The Devil's Pleasure Palace (26 page)

“Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

“No, no!” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”

“Stuff and nonsense!” said Alice loudly. “The idea of having the sentence first!”

“Hold your tongue!” said the Queen, turning purple.

“I won't!” said Alice.

“Off with her head!” the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.

What once was satire is now conventional wisdom, as is the Queen's choleric reaction to Alice's impudence. The stifling of debate and the outlawing of basic concepts of right and wrong, of social propriety, is the purpose of political correctness; and dissent, once the highest form of patriotism, is no longer to be tolerated. Like “tolerance,” “dissent” was only a virtue when it was useful to the Left.

Let us examine that phrase, “the highest form of patriotism.” Dissent doesn't mean demurral, even passionate objection. Here, it means a fundamental, radical, irreconcilable objection to all time-honored verities, which is then followed by a frontal assault: Critical Theory in action.
Tolerance, as we have seen from Marcuse's redefinition of it as “repressive tolerance,” means
intolerance
. One suspects, for example, that “diversity” will no longer be deemed necessary once the white man has been knocked off his perch of “privilege” and effectively disinherited from his own cultural patrimony. Only “non-white” whites, the champions of the “diverse” masses, will be allowed to have power; and they will be selected by a nakedly political criterion, much like that the Viennese mayor Karl Lueger expressed when asked to justify his friendship with many Jews despite the anti-Semitic ideology he peddled for votes: “
Wer a Jud ist, bestimm' i.
” (“I decide who is a Jew.”) At the real Ministry of Truth under the next Progressive regime, the words carved into the façade will read:
DISSENT—TOLERANCE—DIVERSITY
.

As for “the highest form of patriotism,” all that ever meant was that the Left did not wish to have its patriotism questioned while it was busily going about the process of undermining the existing order (in order to create a better one, of course). Not only was its patriotism questionable, it was nonexistent. The patriotism the '60s radicals praised was not the patriotism of the past (now dismissed as “jingoism”) but the patriotism of the America of the Future, the new State that would come into being once the old one had been destroyed and replaced with the Brave New World they were cooking up in poly-sci test tubes on campuses across the country.

Any leftist will tell you, usually indirectly as he may not admit it to himself, that he does not admire the world as it is but esteems the world as he wishes it to be. That few agree with leftists when this proposition is so bluntly stated simply means they must conceal it for the time being, until it can be forced on an unwilling but sullen public. They see themselves as inheritors of a noble tradition, perhaps best summed up by the composer Gustav Mahler when he declared, “My time will yet come.” They look to the judgment of posterity, not history. The very fact of being
against
something—it doesn't much matter what—contributes to their sense of moral superiority, without which they are nothing.

This last is crucial to the understanding of the Unholy Left: that they consider themselves, like the Puritans they otherwise execrate, the party of the Elect, the Blessed. Likewise, they consider resistant conservatives—those who like things more or less they way they are, who trust the judgments of their ancestors and honor their wisdom and experience—to be
the Damned who must be brought into the Light—that is to say, into the Darkness. (The resemblance to Mozart's Queen of the Night is obvious.)

The problem with their ideology, however, is that, after a few victories (the civil rights movement, for example, although even that was fiercely opposed by many of their fellow Democrats), it has nowhere to go. Once the perceived wrongs are righted, the revolution turns on itself, aiming its scorpion's tail at ever-smaller targets and stinging them ever more viciously until it is thrashing at phantoms. A good example is the strange obsession with “white privilege” (racism always lurks just beneath the surface of the leftist project; it is their eternal bugbear) and the terrible whiteness of being, which has now pushed past slavery as America's Original Sin. Overly fond of conspiracy theories as they are, “white privilege” affords the Unholy Left its best conspiracy yet, a conspiracy so vast that it took the combined efforts of multiple European countries to sail the Atlantic, discover America for themselves, found colonies, and populate the New World, all in an effort to deny People of Color what should have rightfully been theirs, had they only been able to cross the Atlantic from Africa or Asia and get there first. The United States, in other words, was not founded, somewhat haphazardly, in an attempt to flee the religious and economic strictures of the then-developed world, Europe (we can blame the Enlightenment for those strictures), but to deliberately offend “indigenous peoples” by effectively creating a political entity without them. Never mind that there were few People of Color in Europe at the time, and that the context in which the Voyages of Discovery were made was purely “white.” It must have been a plot. Or at least unfair, for daring to assume European technological “superiority.”

The following sentiment is, alas, typical: “I am as white as white gets in this country.” So wrote Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas, in the
Baltimore Sun
in 1998. The confession continues:

I am of northern European heritage, and I was raised in North Dakota, one of the whitest states in the country. I grew up in a virtually all-white world surrounded by racism, both personal and institutional. Because I didn't live near a reservation, I didn't even have exposure to the state's only numerically significant population, American Indians.

I have struggled to resist that racist training and the ongoing racism of my culture. I like to think I have changed, even though I routinely trip over the lingering effects of that internalized racism and the institutional racism around me. But no matter how much I “fix” myself, one thing never changes—I walk through the world with white privilege. There is not space here to list all the ways in which white privilege plays out, but it is clear that I will carry this privilege with me until the day white supremacy is erased from this society.

Substitute “sin” for the various racial buzzwords, and it's clear that what Jensen is after is redemption. He's giving testimony in a tent revival of that New Time Religion, Progressivism.

One thing the Left has on its side in its war on American “whiteness” is demographics. At some point around midcentury, whites (however defined, as the Left uses a conveniently sliding scale) will decline to less than half the total population, and the U.S. will be a minority-majority country; Ted Kennedy's Immigration Act of 1965 has seen to that. (When I was a boy growing up in San Diego, near the Mexican border, exactly nobody considered Mexicans “non-whites,” and the words “Latino” and “Hispanic” were hardly ever heard. Mexicans were, well, Mexicans, distinguished not by the color of their skin, but by the fact that they spoke Spanish and came from Mexico, that foreign country twenty miles to the south.)

Between the last great waves of European immigration in the first two decades of the twentieth century and 1965, the nation took a long pause, absorbing the often fractious Irish, Italians, and Jews and smelting them into Americans. It wasn't easy. For many Americans of the period, the newcomers were little more than criminals fleeing misery. (The Marxist historian Noel Ignatiev, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, even wrote a book on the often painful transformative process,
How the Irish Became White
.) It took decades or longer. In the case of the Catholic Famine Irish, it was a full century before they were accepted so fully into American society that one of them, John F. Kennedy, was elected president. That he came from the criminal family of Joseph P. Kennedy was politely ignored, especially by the Irish themselves. Not until some years after JFK's election did the Irish begin to vote as anything other than a monolithic, alienated, immigrant bloc.

No such caesura has yet occurred with the new waves of immigration from Latin America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and East Asia—and this is by design. The Democrats, now almost explicitly the “anti-American” party (meaning “American” as the term was formerly understood), need to keep immigrants balkanized, dependent, and voting the straight Democratic ticket for as long as possible, alienated not from the lock-jawed, shrimp-forked WASP bogeyman of old but from the new global Devil, the White Man. “White privilege” is today's Original Sin, a meme gleefully transmitted by the Left's housebroken, pet media outlets. (The murderer is
one of us!
But crucially, not
us
-us. Them-us. White-boy us.) The meme will last just as long as its usefulness as a cudgel does, and not one second longer. Besides, who among us—with the example of the Soviet
nomenklatura
fresh in our minds—supposes that some sort of “white privilege” won't survive even “fundamental transformation?” The transformation is intended for the voting public, not the leftist ruling class. They'll just dub themselves non-white.
Wer a Jud' ist, bestimm' i'
and all that.

The key to understanding political correctness is its constant redefinition of what is acceptable regarding the use of language; it's Sisyphus on the euphemism treadmill. The way to fight it is to refuse to accept it. They have their Critical Theory; we have the Consolation of our Philosophy. They have the hammer; we have the anvil. They seek to forge a new
Nothung
from Western civilization's industrial shards; we aim to prevent them from wielding something unholy and obscene against us. They are weak, but strengthening; we are strong, but weakening. They brim with self-confidence; we cower in self-doubt.

But, as philosophy consoles the doomed Boethius, there really is nothing to fear; the only weapon they have is our own weakness. Without that, as the Frankfurt School readily understood, they are helpless. A spy, surrounded by armed soldiers, is a dead spy, soon shot or hanged. It is our wish to be seen as reasonable, as proportional, as judicious, as measured (all leftist terms) that hinders us from taking decisive action against them. Casting our weaknesses as the direct results of our sins, instead of our mistaken reactions to their charges and provocations, they have activated Alinsky's Rule No. 12: “Pick the target, personalize it, and polarize it.”

A polarized target—for the Unholy Left, that would be Judeo-Christianity—is a frozen target, and a frozen target is a sitting duck. Ever on the attack, the Left faces great difficulty in playing defense. Their usual retort is simply a crude personal insult, not so much of a counterargument but a “how-dare-you?” accusation. Their stocks-in-trade are in fact the two lowest forms of argumentation, the tu quoque assertion (“Oh, yeah? You are too!”) and the ad hominem offensive (“Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of elderberries,” to quote a choice insult from
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
). Of rational arguments they have none, since their philosophy is based exclusively on emotion and appeals to what “ought” or “ought not” be done; they argue from authority, minus the authority.

As conservatives know only too well, most arguments with true believers of the Left end in insults, comparisons to Nazis, tears, and the leftists' hasty retreat, leaving the conservatives frustrated and angry at their opponents' inability or refusal to engage. But, as leftists see it, they live to fight, and soul-sap, another day, which is precisely why they do not engage; to engage would be to give the whole game away and reveal the Potemkin village behind their confident assertions.

At its bluntest, the Marxist worldview is based on a demonstrable lie (or, to put it more politely and in Hollywood terms, a buy-in): that the forces of history are scientific, as predictable as the motions of the sun, moon, and stars. But this is nothing more than a very grim fairy tale, translated from the opaque, pseudoscientific German and given, like the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
, a fancy diploma from the Goethe University of Frankfurt. The truth is, as everyone from the ancient Greeks on has known, Fortune is a fickle mistress, lavishing her attention first here and then there, with no regard for the consequences of her actions. There is nothing at all scientific about fate, as Boethius writes:

       
FORTUNE'S MALICE

       
Mad Fortune sweeps along in wanton pride,

       
Uncertain as Euripus' surging tide;

       
Now tramples mighty kings beneath her feet,

       
Now sets the conquered in the victor's seat.

       
She heedeth not the wail of hapless woe,

       
But mocks the griefs that from her mischief flow.

       
Such is her sport; so proveth she her power;

       
And great the marvel, when in one brief hour

       
She shows her darling lifted high in bliss,