Cabaret

[RobertUrbanek]

The 1972 musical Cabaret examined the social corruption that accompanied the Nazi rise to power.

Inside the Kit Kat Club of 1931 Berlin, American singer Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli) celebrates "divine decadence" with songs like "Mein Herr," "Money, Money" and "Cabaret" while the impish emcee (Joel Grey) mocks the Nazis. Offstage, the promiscuous Bowles seduces gay Brian Roberts (Michael York) and both have intimate encounters with a rich playboy (Helmut Griem).

The sexual exploits come to an end as the playboy abandons both of them and Bowles aborts her baby with Roberts to pursue her singing career and carefree lifestyle.

The conventional liberal interpretation of Cabaret is that Bowles and her coterie of performers and lovers are creative free spirits who are bravely standing up against the brutish fascists. However, another interpretation is that the Kit Kat Club and its denizens represented all the filth, corruption and anarchy that plagued the Weimar Republic: reasons to give power to Hitler and “restore morality.�

The lesson of Cabaret, that decadence provokes fascism, has been lost on Hollywood because the cultural revolution that began in the mid-1960s seems unending. Every year sees a new performer, like Sacha Baron Cohen or Sarah Silverman, who "pushes the envelope" to bring new levels of depravity to the media.

But the reaction is taking place, if not here, then on the other side of the globe, where Islamo-fascism provides a polar opposite to Hollywood. The polar analogy can be taken to another level. The earth's magnetic field is long overdue for a polar shift, in which the magnetic fields are reversed and the needle on your compass will point south. Perhaps we will experience a similar shift in the “moral compass.� When true liberal democracy comes to the Middle East, theocracy will triumph in the United States.

Consider also a larger question: Is humanity forever locked in a struggle between right and left, oppression and rebellion, in a drama directed by a divine force?