Do you enjoy living in The Devil's Pleasure Palace? #GoodReads

Good Reads

Is there any question that we're living in The Devil's Pleasure Palace? Political correctness runs amok on American campuses as students demand freedom from offense and free everything else. Sex loses all its pleasure as it becomes easier to obtain. The practice of abortion destroys human life in numbers that would make a Nazi blush. Pseudo-science is used to control behavior. Atheists have gained the legal right to demand tolerance of their belief system only. The purveyors of progressive leftism, like Rousseau, Marx, Brecht, Sartre, and Lillian Hellman, beasts in their private lives who profess to love humanity most but despise people, have come to dominate American philosophical and political thought. So, what else would you call this place other than The Devil's Pleasure Palace?

Sure it's older, but why do We the People believe their culture is better?

Explaining this phenomenon is the goal of The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh.

In the aftermath of World War II, America stood alone as the world’s premier military power. Yet its martial confidence contrasted vividly with its sense of cultural inferiority. Still looking to a defeated and dispirited Europe for intellectual and artistic guidance, burgeoning trans-national elite in New York and Washington embraced not only the war’s refugees, but many of their ideas as well, and nothing has proven more pernicious than those of the Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory – like Pandora’s Box – released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a central-European nihilism celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the New Nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service; they have sown (as Cardinal Bergoglio – now Pope Francis – once wrote of the Devil) “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny” – and all disguised as the search for truth.”

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We needn't despair. There is a way to combat this insidious movement. We can laugh at it. As the author explains...

Scorn drives the Unholy Left insane. They cannot bear to have their theories questioned, or the failed results of those theories laughed at. Dignity is one of the imaginary virtues – one of the last virtues, period – they possess, and to have that attacked along with their 'entire' belief system' (the jeering term they use for organized religion) is too much to bear. Mockery is the thing that brings them quickest to frothing, garment-rending rage, so wedded are they to the notion of their own goodness and infallibility when it comes to matters of impiety and immorals.”

Reading this last has once again reminded me of my own shortcoming, my oft bemoaned failure as a humorist. Why can't I write more like Twain who reminded us that “None can stand in a gale of laughter.” Sadly, ranting against the Left only provides them succor. They suckle on our self-righteous anger as though it were mother's own milk to them.

We all need to take a deep breath.

Count to ten.

Then laugh at their nonsense.

Reading The Devil's Pleasure Palace won't make it any better but, at least, after reading it, you may be able to get the punch line.