The Devil's Pleasure Palace by Michael Walsh Page A

organization masquerading as a political party.
    At root, and as with any criminal organization, the primary goal of the Frankfurt School, its acolytes, and its Critical Theory adherents—however camouflaged by the squid ink of altruism, ideology, and philosophical pretenses—was the attainment and retention of power in order to amass wealth. No one who lived or spent any time in the old Soviet Union could miss that salient fact about that country. The nomenklatura drove through the sparse traffic on the streets of Moscow in limousines, summered at their dachas, patronized state-run beryozka shops, where they used valuta (foreign currency) to purchase luxury Western goods unavailable in the regular stores where proles shopped. Everybody else stole caviar from the kitchens, hawked bootlegged cigarettes from the trunks of their cars, or simply sold themselves. Russia at the end of the Soviet period was a country of a wealthy few, all politically connected, and the subsisting masses. In the same way, the Democratic Party’s base consists of, at one end of the spectrum, the well-connected and often obscenely wealthy rich, who profit from their personal and business relationships with government, and, at the other end, the very poor, who depend on that same government.
    But then, in the eyes of the Left, a nation of free citizens, equal before the law and not necessarily equal in much of anything else save opportunity, does not much look like the America that “fundamental transformation” is intended to bring about. By their lights, they are patriots, just not “American” patriots. They are patriots of America of the Future. The country they hope to bring into being will be still be called “America,” it just won’t be America.
    This is what happens in a country created by the Enlightenment when reason goes to sleep. The men of the Frankfurt School pretended they were bringing typically German ratiocination to bear on a host of challenges: destroying tonal music, in the case of Adorno and Schoenberg; destroying the family, in the case of Gramsci and Lukács; destroying conventional morality, in the case of Marcuse and Reich. But they were no more intellectual than Faust after his wager with Mephistopheles, although their particular bargain was with another devil. They had the illusion of reason, to be sure; yet in no other country on earth has this illusion done more damage than in Germany, the country that gave the world both Marx and Hitler. But that the country of deep philosophers, brilliant scientists, Romantic poets, and towering composers produced such monstrosity should not come as much of a surprise. The sadistic mix is in the blood. As Faust shows, the problem with accomplishment is not mastery; it is the devilish boredom that follows mastery.
    Symbolically, Wagner destabilized conventional tonality with the now-famous “Tristan chord” in the opening phrase of his opera Tristan und Isolde . It announces, in the second bar, not only the emotional core of the work but the disintegration of European musical culture that would soon follow in the wake of the opera’s debut in 1865. The four notes of the chord (F-B-D#-G#, a perfect fourth on top of a tritone) appear throughout musical history, from Machaut and Gesualdo to Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, although the chord’s harmonic function differs widely. But the prelude to Tristan atomized harmonic expectations through the opening line’s floating chromaticisms, setting the mood of sexual desire and sexual frustration that, to this day, disarms audiences during the great “ Liebesnacht ” love duet in the second act (coitus interruptus in music) only to be erotically released by death in the final “ Liebestod ,” when the chord finally stabilizes into B major—in retrospect, not very far from where the opera began, but a world away.
    But after such mastery, what? European composers after