The Secret Knowledge
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
Chapter 2 - THE AMERICAN REALITY
Chapter 3 - CULTURE, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE ELEVATOR
Chapter 4 - ALCATRAZ
Chapter 5 - LOST HORIZON
Chapter 6 - THE MUSIC MAN
Chapter 7 - CHOICE
Chapter 8 - THE RED SEA
Chapter 9 - CHICAGO
Chapter 10 - MILTON FRIEDMAN EXPLAINED
Chapter 11 - WHAT IS “DIVERSITY”?
Chapter 12 - THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM AND THE CONTRACTOR
Chapter 13 - MAXWELL STREET
Chapter 14 - R100
Chapter 15 - THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Chapter 16 - THE VICTIM
Chapter 17 - PURITANS
Chapter 18 - THE NOBLE SAVAGE
Chapter 19 - ADVENTURE SLUMMING
Chapter 20 - CABINET SPIRITUALISM AND THE CAR CZAR
Chapter 21 - RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter 22 - MY FATHER, AL SHARPTON, AND THE DESIGNATED CRIMINAL
Chapter 23 - GREED
Chapter 24 - ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 25 - OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA
Chapter 26 - FEMINISM
Chapter 27 - THE ASHKENAZIS
Chapter 28 - SOME PERSONAL HISTORY
Chapter 29 - THE FAMILY
Chapter 30 - NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 31 - BREATHARIAN
Chapter 32 - THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED
Chapter 33 - SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
Chapter 34 - HOPE AND CHANGE
Chapter 35 - THE SMALL REFRIGERATOR
Chapter 36 - BUMPER STICKERS
Chapter 37 - LATE REVELATIONS
Chapter 38 - WHO DOES ONE THINK HE IS?
Chapter 39 - THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SENTINEL
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2011 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © David Mamet, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Mamet, David.
The secret knowledge : on the dismantling of American culture / David Mamet. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51535-8
1. Right and left (Political science)—United States. 2. Political culture—United States. 3. United States—Politics and government—21st century. I. Title.
JK1726.M36 2011
320.51’30973—dc22 2010049347
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father.
Most initiations are about the devolution of responsibility. At the same time, initiations often double as a long and confused moment of shared truths. Essentially, what the adults, elders, or senior members of the group share with the initiates is the knowledge they possess, and then they admit to a terrible secret, the secret of the “tribe”—that beyond the knowledge the initiates have just been given there is no special knowledge.
—Anna Simons, The Company They Keep
1
THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
All religions stem from the same universal needs. Each contains awe, obedience, grace, study, prayer, and submission. Each religion will order and stress these elements differently, but their root is the same—a desire to understand the Divine and its intentions for humankind.
The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.
Emotions may elevate practical partisan differences to the realm of the spiritual or doctrinal, which is to say, the irreconcilable—Democrats, notably, are more likely to credit terrorists taken in battle against our country rather than Republicans, and many liberal Jews to believe the statements of Hamas rather than those of Israel.
In the election of 2008, environmental, social, and financial change were the concerns of both parties. The Right held that a return to first principles would arrest or re-channel this momentum toward bankruptcy and its attendant geopolitical dangers. It suggested fiscal conservatism, greater and more efficient exploitation of natural resources, lower taxes, a stronger military. The Left’s view was to suggest that Change was good in itself—that a problem need not be dealt with mechanically (by acts whose historical efficacy was demonstrable) but could be addressed psychologically, by identifying “change itself” as a solution.
The underlying question, common to both sides, was how to deal with this problematic change; the Conservative answer, increased exploitation of the exploitable and conservation of needless expenditure—in effect, sound business practice; that of the Liberals a cessation of the same. Each were and are interested in Security, the Liberals suggesting détente and the Conservatives increased armament; each side was interested in Justice, the Conservatives holding it will best be served by the strict rule of law, the Liberals by an increase in the granting of Rights.
This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.
My early plays, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Glengarry Glen Ross, concerned Capitalism and business. This subject consumed me as I was trying to support myself, and like many another young man or woman, had come up against the blunt fact of a world which did not care.
I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad, although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings. I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.
As a youth I enjoyed—indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered—the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, ne
ither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system—which is to say by the accrual of wealth—house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.
We cannot live without trade. A society can neither advance nor improve without excess of disposable income. This excess can only be amassed through the production of goods and services necessary or attractive to the mass. A financial system which allows this leads to inequality; one that does not leads to mass starvation.
Brecht, an East German, was allowed by the Communists to keep his wealth and live at his ease in Switzerland—a show dog of Communism. His accomplishments, however, must be seen not as an indictment, but as a ratification of the power of free enterprise. As must the seemingly ineradicable vogue for the notion of Government Control.
The free market in ideas keeps this folly as current as any entertainment reviled by the Left as “mindless.” But the fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is, at essence, like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.
Who does not want Justice? Each of us, of course, wants justice for himself, and all but the conscienceless few realize that we deserve well from each other.
The question is one of apportionment, for justice cannot be infinite. There is a finite amount of time, knowledge, wisdom, and money—and to tax the mass endlessly, even in the pursuit of justice, must cause injustice somewhere.
One may be just to the trees of the Northwest, impoverish loggers, and raise the cost of home construction; if all prisoners are allowed unlimited and endless access to all courts, whose time and energy is as finite as every other thing, the court system must stint other applicants. One may extend Justice to the snail darter and cripple the Port of New York; and a legitimate aversion to racial profiling may not only inconvenience but mortally endanger the traveling public.
My revelation came upon reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It was that there is a cost to everything, that nothing is without cost, and that energy spent on A cannot be spent on B, and that this is the meaning of cost—it represents the renunciation of other employments of the money. He wrote that there are no solutions; there are only tradeoffs—money spent on more crossing guards cannot be spent on books. Both are necessary, a choice must be made, and that this is the Tragic view of life.
It made sense to me. Now, like the Fibonacci sequence, I began to see it everywhere. Milton Friedman pointed out that the cavil, “It would seem that a country that could put a man on the moon could provide free lunches for its schoolchildren,” missed the point: the country could not supply the free lunches because it put the man on the moon—there is only so much money. I understood this because I have a checkbook, and my reading inspired me to realize the equation did not differ at the National Level—there was only so much money, and choices must be made.
Money, I further learned, was just an efficient way of keeping track of the production of individuals—of their work and the capacity of that work to benefit their fellows. The more the money moved around, the more the mass benefited. The Government could do little with this product save waste it: it did not produce. It could tax or confiscate, but it could not allocate with greater justice than the Free Market;1 it could and should, then, provide only those services of which the Free Market was incapable: the roads, the sewers, the Judiciary, the streetlights, the Legislature, and the Common Defense—the notion that it could do more was an illusion and nowhere demonstrable.2 The Government could only profess to do more, its bureaucrats and politicians playing on our human need for guidance and certainty, and, indeed, our desire for Justice. But these members of Government, Right and Left, were as likely to exploit their position as you or I; and, like Brecht, as likely to mine human credulity as to alleviate human need.
Politics, then, seemed to me, like business, a delightful panoply of deceit and error and strife—a brand-new tide pool for the naturalist.
I wrote a political play.
Writers are asked, “How could you know so much about [fill in the profession]?” The answer, if the writing satisfies, is that one makes it up. And the job, my job, as a dramatist, was not to write accurately, but to write persuasively. If and when I do my job well, subsequent cowboys, as it were, will talk like me.
In order to write well, however, the good dramatist must absolutely identify with his subject. This does not mean to be in “sympathy with,” but “to become the same as.”
In writing my political play I realized, then, that I was in no way immune from the folly of partisanship, of muddle-headedness, and of rancor in political thought; that I enjoyed the righteous indignation and the licensed spectacle as much as anyone, for the feeling of superiority it gave me. That I was, in short, a fool.
That, for a writer, is an excellent place to begin.
A friend came to our house for Thanksgiving. She’d flown from D.C. to Los Angeles, and the first-class cabin of her plane had been occupied by two turkeys “pardoned” by President Bush, and sold or lent to the Disney Corporation, to lead its Thanksgiving parade down the Main Street of Disneyland.
This intersection of these two hucksterisms drew me irresistibly to a fantasy.
All people being venal by nature, and politicians doubly so by profession, was it not clear that a President would not pardon turkeys save for some consideration? My fantasy had a despised incumbent, scant weeks from Election Day with no hope of reelection. His party has stopped advertising his hopeless run. He is asked to pardon a couple of turkeys in return for a small campaign contribution. He becomes inspired and tells the turkey manufacturers he wants two hundred million dollars or he will pardon every turkey in America.
So far so good, and here’s the kicker—in order to convince the American People to endorse his ban on turkey, he enlists the genius of his treasured speechwriter. She, a Lesbian, has just returned from China, whither she and her partner had gone to purchase a baby. She says she will write the speech only if the President, in return, will marry her and her partner on National TV. Pretty funny play. And its theme, I believe, is not only that we are “all human,” but, better, that we are all Americans.
Here is Clarice Bernstein (the Speechwriter) reading a draft of her speech to Charles Smith, the President:The fellow or the woman at the watercooler? We don’t know their politics. We judge their character by the simple things: are they respectful, are they punctual, can they listen, “can they get along” . . . we care if they paint their fence. We don’t know who they vote for. We don’t know what they “do in bed.” Who would be disrespectful enough to enquire? If you look at the polls it seems we are a “nation divided.” But we aren’t “a nation divided.” Sir. We’re a Democracy. We hold different opinions. But: we laugh at the same jokes, we clap each other on the back when we’ve made that month’s quota; and, sir, I’m not at all sure that we don’t love each other. (from November)
There is a final reconciliation of Right and Left, straight and gay, and everything is made right by the deus ex machina, Chief Dwight Grackle of the Micmac Nation, who has come to assassinate the President, and the curtain line is “Jesus, I love this country.” As do I. And my love increased the more I thought about it. I considered the play a love letter to America.
A local New York paper tried to close the play. Their fellow was outraged, finding it politically incorrect, in which he was, astonishingly, acute.
Now, the plot thickening, the Village Voice asked me to write an article on the play’s politics. I wrote them an essay titled “Political Civility,” which laid out my views as above. I knew, however, that the Voice (a) has always been the voice of the Left; and (b)
that they, over the years, had generally accepted my work only kicking and screaming. So I schemed to ensnare them. I began my essay on civility and consideration with an anecdote about the Village Voice.
Norman Mailer reviewed the first production in America of Waiting for Godot in the Village Voice. He called it trash. He went home though, and thought about it and returned to see the play again. He recognized it now as a work of genius, and bought a page in the Voice renouncing his review, and praising the play. I began my essay with this anecdote.
Aha. The Voice took the bait and published the article. They, however, retitled it “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.” The New York paper, enraged, rereviewed my play, giving it a worse notice than the first time around, and I was embraced by the Right.
Then I was asked to write a book on politics. And, in the words of Gertrude Stein, so I did, and this is it.
2
THE AMERICAN REALITY
It was observed, and I cannot remember by whom, that “like all prolific writers, he was very lazy.” This is certainly true of me. I am prolific, and look upon my lengthy and various credits as must an inveterate debtor look upon the completed list of his obligations: it fills me with shame. Why? Perhaps because none of it felt like work, but like escape. What sort of sick fool would need to still so many terrifying thoughts by so much production?
In any case, I have been granted the dispensation to spend my days making the unpleasant pleasant.
By whom was I granted this right? By the society in which I live, which found my works sufficiently diverting to pay me to sit alone all day and continue as I had begun.
Leisure for reflection, somewhere near the end of a long career, leads me to thank God for allowing me to live in a society sufficiently free of Governmental control to allow the citizenry expression of its true diversity, which is to say, diversity of thought.