The Devil's Pleasure Palace (12 page)

Still, we know the outcome: that in the profoundly and essentially feminist Christian myth, it is Eve who falls, beguiled by the serpent's flattery (in
Paradise Lost,
Adam addresses Eve as “O fairest of Creation, last and best of all God's works”), but it is Mary who confronts the demon and, even in the midst of her confinement, vanquishes him.

Female empowerment is a theme that, despite what modern, anti-female “feminists” claim, long ago entered Western storytelling. At the end of
Fatal Attraction
, it is not the Michael Douglas character who finishes off Glenn Close's psycho stalker but his long-suffering wife, who shoots the monster as she tries to resurrect herself from a near drowning in the bathtub. Countless other stories—harkening back even to
Beowulf
, in which the truly formidable monster is not Grendel, but Grendel's irate mother—feature formidable females, thus giving the lie to one of Critical Theory's most persistent critiques of Western culture, that it demeans women or places them in secondary positions to men.

This brings us to the most pernicious of Critical Theory's unholy offspring, political correctness, a kind of Hell in itself, bringing to mind Satan's plaintive observation in
Paradise Lost
: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.” Political correctness turns our innermost thoughts hellish and bids fair to punish humanity for the crime of free thinking. What could be more satanic?

Let us recall that in Milton, Satan created his daughter, Sin, who sprang directly from him (grotesquely parodying the birth of Athena
from the head of Zeus); then Satan begat his only son, Death, upon the half-woman/half-fish mermaid body of his daughter. But Sin is cursed to eternal childbirth labor (the opposite of sinless Mary's sole, transformative, virgin pregnancy), giving birth to an endless succession of canine-like creatures that hound humanity. Sin is thus almost a parody of contemporary “feminists,” who fantasize about a world without men—who can complain more about men than Sin, constantly impregnated without recourse?—but fail to understand the practical consequences of just such a world.

Political correctness is not simply a pack of Hounds of Tindalos (although it is all of that) but the most brazen assault on Western culture that one can imagine: a ravenous, lupine force that can never be satisfied. In Frank Belknap Long's memorable addition to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, the eponymous Hounds of Tindalos are clearly the offspring of Sin: “ ‘They are lean and athirst!' he shrieked. . . . All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies?” Best described as “foul,” the terrifying, ichor-filled Hounds pursue their victims with unrelenting ferocity across dimensions, space and time. Such vividly described creatures recall Milton's poem and thus fall into the overall ur-Narrative scheme I have been describing: the recurrence (or emergence) of figures from the primal myths of human origins.

The term “political correctness” seems to have originated with Trotsky to describe the early Bolsheviks who were forced to adapt to constantly changing “correct” modes of Soviet political thought, and it was later picked up by Mao, among others. Today it is the Unholy Left's counter-narrative, a fascism of the mind meant to discourage independent thought and encourage lazy sloganeering; in other words, a political tool that has nothing to do with “morality,” “tolerance,” “diversity,” or “the arc of history.” It is simply evil. But to say it is a very great evil is to underestimate it. It goes against liberty in all her forms, which is precisely its object, although it cloaks itself in the folds of another bogus virtue, compassion.

“Without freedom of thought, there can be such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without freedom of speech,” wrote “Cato” (British essayists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon) in 1720. “Whoever would overthrow the liberty of the nation, must begin by
subduing the freedom of speech.” There's a reason that revolutionaries target newspapers and radio stations first.

Subduing the freedom of speech is precisely the goal of the Jacobins of the Unholy Left, who cannot countenance any thought unmoored from policy prescriptions or social goals. Over the past few decades, they have waged a war, at first covert and now overt, on the First Amendment, trammeling it wherever they can: in campus “speech codes,” for example, or in social ostracism should a hapless renegade wander off the reservation and accidentally speak his mind.

Political correctness, for all its notoriety, has not received the full scrutiny it deserves, in part because, like everything else the Marxists touch, it wears a
tarnhelm
, a magic helmet—in this case, of kindness, politesse, and sheer righteousness. Busily formulating new lists of what can and cannot be said (lest it offend somebody, somewhere, either now or at some future date), and always in light of the Critical Theory imperative to be perpetually on the attack, political correctness's commissars resemble no one more than Dickens's implacable Madame Defarge in
A Tale of Two Cities
, clicking her knitting needles as heads roll into baskets. Common words, common terms, even the names of venerable sports franchises come under fire as they march ever forward toward the sunny uplands of perfect totalitarian utopia.

All this has sprung from the ordure of Critical Theory, a miasmic gas that chokes the life out of free-ranging rational discourse. When in doubt, PC supplies its adherents with a ready supply of rubrics and bromides, most of which reinforce the central idea that there are some things that simply cannot be said or even thought.

Let us think of political correctness as Ugarte's famous “letters of transit” in
Casablanca,
which cannot be rescinded—or even questioned. The letters are the central McGuffin of the great film—the “buy-in,” as people say in Hollywood, that the audience grants to the filmmakers in order to fully invest itself in the story. Without the letters, there is no story. Ugarte cannot give them to Rick Blaine for safekeeping; Ferrari can't try to buy them from Rick; Rick cannot provide them to Ilsa and Victor Laszlo to ensure their escape; nor can Ilsa and Victor escape at all. Everyone accepts them uncritically, even the Nazis, despite the fact that they are signed by General Weygand, a Vichy official, whose order could easily have been countermanded by Major Strasser, the German
officer. (They are not signed by de Gaulle, as is sometimes misheard; Peter Lorre's Hungarian accent confuses things. And, in any case, that would make no sense at all.)

So, in political correctness, the Left has its “letters of transit,” its trump card in the great game it endlessly wages against its enemies. But they are false, counterfeit; no one need pay any attention to them. But by simply declaring whole swatches of argumentation invalid, the Unholy Left seeks to erect a Devil's Pleasure Palace around itself, a world of illusion peopled with fake monsters and hallucinatory apparitions, an anti-fun-house of horrors whose only purpose, directly antithetical to the United States Constitution, is to stifle opposition and debate.

The thinkers most responsible for the rise of political correctness were Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, who were among the first to grasp that while economic Marxism could not work, cultural Marxism could. If instead of seizing the means of the production to (someday) be turned over to the proletariat, they could instead occupy culture, wouldn't the revolution have a far better chance of succeeding? They had been let down by the grubby, unwashed workers of the world, who largely rejected the great gift they had been offered; now they would approach their equals in the intelligentsia, a far more receptive and persuadable audience. As any con man knows, the easiest mark is the one who wants to believe.

Gramsci therefore targeted mass media such as newspapers, magazines, radio, film (à la Hitler and Lenin), and education, in order to—as Brecht famously later suggested—dissolve the people and elect another. For Gramsci, the proletariat was blinded by its Faustian bands of illusion; what it needed was liberation from the Christian West, something the Left had long been itching for. Lukács, a Hungarian-Jewish aristocrat from a prominent banking family named Löwinger, went a step further, believing that the old order had to be eradicated before a new kind of citizen could sprout up.

Lukács dreamed of creating a void in the soul of humanity, in a world that supposedly had been abandoned by God, a collectivist world in which there would be no room for the individual—which is to say an ant farm that would admit of no heroic Siegfrieds or supermen. He wrote of the necessity of an
Aufhebung der Kultur
—an abolition of culture, specifically Judeo-Christian Western culture, although the word “
Aufhebung
” might be better translated in this instance as the “uprooting.”

Writing in 1962, in the preface to his
Theory of the Novel
, and reflecting on his experience of World War I, Lukács underlined his anti-Western sentiments:

My own deeply personal attitude was one of vehement, global and, especially at the beginning, scarcely articulate rejection of the war and especially of enthusiasm for the war. . . . There was also some probability that the West would defeat Germany; if this led to the downfall of the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, I was once again in favour. But then the question arose: Who was to save us from Western civilisation?

Who indeed? One unpleasant answer came quickly enough in the form of Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party, which emerged victorious from its pitched street battles with the other party of the Left, the Communists, and then quickly set about eliminating both Jews and Communists, whom it saw as essentially interchangeable. Hitler had little or no love for Western civilization, which he regarded as an anti-Aryan enterprise spearheaded, sequentially, by the Romans, the Church, and the Jews. He idealized the
Volk
, the German people uncorrupted by the world-manipulating International Jew, exemplified in his eyes by, among others, Lukács and the rest of the Frankfurt School. Still, Lukács lived long enough to have the last laugh. He rode out the war in his beloved Soviet Union and returned to Hungary to help form the postwar Communist government—which, to his death in 1971, he thought could compete with West while maintaining its own socialist terms.

Today, in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, such fantasies seem absurd. To anyone who traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain in the years before its collapse—the sight of the empty shops, the endless lines, the rigid conformity, the blaring loudspeakers summoning the populace to this or that Party occasion highlighted by a long-winded speech from a series of gray functionaries—the idea that anyone would willingly embrace such a soulless hell is laughable. Only those with no experience of Communism admire Communism. Seeking a victory for cultural Marxism in the Warsaw Pact countries, Lukács and his ilk signally failed; having experienced the dictatorship of the proletariat, the suddenly free peoples of
what we used to call the “captive nations” opted for fresh bananas and porn, and were thrilled with the trade.

Why anyone would want to live in the world Lukács and his cohorts envisioned remains an open question. And yet, to an increasing extent, many do. I believe the attraction lies, in part at least, in its very impossibility. The generation that grew up in the United States and Western Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has had a hard time imagining any adverse consequences that might arise from their seemingly noble, benevolent beliefs; they live “within the context of no context,” to borrow the title of a 1980
New Yorker
essay by George W.S. Trow. They are unaware of the consequences of fearing no consequences. In the world of Marxist fantasy, the blind man is king.

Nevertheless, many seem willing to trade liberty for some form of security; and in a bountiful society, there seems no end to the riches that can be squandered in the name of “compassion,” “tolerance,” or “diversity.” It was said of Tammany Hall, the Democratic-gangster political machine that ran New York City for the better part of a century, that it was wise enough never to steal
all
the money flowing into the city's treasury. It left just enough for careful administration so the peasants would never realize they were being fleeced even as the sachems showed up at their weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs.

What saved the Frankfurt School was its transplantation under duress to America. The brutal efficiency of the Nazi regime opened their eyes to the consequences of what they had imagined would have no consequences. Had they proclaimed their destructive anti-American, anti-Western intentions openly—made those the most conspicuous feature of their teachings—they might rightly have been regarded as spies, sappers, and saboteurs, and hanged. But twinned with another Central European intellectual conceit, Freudian analysis (many of whose tenets synchronized happily with
Institut
theory), they appeared to be relatively harmless, nutty-professor refugees with funny foreign accents who were seeking shelter in America, pleading tolerance for lofty ideals. What went unnoticed was that the ideals for which they sought tolerance were themselves anything but tolerant. Indeed, they were fundamentally antithetical to the American ethos and experience. America would not have to descend into Hell; Hell had come to America—disguised, naturally, as Heaven, and now lying in wait for the unwary.

CHAPTER SIX

THE ETERNAL FEMININE