The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Read Free Book Online Page A

to frame the moral argument for the political argument that is to come. I make no apologies for the explicitly Christiancontext of my analysis; as a Catholic, I would be foolish to try to tackle the subject from any other perspective. Nevertheless, I am not relying on the fine points of dogma or any particular set of teachings (other than right = good, wrong = bad). The moral principles from which I shall proceed are found across all cultural divides. Make no mistake: The crisis in which the United States of America currently finds itself enmeshed is a moral crisis, which has engendered a crisis of cultural confidence, which in turn has begotten a fiscal crisis that threatens—no, guarantees—the destruction of the nation should we fail to address it.
    Third, I focus on Milton because the archetypal biblical characters limned first in Genesis and expanded upon by Milton—we call them “God,” “Satan,” “Adam,” “Eve,” and the “Son” (Jesus)—are fundamental to the ur-Narrative and have served as templates and models for countless subsequent characters in the literature and drama that followed. Call them what you will: the stern father, the rebellious son and the good son, the hapless but oddly empowered bystanders caught up in the primal conflict of the first family. What, after all, is Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung cycle but (as the late Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau famously described it) a “family tragedy” in which Wotan’s greed and arrogance force him to beget a morally uncompromised son (Siegfried) to wash away both Wotan’s sins and the entire ancien régime, redeeming humanity into the bargain.
    This is, I hope, a helpful and even novel way of looking at politics. Left to the wonks, political discussions are almost entirely program-and-process, the realm of lawyers, MBAs, and the parasite journalist class that feeds on both of them. It’s the reason that congressional bills and their attendant regulations now run to thousands of pages, as opposed to the terse, 4,543-word U.S. Constitution, whose meaning was plainly evident to an average literate citizen of the late eighteenth century. Contrast that with the inaptly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, whose word count, with regulations, is nearly twelve million and counting, with new regulations being added along the way. When it comes to lawmaking, brevity may be the soul of wit, but complexity is the very essence of “trickeration.”
    Who is to say which makes for the best political analysis? Rather than getting down in the weeds with the increasingly specialized schools of government (whose mission effectively is to churn out more policy wonks), perhaps it is better to pull back and look at our political history for what it really is: a narrative, with a beginning, a middle, and an endthat is yet to come. It may at times be a tale told by an idiot; as passions sweep away reason, bad laws are enacted and dire consequences ensue. At other times, it may be a story told by a master craftsman, with twists and turns and reversals and plot points that surprise, delight, enthrall, and appall.
    Most of all, it is a story with heroes and villains. And this brings us back full circle, to the foundational myth of our polity—Satan’s rebellion, which led to the Fall of Man, and to the Devil’s Pleasure Palace erected to seduce and beguile humanity while the war against God, as ever, continues, and with no material help from the Deity apparently in sight.

CHAPTER TWO
    THESIS
    W hat 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 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