Читать книгу The Devil's Pleasure Palace - Michael Walsh - Страница 14

CHAPTER TWO

THESIS

What is The Godfather about? Ask almost anyone and he or she will tell you it’s the story of a Mafia don, Vito Corleone, and his three sons who are battling other Italian crime families for control of the rackets in post–WWII New York. But that is not what The Godfather is about. And therein lies the crucial distinction between plot and what screenwriters call story. Plot is the surface, story is the reality. Plot is the ordering of events: This happens and then that happens, and the next thing happens, and on to the end. Plot is what we tell each other when we describe what the movie or novel is about. Plot is what hangs on the narrative framework. Plot . . . doesn’t matter.

What matters is story—the deeper, underlying significance of the events of the plot. This happens and then, because of that, something else happens; and because of that, the next thing happens: the force of destiny. Thus, The Godfather is about a man who loves his family so much and tries so hard to protect it that he ultimately destroys it.

There are many plots, but few stories. Earlier I touched on what Joseph Campbell described as “the hero’s journey,” but here I should note that that journey need be neither successfully completed nor happily ended. Don Corleone’s all-American tale is the rise of a monster whose true face remains hidden until his very last moments, when he stuffs a piece of an orange (a symbol of imminent death) in his mouth and grimaces at his grandson, terrifying the boy with the sudden revelation of his grandfather’s true nature.

Still, we might tell the same story—about a man who loves his family so much that he destroys it—in many different ways and in many different times and places. In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, the character played by John Wayne, goes on a monomaniacal mission to rescue his niece who has been abducted by Comanches and turned into a squaw. He aims not to bring her home (most of her family was murdered by the Indians) but to kill her, though in the end he does not kill her but returns her to her remaining relatives. The movie’s last image—the cabin door slowly swinging shut on Ethan, condemning him to a lifetime of bitter loneliness—was later borrowed by Coppola for the final scene of The Godfather. In this, the door to Michael’s inner sanctum is closed against his wife, Kay—except that it is Michael who is being penned in to the life of crime to which his father has condemned him, and Kay who is being shut out. Stories about families are among our most primal, which is why they have such tremendous power.

Therefore, it’s no accident that one of the chief targets of the Unholy Left is the family—just as the nascent family of Adam and Eve was Satan’s target. The family, in its most basic biological sense, represents everything that those who would wish “fundamental change” (to use a famous, curdling phrase) on society must first loathe. It is the cornerstone of society, the guarantor of future generations (thus obeying nature’s first principle of self-preservation via procreation), the building block of the state but superior to it, because the family is naturally ordained, whereas the state is not. Against the evidence of millennia, across all cultures, the Left hurls the argument that the family is nothing more than a “social construct” that we can reengineer if we choose.

Like Satan, the modern leftist state is jealous of the family’s prerogatives, enraged by its power, and it seeks to replace this with its own authority; the satanic condition of “rage,” in fact, is one of the Left’s favorite words (e.g., in 1969, the “Days of Rage” in Chicago) as well as one of its chief attributes. The ongoing, expansive redefinition of what constitutes a “family” is part of the Left’s assault. If any group of two or more people, no matter how distant their biological relation, or even if they are entirely unrelated, can be called a “family,” then there is no such thing. But see how it has been accomplished: As lustful Satan (“involved in rising mist”) comes to Milton’s Eve in the body of a snake in order to appeal to her vanity and curiosity while at the same time calming her fears at his sudden apparition in the Garden, so does “change” cloak itself in euphemism, disguising its real intentions, appealing to the transgressive impulse in nearly everyone, and promising a better tomorrow if only we compromise on this one tiny little stricture.

Soviet Communism (along with its evil twin, National Socialism, as pure an expression of the satanic in man as one can imagine) understood this well: Destroy the family, seize the children, and give the insupportable notion of a Marxist post-Eden replacement paradise a purchase on power for at least one more generation. American youth who grew up in the 1950s, as I did, heard numerous horror stories of Russian children who informed on their own parents, mini-vipers in the bosom of the families that sheltered them. Probably the most famous was the thirteen-year-old Pavlik Morozov, an instantly mythologized Soviet Young Pioneer who informed on his father to the secret police and was in turn murdered by “reactionary” members of his own family, who were later rounded up and shot. Whether the story is actually true—and post-Soviet scholarship suggests that it was largely fabricated—the Soviet myth required just such an object lesson and just such a martyr to the Communist cause.

The crucial importance of narrative to the leftist project cannot be overstated. Storytelling—or a form of it in which old themes are mined and twisted—sits at the center of everything the Left does. Leftists are fueled by a belief that in the modern world, it does not so much matter what the facts are, as long as the story is well told. Living in a malevolent, upside-down fantasy world, they would rather heed their hearts than their minds, their impulses than their senses; the gulf between empirical reality and their ideology-infused daydreams regularly shocks and surprises them, even as it discomforts or kills millions who suffer the consequences of their delusions.

And what, precisely, is the point of their twisted narrative? Simply this: It, like scripture, contains all the themes and clichés deemed necessary to sell a governing philosophy that no one in his right mind would actually vote for absent deception and illusion. No matter how evil, the leftist story must seem to have a positive outcome; it must appeal to the better angels of our nature; it must promise a greater good, a higher morality, a new and improved tomorrow. In short, it must do what Milton’s Tempter (“with show of zeal and love / To man, and indignation at his wrong”) does in the Garden: lie. Thus spake Lucifer to Eve, in the same words that come out of the culturally Marxist mouth of every cajoling leftist. We might well refer to this passage in Book Nine of Paradise Lost as the Left’s very own foundational myth:

Queen of this Universe! do not believe

Those rigid threats of Death. Ye shall not die.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . will God incense his ire

For such a petty Trespass, and not praise

Rather your dauntless virtue, whom the pain

Of Death denounced, whatever thing Death be...

Why then was this forbid? Why but to awe,

Why but to keep ye low and ignorant . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . ye shall be as Gods,

Knowing both Good and Evil as they know.

This speech by Satan is perhaps the most perfect embodiment of wheedling Leftism ever written, combining nearly all the tactics we still see in use today. The Tempter, in a nutshell, asks: Why not? Besides, what’s the big deal? God is lying to you. He wants to keep you naked and ignorant. Look at me: I ate the apple, and now I, a mere serpent, can speak human language with wisdom and compassion. And you—just one small “transgression” against a stupid and arbitrary edict, and you, too, shall be as God is.

Eve bites. In that instant, true, Paradise is lost to humanity (Adam’s loving acquiescence is at this point a fait accompli); but also in that instant, Eve becomes not godlike but fully human. The Fall is the central paradox of human existence and the root of all mankind’s misery and opportunity. How we react to it—or even if we react against the very notion of it and dismiss it as a fairy tale produced by a hegemonic culture—determines just about everything about us. Are we the independent heroes of our own stories, battling to make our way in the world? Or are we mere stick figures being pushed through a plot? Are we strong or are we weak? Destined for glory or already fallen and sure to be condemned? Is freedom a gift or an illusion?

For Milton—as it should be for us—the knowledge of good and evil is a fundamental aspect of our human nature. It is the basis of free will, and our (God-given) ability to freely choose between them. It can make us better or worse, lead us to salvation or damnation.

This is the argument for the felix culpa, the Fortunate Fall celebrated in the Catholic Easter proclamation: “O felix culpa . . . O happy fault that won for us so great a Savior.” The Fall, in this light, is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Of course, people argue about this endlessly, and there are compelling arguments on both sides: Since God is the Author of all, did he therefore engineer the Fall? (Milton’s God denies it.) If God created Lucifer, and the fallen Lucifer (Satan) then sired, directly or indirectly, both Sin and Death, is God therefore responsible for evil? Does God somehow require sin, as Calvin would have it? Can there ever be a true Hegelian-Marxist synthesis between Good and Evil, and if so, what would it be? As former president Herbert Hoover—to this day, one of the Unholy Left’s most useful cartoon villains—wrote in a posthumously published memoir of the New Deal: “The world is in the grip of a death struggle between the philosophy of Christ and that of Hegel and Marx.”

In stories of heroes, there is never a synthesis; indeed, there cannot be. The satanic Left understands this all too well, no matter what lip service they pay to “synthesis.” The hero must not—and ultimately cannot—cooperate with the villain. Even if it appears that he does so, it is merely deception on his part, allowing him to wield the villain’s weapon against him. (The hero very often does require sin—in some cases, he can win the day only at the cost of his soul.) Similarly, the antagonist (who, remember, is the hero of his own story) cannot compromise with the hero in any real sense. If he did, he would lose.

Which brings us back to the political argument at the heart of this book. We frequently hear terms such as “bipartisanship” and “compromise” in the halls of Congress, especially coming from the Unholy Left whenever it finds itself on the short end of an electoral decision. But, according to the dictates of narrative, such “compromise” cannot hold, except in the short term—and not even then, I would argue, since compromise, even in the smallest things, leads to synthesis, and there can be no synthesis between Good and Evil. As the crude metaphor goes, one part ice cream mixed with one part dog poop is dog poop, not ice cream.

The objection now will come that mine is a Manichaean view of the world: black and white, with no shade of gray between, much less fifty. Critics will label my notion—in a term much favored by adherents of the Left—“simplistic” and cry that it fails to allow for the subtleties and nuances of the human condition.

But so what? That is akin to observing that firearms are bad because they are designed to kill people—when no one would disagree that killing is precisely their object, which is, far more often than not, a force for good. There is no nuance in a handgun. It is either loaded or unloaded. Its safety, should it have one, is either on or off. It is either pointed at the target or it is not pointed at the target. The bullet is either fired or it is not.

A hero given to inaction while he studies the subtleties and nuances of a critical situation is not much of a hero. We remember Hamlet not for his heroism but for his inability to act. His most famous soliloquy is a paean to omphaloskepsis—navel-gazing. And yet, we can put even that—“to be or not to be”—within a Manichaean frame, because Hamlet’s inability to come down on one side or the other until it is too late gets a lot of people killed.

Far from being admirable, Hamlet is an archetype of the contemptible fence-sitter, and he pops up again and again in popular storytelling. Take for example, the character of the mapmaker Corporal Upham in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Hastily assigned to Captain Miller’s rescue operation after the carnage of the Normandy landing, Upham at first argues for the release of a captured German soldier (“Steamboat Willie”); later he fatally hesitates in a ruined stairwell while one of his comrades, Private Mellish, is overcome and stabbed through the heart with his own souvenir Hitler Youth dagger on the floor above. Near the end of the film, Steamboat Willie returns to kill Captain Miller in the final battle on the bridge and, after he surrenders, is shot in cold blood by Upham—freed at last of his nuances, Upham commits a war crime as a retributive act for his own earlier cowardice and foolishness. There is something to be said for recognizing good and evil after all.

And yet how often in real life we fail, including the statesmen among us. Neville Chamberlain botched Munich when he failed to take the measure of Hitler. George W. Bush failed with Vladimir Putin (“I looked the man in the eye. . . . I was able to get a sense of his soul”). Collectively, the West is confounded by Islam because it fails to credit the plain words of Islamist animus against the West; how much interpretation, after all, does the slogan “Death to America” actually require?

We know this thanks to our ur-Narrative, our primal story, the divine spark hidden deep within us that gives our lives meaning. Critical Theory seeks to undermine this self-knowledge at its root by insisting that everything is a “construct,” a plot by the “privileged.”

Once again, phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny instead of the reverse: The primal, universal, species-wide story (phylogeny) is buried deep within each individual organism (ontogeny), within the heart, soul, and psyche of every human being. Story is not a reflection of the world but its engine and essence. Story alone will not achieve the final triumph of Good over Evil, but it propels the way.