I watched a 1972 Bob Fosse movie Cabaret last night with my wife.  I don’t usually prefer musicals.  I confess to a negligible background in music which constrains my appreciation of many varieties of musical expression. This movie impressed me as a layered, complex piece of story telling.  The musical pieces, served to show the intellectual and emotional atmosphere of Berlin in the German Wiemar Republic of 1931.  The arc of the story is tragic as most great stories prove to be.  Sophocles the great Greek Tragedian (496-406BC) would have approved of Fosse’s work.

At the stories conclusion Sally Bowles, played by Liza Minnelli,  continues to work at the Kit Kat Klub, and Brian Roberts in the aftermath of his failed engagement to Sally, returns to his Phd work at Cambridge.  Both are subject to the current of circumstances, present and past, that exert inexorable influence upon their choices.  Watching the movie, I was intrigued and fascinated by the emotional complexity of the characters.  Individuals are seeking well being, happiness would be a more artless term, in the immediate “decadent” environment of the Kit Kat Klub.  A wider, expansive social environment envelops all.  Hitlerism is ascendant, a growing, dark will to persecute Jews, identifying them as scapegoat for  perceived problems in German economy and society.  The background context, — both the sexual ambiguity and violence of the Kit Kat Klub culture, and beatings on the street by the Nazi Brown-shirts defined for me what Nietzsche, writing 40 years earlier meant by “decadence.”

For the sake of clarity, the range of human sexual behavior is broad.  The norm of heterosexual expression happens to be deemed “standard” by our culture.  Yet, sensuality touches the core of life’s prime imperative which is survival.  What is one form of decadence if not sexual attraction, favor for a price at the Kit Kat Klub?  To make into a commodity a aspect of life that at best is transcendent, exceeding words, is a sad reality beneath the gitz of the Kit Kat Klub.  What have we not turned into a commodity?  Survival also means nothing less than pay for service — essential as we all have to eat. 

I suppose that clarified nothing.

And what of us, of our time?  Why my interest in this 1971 tale?  Aside from Las Vegas, a place that has always marketed decadence, are we not awash in online decadence?  What of social media, and a proliferation of porn sites of every type delivering distorted, retrograde human behavior and language, visually, audibly — to devices held by nearly every adolescent and adult in our society?  I need not mention the infection of our political discourse.  Institutions that formerly we assumed were durable are failing.  Bluntly put, we are denizens of the Kit Kat Klub.  We are becoming a 21st Century version of Wiemar Germany.  A majority are increasingly poverty stricken, and we have a rapidly deteriorating political situation.

To conclude I offer this youtube video of the single song in Cabaret that is not performed in the Kit Kat Klub.  You will be as chilled as I upon listening to this.  Decadence, retrograde violence, is virulent, a contagion that spreads.