The Devil's Pleasure Palace (13 page)

T
he assault on the citadels of Western culture had many fronts, but foremost among them was sex—the most powerful engine in human existence, the one that brings us closest to the Godhead, a force of such overwhelming power that it can change the courses of our lives, bringing death or transcendence in its wake. Children are its primary issue, but also transformative insight, bravery, courage, altruism, self-sacrifice; great works of art are born from the union, lives sacrificed and won, everything ventured, worlds gained.

So no wonder the relationship between the sexes and the hard-won morality attending such congress was one of the focal points of the attack by the Frankfurt School and their fellow travelers in politics, academe, and the media. The “transgressive” assault on Western culture had to start somewhere, and it started with the idea of the nuclear family.

The first step was to mock it (in the 1960s and '70s, the idealized “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” worlds of the pre-hippie era came in for particular scorn), then to accuse it of various crimes against humanity (particularly the newfound charge of “patriarchy”), then to illustrate that there were “really” other sorts of families, just as good, just as loving, just as valid at the traditional two-parent, opposite-sex nest. Finally, the nuclear family was simply dispensed with altogether, as behavior considered acceptable in the underclass, where sexual license
had always just barely been suppressed, percolated into the higher culture. The morals of those with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a dysfunctional social-welfare system bubbled upward from the black and white underclasses into the middle classes, who had been induced to feel guilty on behalf of the “underprivileged.” And those considered “marginal” or “disadvantaged” no longer bore any responsibility for their destructive personal choices and behavior. It is no accident that the new social acceptance of out-of-wedlock pregnancies coincided with the rise of both bastardy and the abortion culture, the growing demand for contraception, and, later on, gay rights. Once Pandora's Box was opened, all sort of things flew out, some of them at first seemingly contradictory, but all related by the very fact of their confinement in the box. The box had stayed closed for a reason, but under pressure from Critical Theory, it had to be opened.

Many have observed, the historian Arnold Toynbee prominently among them, that society begins to crumble when the morals of the underclass become mainstream. Toynbee noted that when self-expression begins to substitute for disciplined creativity, civilization has a problem. Critical Theory's obsessive compulsion with its genitals is not the sign of a mature culture but a childish one. Discussing the chapter “Schism in the Soul” from Toynbee's
Study of History
, Charles Murray wrote in the
Wall Street Journal
, in 2001:

He observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites—Toynbee's “dominant minority”—begin to imitate those at the bottom of society. His argument goes like this:

The growth phase of a civilization is led by a creative minority with a strong, self-confident sense of style, virtue, and purpose. The uncreative majority follows along through mimesis, “a mechanical and superficial imitation of the great and inspired originals.” In a disintegrating civilization, the creative minority has degenerated into elites that are no longer confident, no longer setting the example. Among other reactions are a “lapse into truancy” (a rejection, in effect, of the obligations of citizenship), and a “surrender to a sense of promiscuity” (vulgarizations of manners, the arts, and language) that “are apt to appear first in the ranks of the proletariat and to spread from there to the ranks of the dominant
minority, which usually succumbs to the sickness of “proletarianization.” That sounds very much like what has been happening in the U.S. Truancy and promiscuity, in Toynbee's sense, are not new in America. But until a few decades ago they were publicly despised and largely confined to the bottom layer of Toynbee's proletariat—the group we used to call “low-class” or “trash,” and which we now call the underclass. Today, those behaviors have been transmuted into a code that the elites sometimes imitate, sometimes placate, and fear to challenge. Meanwhile, they no longer have a code of their own in which they have confidence.

In his 1964 opera
Der junge Lord
, the German composer Hans Werner Henze parodied—in this context, “aped” is apposite—precisely this phenomenon. A wealthy, eccentric English nobleman arrives in a small German town with an entourage of slaves and wild animals and succeeds in passing off an ape as his nephew, “Lord Barrett,” whose simian behavior charms the impressionable townsfolk until his costume falls apart and everyone can see him for the glorified chimp that he is. (Interestingly, Henze was a committed Communist, although “limousine liberal” or “champagne Socialist” might be a more apt description of him. Having fled Germany—West Germany, not Nazi Germany—for its perceived conservatism and intolerance of homosexuality, he lived la dolce vita in Italy.)

In the end, however, the sexual behavior of ancient cultures (the Greeks) or other primates (bonobo chimps) is not relevant to the problems we face today. No culture until ours has so willingly abjured procreation, so enthusiastically practiced abortion, so demonized (an apt word) those who demurred, and so refused to understand the demographic “consequences of no consequences.” If procreation is only an afterthought or an optional lifestyle choice, our Ponzi-schemed social-welfare programs, such as Social Security, which depends on future generations to make it function, will collapse. Indeed, we could be looking at the demolition of the entire “social safety net”—though one would think radicals would want to save this, if we are to believe them when they express grave concern for humanity.

“Who will save us from Western culture?” The good news for the Left is that they have been saved—by Western culture itself, which succored them in the breasts of academe and nurtured them in what the
late Andrew Breitbart memorably described as the “Democrat-Media Complex.” This is the tight, rotating network of college gigs, media jobs, and government “service” that rewards intellectual conformity to the leftist narrative, even as many of its adherents live their private lives according to conservative principles, raising small nuclear families within the two-parent structure and ensuring their children's safety by living in economically segregated, sometimes gated, communities.

Meanwhile, beyond the borders of Potomac, Maryland, Bel Air in Los Angeles, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the citizenry is subject to whatever laws its betters choose to make—and the more the laws, the better, so that, in the words of Harvey Silverglate, just about everyone unknowingly commits “three felonies a day” (the title of his 2009 book) while simply going about his daily business. And to prevent future generations from rising up against what they must eventually perceive as tyranny, anti-procreationists and abortion “providers” are busily erasing the next generation in the name of “women's rights.” Few cultures, if any, have been as gleefully self-righteous about the moral righteousness, the transcendence, of their suicide as the West.

Thus, like Rosemary's baby in the iconic movie of that title, the culture of death was born in a country that had formerly welcomed babies and children. Up until the 1960s and '70s, and prior to
Roe v. Wade
, American culture had prized babies as a necessity in a muscular, growing, culturally confident republic. Fittingly, in Roman Polanski's 1968 horror film, Death, in the form of Rosemary's baby, arrived in the intellectual precincts of the nation's greatest city, New York. In order to make its anti-life, anti-procreation argument work, the Marxist squid had to exude great quantities of ink—most of which landed on the pages of the house organ of Leftism, the
New York Times
—to obscure its true purpose. The Malthusian myth of overpopulation was trotted out once more. Leftists love zero-sum games and “scientific” prophecies of certain doom: “climate change,” “diminishing resources,” “peak oil,” etc. It would be a crime to bring a child into this terrifying world, they warned, and subject him to a shrunken future. Overpopulation was an omnipresent theme of the period. Even the movies got into the act—
Logan's Run, Soylent Green
. The world would soon be crawling with mewling, starving people, and the most merciful thing would be to kill them and maybe even eat them. Thus was the leftist suicide cult born.

It's crucial to remember how quickly this transformation was accomplished. The cultural revolution of the late '60s took place during a period marked by widespread dislocation. The Tet Offensive, LBJ's abdication, Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Bobby Kennedy's murder—all occurred in the first six months of 1968. Still to come that year were the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Chicago riots at the Democratic convention in August, and the launch of Apollo 8. By the mid 1970s, there was no going back. After
Deep Throat
(1972) and
The Devil in Miss Jones
(1973), porn shops and peep shows popped up across the land, Hugh Hefner's “Playboy philosophy” began its cultural ascendancy, and the sexual revolution got well and truly under way.

But what, precisely, was the problem that the Left sought so desperately to fix? What required the destruction of the preexisting system of cultural and social mores? The answer—despite the earlier battering by the Fabian Socialists in 1880s England, by the Bloomsbury Group of Virginia Woolf and her compatriots, by Margaret Sanger's “progressive” eugenics movement of the 1920s—was nothing.

When the businessman/villain Gordon Gekko is asked in the 1987 movie
Wall Street
why he wants to wreck a company that's his takeover target, he irritably replies: “Because it's wreckable, all right?” The hit movie was co-written and directed by another man of the Left, Oliver Stone, and Gekko's remark was meant to illustrate the mean-spirited avariciousness of the “greed is good” Reagan-era businessmen. And yet, looked at another way, it says more about the ethos of the eliminationist Left than it does about the Right's putative avarice.

Even earlier, in
The Wild One
(1953), the glamorous biker-gang leader Johnny Strabler (Marlon Brando) is asked by a local girl, “Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” His reply—“Whaddya got?”—is one of the most famous lines in film history and a perfect encapsulation of the sense that for the nihilist new Romantics, civilization
tout court
was worthless. Significantly, the first complete draft of the script was written by Ben Maddow, who was blacklisted in 1952, taking him off the project as well as stopping his work on the first draft of
High Noon
. Maddow was a Columbia-educated leftist who under the pseudonym David Wolff was a poet of considerable renown in bien-pensant circles. Allen Ginsberg even cited Wolff's “The City” (1940), a sprawling account of urban horror and alienation, as the inspiration for Ginsberg's own, better-known “Howl.”
Like many artists who came of age in the inter-war years, Maddow—and the rest of the herd of independent minds—had come to believe that an apocalyptic broom would need to sweep clean the detritus of the broken world and remake it anew.

The system had to go because it was blocking the Marxist arc of history, that rainbow that would end somewhere, somehow, in a pot of gold in a humble proletarian field. And who better represented “the system” than the modern incarnation of Adam and Eve, a man and a woman, their bodies designed to act reciprocally in the matters of procreation and pleasure, the creatures that God himself had interposed between Heaven and Hell, free to be strong or weak as the mood took them, and thus a perfect target for the satanic impulse, whether literarily or literally?

The family was the first target, but even that was a feint, collateral damage from the principal target: the nature of the sexual relationship itself. And for that, we must once again turn to our evocation of man's primal dark side, Goethe's
Faust
.

When Faust first sees Gretchen (in a magic mirror, having been warmed up by a witch's potion), he is immediately smitten—and just as quickly mocked by the Devil, who remarks: “With this drink, you see Helen of Troy in every woman.” (As it happens, Helen will play a large role in
Faust,
Part Two.) This is how Faust describes Gretchen to Mephistopheles, after first encountering her in person in the street and having had his advances rebuffed:

       
By Heaven, this child is beautiful!

       
I've never seen anything like her.

       
She's so rich in purity and virtue

       
And just a little saucy, too.

       
Her lips red, her cheek fair,

       
'Til the end of days I shan't forget it!

       
The way she cast down her eyes

       
Deeply impressed itself into my heart;

       
How curt she was with me,

       
Now that's pure enchantment!

Faust is thunderstruck, just as Mephisto had predicted he would be. But look at what he reacts to: his opposite, the “other.” Faust is old;
Gretchen is young. Faust has seen everything in the course of his studies; Gretchen is a simple girl, but he has never seen anything like her, nor she him. Faust is stiff and cold; Gretchen is pert, with a telling hint of sexy mischief in her sparkling eyes. Faust is blunt; but with one shy downward glance, Gretchen binds his heart forever.