservative” equals bad, they merrily apply the “conservative” label to their own movements once they go bad. Note, for instance, their dogmatic reluctance to use the full name of the Nazi Party: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The Nazis enthusiastically employed as many heroic images of the Toiling Proletariat—hammers swinging, factory wheels turning, bosomy peasant girls saluting the rising sun—as did the Soviet Communists. But, insists the Left, they had nothing whatsoever to do with each other—beyond their iconography, their anti-capitalism, their philosophical affinity, their political alliance, and their willingness to employ violence in the name of the state.

  The sclerotic bureaucracy of fat old Slavic men in greatcoats and plastic shoes standing atop the Lenin Mausoleum and feebly waving at the military parade on Red Square (an image that personified the end of the Soviet Union) was invariably referred to by the leftist media as “hard-line” or “conservative.” (The missing noun for these free-floating adjectives was “Communists,” but that would spoil the story.) The theocratic mullahs in Iran, who overthrew the secular government of the Shah and today murder women and homosexuals with impunity, are similarly characterized by the media sloths. So is the Taliban, savage cultural vandals with little interest in preserving any vestige of that country’s pre-Islamic past, called “conservative.” And the heirs of Mao in China as well.

  Gramsci and Lukács were right: Better to tunnel under the walls of the American Dream and detonate it from below than try to storm Heaven. This they learned from Satan himself, who failed at the latter task—as did Marx—but succeeded to a limited extent in the former. Despite my Irish-Catholic background, it amuses me to think that, at the Last Judgment, Hell will be liberated of its human souls, no matter what their earthly crimes, and they too shall ascend to Heaven, having done their time. Call it a final flip of the divine bird to Lucifer, the only real criminal in the entire ur-Narrative; after all, why should God concede even a single soul to his only rival, especially after the Son’s Descent into Hell? It would be the manly, not to say the human, thing to do. And what a wow ending to the longest-running tale ever told.

  Still, as Teddy said, the work goes on. (Kennedy’s final, desperate, dying plea to Pope Benedict XVI—“I am writing with deep humility to ask that you pray for me . . . I’ve always tried to be a faithful Catholic”—was perhaps politely shunted to the circular file.) Our task on earth is never complete, it can only be handed off to the next generation; Adam and Eve saw to that, and we owe them a debt of gratitude. Ils ne passeront pas. “They shall not pass,” said the French general, Robert Nivelle, at Verdun, in the closest thing to Hell on Earth mankind has ever experienced. (J.R.R. Tolkien, a veteran of that hell, put a close paraphrase of that declaration in the mouth of his angelic Gandalf, when the wizard forbade the arch-demon Balrog passage across the Bridge of Khazad-Dûm.)

  Facing overwhelming odds at Thermopylae, the Greeks under the Spartan king Leonidas responded to Persian demands that they surrender their weapons with these words for the ages: “Moln labe.” “Come and take them.” Confronting Islamic demands to “submit” to a satanic barbarism masquerading as an “Abrahamic faith,” Roland and other Christian warriors refused. Receiving German demands for surrender at the Battle of Bastogne, General Anthony McAuliffe replied, classically: “Nuts.”

  He could have said something earthier, but “nuts” is plenty earthy enough. “Nuts” means balls, testicles; McAuliffe and his surrounded soldiers at the Bulge fought on as, unknown to them, Patton’s Third Army, spearheaded by the Fourth Armored Division, sped toward its rendezvous with destiny and glory. The root word of “testify” could not have been more appropriate.

  Or politically incorrect. Warriors do not seek to understand the motivations of their enemies or to treat them with “respect.” They kill them, and they keep on killing them until those enemies either are all dead or cannot fight anymore. The progress of modern warfare, whose logic was evident in the firebombing of Germany and Japan, and in the use of atomic weapons to end the war, has cruelly made civilian destruction inevitable. It was the looming threat behind the Cold War, the punch line of Dr. Strangelove, in the discussion of an “acceptable” rate of casualties in a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, should it come to that. “Ten to twenty million killed, tops,” exclaims George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson in Strangelove’s famous War Room scene, “depending on the breaks.”

  Scott’s character was written and played as a bellicose buffoon, a safe depiction in the environment of 1964 America; the reasonable character, by contrast, was meant to be the ineffectual, Adlai Stevensonesque figure of President Merkin Muffley, although the two double entendres in his name made their own commentary on the character’s manliness. Balls were out, pussies were in; and the Vietnam War was about to begin, although we’d never pursue victory fully in earnest. It was the first war deliberately fought first to tie and then to lose. There have been others since.

  As American society became ever more solipsistic and fearful—ever more protective of its nuts, as it were, and thus ever more unmanly and unregenerative—it played directly into the armchair-general mitts of the Frankfurt School philosophers, for whom (in the words of the late Washington Redskins head coach, George Allen) the future was always now. Still, the philosophers fled Europe rather than stay and fight. Only Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the border town of Portbou, Spain, rather than fall into German hands as he tried to escape via Varian Fry’s trans-Pyrenean underground railroad in 1940. Yet even his epitaph reads, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”—a typical Frankfurter sentiment combined with a cheap twist of phrase, one more worthy of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Show than a German intellectual of the Frankfurt School, but there it is.

  Don Quixotes of the mind, their philosophy giving unholy birth to the “sniveling brats” of the contemporary nasty, sneering Left, gibing at both the traditionally masculine and feminine virtues and appurtenances, desperately trying to relegate the ur-Narrative to the realm of secondary myth and legend, to bedtime stories for the gonzo Bonzos of postwar America: Such was the Frankfurt School. Having seized academia, they left a legacy in the cancerous growth of “studies” departments (gender, race, queer, whatever) that infest the modern university at the expense of classical learning. They have turned prominent institutions of what used to be called “higher learning” into reeducation camps of lower learning, populating them with “diversity” commissars and political officers, blunt fists in tweed jackets, sucking taxpayer money to fuel their own employment, forcing the larger population to subsidize their own theory of destruction.

  I have termed this ongoing political war between Left and Right the “Cold Ci
vil War,” except that, until perhaps recently, it is a civil war that only one side understood it was fighting. In this it most closely resembles the declared war of Islam on the West, and the half-hearted, undeclared war that the West is endlessly, purposelessly, fighting against Islam in Mesopotamia and Afghanistan. Wars cannot be won without a clear understanding of what might constitute victory, as both General Gordon and Field Marshal Kitchener would have understood. “There can be only one,” the immortal swordsmen say in Highlander as they go about the grim business of beheading each other. Even a B movie gets that right.

  And so the United States, as the twenty-first century gets fully under way, finds itself in the position of the two combatants in Robert Graves’s vivid Great War image—the two bayoneteers locked in mutual death and rigor mortis, literally transfixed by each other, united eternally in the comradeship of hatred. Only one camp, however, has the additional elements of duty, honor, and country on its side. Only one side defends its women and children. Only one side fights to preserve instead of destroy, to honor instead of mock, to improve instead of tear down—to maintain the fence between civilization and barbarism, and to ask “Why?” instead of “Why not?” That knowledge, hard won, is both ancient and ongoing:

  . . .The angel last replied:—

  “This having learnt, thou hast attained the sum