In his book On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, the Rev. James V. Schall, who was a legendary Jesuit and teacher at Georgetown University, argues for the importance of fun. Dancing, gardening, bike riding, and other fun activities, he writes, are more important than politics.
Having fun in so-called frivolous activities is a way of acknowledging our limits and mortality, Schall says. Jokes, ping pong, surfing, and dancing signal that there are limits to what we can do with our time on Earth and that our ego-driven politics are not really what makes us spiritual creatures. “The governance of God over his creation, His ability to bring it to its end, does not depend on the affairs of men, though it does include them,” Schall wrote. “He is present in our tragedies and our elations. The Cross is, as a Kempis said, a ‘royal road.’”
From its mental health crisis to its cranky politics, America is suffering from a lack of fun. The new resentful and punitive Left, like the German Stasi, comes after publishers, drinkers, comedians, and actors if any of them show signs of having fun. You can’t attain utopia if people are racing mini-bikes and having keg parties; it’s much more important to police mask mandates and censor jokes.
In his book Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall, journalist Tim Mohr explores how the postwar German Stasi harassed, monitored, and beat punk rockers. It’s notable how many times the word “fun” is used by the punks to explain what they were doing. Between 1981 and 1985, one of the most popular bands behind the Iron Curtain was Wutanfall (“Tantrum”), a Leipzig six-piece that, Mohr writes, “represented a loose but dedicated opposition to the state.”
The leader of Wutanfall was a frontman calling himself Chaos. Chaos was interrogated every week by the Stasi, whose harassment and beatings became so severe that Chaos ultimately gave up. “I’m not doing anything!” he once told his parents, who advised him to abandon music. “I just play music and spike my hair up with shaving cream, OK? I just want to have my own brand of fun, that’s all. That’s no reason for them to beat me half to death!”
In the end, Wutanfall collapsed. “It had always been so fun,” Mohr eulogizes, “the little gang of punks against the idiot overlords. All the difficulties had just brought them closer together. But now he felt overwhelmed. Beaten down. The Stasi’s strategy of degradation had worked.”
In my new book, The Devil’s Triangle, I describe the nightmare in 2018 when I became a central figure in the Leftist opposition research hit on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. There were all kinds of crazy fake charges. One of the main lines of attack was on the fun Brett and I and our 1983 high school class had three decades ago. (Yes, the 1980s really were a lot of fun.) The puritanical press was shocked we had keg parties. They were appalled at our dumb adolescent jokes and slang.
As part of “reporting the controversy,” the media unearthed the Unknown Hoya, an underground newspaper I and a couple of other guys had published in high school. Reporters were actually combing through a 1983 sheet and trying to find clues about girls, slang, and keg parties. At one point, one of the other editors called me up.
“You know,” he said, “our reporting in the Unknown Hoya was more accurate than the New York Times and the Washington Post.”
Journalists used to be fun people. Remember Hunter S. Thompson and H.L. Mencken?
So how did we get here? How did the Left replace the old Right as society’s killjoys? In James Piereson’s groundbreaking book Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism, the author argues that modern liberalism, unlike classic liberalism, feeds off of the desire to punish others. This phenomenon, which Piereson calls “punitive liberalism,” goes back to the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. Piereson argues that prior to Kennedy’s death, liberalism was pro-American, anti-communist, pro-labor, and for incremental change to address social ills such as racism. The Catholic, anti-communist, tax-cutting Kennedy exemplified these beliefs. This is why Kennedy was disliked by the far Left (and would be a conservative if alive today).
When Kennedy was shot and killed by communist Lee Harvey Oswald, liberals went into shock. They then found themselves at a loss to explain the tragedy. It simply couldn’t be possible that the conservatives were right, that Kennedy had been a martyr not to the civil rights movement but to the Cold War and that his blood was on the hands of the communists. That was just too much reality to handle.
Liberalism explained Kennedy’s death by blaming it on America. It wasn’t Oswald, a Castro-loving zealot, who pulled the trigger; it was “right-wing America,” the “climate of hate in Dallas,” and our collective historical sins. America was to blame.
Piereson summarized his theory even before his book was published in a 2004 essay in the Weekly Standard: “From the time of John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976, the Democratic Party was gradually taken over by a bizarre doctrine that might be called Punitive Liberalism. According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement.”
“Given this bill of indictment,” Piereson concludes, “the Punitive Liberals held that Americans had no right at all to feel pride in their country’s history or optimism about its future.”
These days, it’s hard to make it an hour watching cable TV, combing through a bookstore, or scrolling social media without coming across someone whose main job in life seems to be punishing America. Our society has been overrun by American Stasi whose totalitarian impulses are far more dangerous than COVID ever was.
The best solution, as Schall put it, is to remember that we are first and foremost spiritual creatures and that the leftist bullies who would take away our rights would love nothing more than to make us forget that. They want docile, thoughtless sheep who know how to take orders — and that’s it. But what our society really needs is its own Wutanfall: joyful citizens determined to enjoy the freedoms they’ve been given while they still can.
Maybe we can kick things off with a keg party.
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Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
