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

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 31grimaces 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 (“involvedin 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