by David Mamet
It is inevitable that the bureaucrat, awarded his job as a perquisite of superiors who wish to display their power and provide themselves insulation, will work, not primarily, but exclusively to obtain and exercise those same perquisites in his own behalf.
Thus, at the end, Chrysler and GMC were making cars no one wanted for a price that did not repay their manufacture. The car business had been run, both by labor and management, as a sideline of their bureaucracies, each exploiting its own rights (which is to say its position and potential for further exploitation). Who was left designing and producing cars people wanted to buy and drive?
At this point the hag-ridden industry was “rescued” by the only organization in the world less equipped to ensure productivity: the Federal Government.
What does this “rescue” mean? That the décor and the staffing of the boardroom will change. That the tenor of boardroom life will become more austere is inevitable (see the workers’ uniforms adopted by Stalin, Mao, Ho, and so on), but otherwise it will be Business As Usual, which is to say waste (now on an even greater scale), disregard for the consumer, and increased distance from those personally involved with the success of the product offered.
In a rational, which is to say a free-market world, this situation would self-correct: the public would cease to buy a product which no one cared to make attractive, efficient, or affordable, and the business would change or go broke.
The only businesses excepted from this rational progression are those supported by government, and, of course the Government itself, where waste is the end product.
What are we purchasing with our taxes?
What is Big Government but the Executive’s cocaine dream, an activity devoted solely to jockeying for position, in which he may find license for malversation, and may take the company treasury and direct it toward those people who will support his continued incumbency—it is within the law. Its street name is “earmarks,” but it is theft. Of your money and mine.
The problem is, as with the movie business, not with the identity of placeholders, but with the jobs themselves.
The San Fernando Valley is littered with office campuses housing the executives who supposedly “make” the movies. Many of these buildings occupy space which was, formerly, the lot on which actual movies were once made.
Mismanagement (by labor, capital, and our benevolent government) has driven the actual movie business out of California, and, to the largest extent, out of the country.
What would happen to the movie business if these office campuses and their inhabitants were all to disappear tomorrow?
Nothing.
It is not just that a movie studio could be run by one person with a cell phone, in the back of a limo—that is how they are run. The accreted bureaucracy serves the Executive as a Royal Court,37 but, like the Big Government it strives to emulate, it makes nothing but waste. It just exists and grows and grows.
Government is the ultimate bureaucracy, from which has been abstracted not only responsibility for the product, but the product itself.
The price is paid not by the consumer (of what? there is no product) but by Government’s victims—those taxed—and many taxed literally out of existence—by the bureaucrat’s unchecked ability to rape the treasury in buying support for his position, his good ideas, or his reelection.
The difference between the Liberal and the Conservative lies, in the main, in the level of abstraction of thought. The Liberal assumes he differs from his opponent on the identity of the person holding the job, and on the content of that person’s proposals. The Conservative cannot persuade him to see the problem differently: that it is the job itself which must be eliminated. The difference is one not of doctrine, but of philosophy.
The worker on the assembly line, on the movie set, and you and I have the same reaction when the Bureaucrats come slumming by: “If the goddamn Suits would finish their tour, stop nodding wisely, and go away, perhaps I might be able to get the job done.”
I received, from an auction house, a notice of the auction of a Glenn Curtiss 1915 seaplane. It is, I think, one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. Its hull is mahogany in a series of gentle steps, allowing it to plane on the water. It is a pusher biplane—its engine mounted behind the pilot and pushing backward. Its wings and tail structure are aluminum. It seats two. It looks as if it were designed by Brancusi; indeed, it was designed by his equal.
The aircraft business, around this time, a mere decade after Kitty Hawk, was largely the domain of producers and designers not far removed (if removed at all) from the workshop garage.
Planes were made (as Nevil Shute observes in Slide Rule) largely from wood, with canvas-covered wings; and it cost little to retool. A fellow with a saw could design and build his own plane, buying or modifying a cheap gasoline engine to power it.38
This early aircraft business resembled that of the shade-tree mechanics who, in building hot rods, gave rise, then as now, to true advances in automobile design. See also the chopper shops of California, and their influence on the world of motorcycling.
A list of these shade-tree mechanics includes the Wrights, Cyrus McCormick, Henry Ford, Tesla, Tom Edison, Meg Whitman, Bill Gates, Burt Rutan, and Steve Jobs. How would they and American Industry have fared had Government gotten its hands upon them at the outset—if it had taxed away the capital necessary to provide a market for their wares; if it had taxed away the wealth, which, existing as gambling money, had taken a chance on these various visionaries? One need not wonder, but merely look around at the various businesses Government has aided. And now it has taken over health care.
15
THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Socialism and “Social Justice” are a sort of Sunday religion, professed one day a week for many good and bad reasons, but suspended during and due to the pressures of the workweek. One may bemoan the plight of the Palestinians, who have elected a government of terrorists and daily bomb their neighbor to the West, but we realize that any support past the sentimental is elective: we do not want to live there, nor to go there, and we blink at the knowledge that monies spent in their support may be diverted to the support of terror, and of organizations pledged not only to kill all the Jews, but to kill Americans and Westerners of all faiths.
Where does sympathy stop, and where may it not become sanctimony and hypocrisy?
Our American plane has been forced to land at some foreign airport, by the outbreak of World War III. It will not be allowed to depart. Two planes are leaving the airport; we must choose which we want to board. One plane is flying to Israel and one to Syria, and we must choose.
That’s where sympathy stops.
No one reading this book would get on the plane to Syria. Why? It is a despotism, opposed to the West, to women, to gays, to Jews, to free speech. It is a heinous Arab version of National Socialism, dedicated to the murder of every person in Israel. And yet one may gain status or a feeling of solidarity by embracing the “Arab cause.”39
But we embrace it only as an entertainment. In the free market, which is to say, when something is at stake, we will vote otherwise.
My interest in politics began when I noticed that I acted differently than I spoke, that I had seen “the government” commit sixty years of fairly unrelieved and catastrophic errors nationally and internationally, that I not only hated every wasted hard-earned cent I spent in taxes, but the trauma and misery they produced; and yet, I thought “the government” was good. What case could I point to to support my feelings? The Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act. Then I would have to stop and think.
It was, of course, easier to worship my own capacity for “good thinking” than actually to think, which is to say to compare my actions with their results. But I tired of it. I tired of hearing Israel condemned by Americans, and hearing Americans condemned by Europeans.
I prefer the company of those who are proud of their country, and proud of the
ir religion—the African Americans have it right, the American Liberal Jews are wrong; there is neither beauty, utility nor safety in identification with one’s oppressors.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed.
Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone.
People have differing needs. The notion that an honest exchange of views will solve all problems is an article of faith; which, like many another, is suspended in our daily lives.
It is fine for the uninvolved to say of everything, “The truth must lie somewhere in between,” but who on the Left says so, for example, of Abortion? The Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all. I do not see where there is a middle ground.
The divorcing husband would like to retain some money and visiting rights to his children, the betrayed wife would like him dead; anyone ever involved in a fight or a lawsuit knows that some conflicts cannot be settled peaceably. The Liberal attitude to our war with Radical Islam is a preference for that action which would end the conflict immediately, and without rancor. That action, unfortunately, is surrender.
American Liberals do not wish to surrender their particular country, but many wish Israel to surrender hers; they wish to have someone else (the Israelis) pick up the cost of their own psychological upset:40 if the Victim is Always Right, and if the Arabs, being darker and poorer, must be the Victim, then Israel must be wrong; further, this being so, the Arab démarches of “land for peace” must be a legitimate attempt to solve the problem, for the victim is always right. It matters not that every Israeli swap of land for peace has resulted in increased Arab attacks. To the Liberal there must be a peaceable solution, and the good-willed (though not the Israelis) see that that solution must be further negotiation, which is to say further concessions from Israel.
The essence of socialism is for Party A to get Party B to give something to Party C.
The Liberal West would like the citizens of Israel to take the only course which would bring about the end of the disturbing “cycle of violence” which they hear of in the Liberal press. That course is abandoning their homes and country, leaving, with their lives, if possible, but leaving in any case.
Is this desire anti-Semitism?
You bet your life it is.
16
THE VICTIM
Just as the Santa Claus myth is a reiteration in the vulgate of the Christ story, so the Love of the Victim is an attempt at a nondeist recreation of religious feeling. It may be found in its everyday, popular face, in the Woman-in-Jeopardy film.
Here the audience experiences vicarious worry and fear for the lot of the defenseless woman (or child), pursued by implacable Evil.
But with these slice-and-dice gothic and horror films, as with the Plight of the Palestinians, the interchange, in order to please, must be inconclusive. The weak, though they may momentarily triumph at the conclusion of any one film, must be available in their intrinsic state of powerlessness for the next go-round.
The woman’s victory over the ax murderer is not a portent of her change from victim to nonvictim, but merely a chance, momentary suspension of that state.
For, in our love of Women-in-Jeopardy films, and in the Left’s love of the Palestinians, there is something of the sadomasochistic. (If one truly deplored the fact of an alleged injustice, one might actually do something about it, but the West sees the Middle East conflict as entertainment; and part of our polymorphous enjoyment of the ending is that though the woman prevails, we know that she is exploitable again next film.)41
We confuse news with reality, and so do the news organizations. They are selling entertainment, and, like any good entertainer, will stress the facts likely to please the audience, and structure the rather confusing and nonconclusive nature of day-to-day existence as a drama.
Six houses were destroyed in the Israeli Army’s incursion into the Arab town of Jenin. It was described by the Western news as “The Rape of Jenin,” and a photo showing a supposedly wounded Palestinian child cradled in his mother’s arms went around the world.
Of less currency was the photo taken from an only slightly wider angle showing the mother and child completely surrounded by photographers, arrayed around the now obviously staged shot.42 But that second shot, though a better depiction of the actual state of events, had less entertainment value as part of an enjoyable spectacle of misery; to call attention to this would be as irritating to the consumers of “outrage” as would a film buff in the next seat at a horror movie explaining, shot by shot, how the effects were produced and that the woman screaming on the screen was actually an actress in no danger at all.
To do so would have lessened the viewer’s enjoyment of the Rape of Jenin.
For one of two things must be true, in the West’s abandonment of Israel: either it is known, at some level, that the Palestinian claims are insoluble, exaggerated, unjust, or skewed; or that the audience, in truth, does not actually care. For if they cared, they would do something, and as they do nothing, one must assume that action would put an end to their enjoyable position as viewer.
Michelle Obama famously declared that America is a “mean, mean country,” of which she was never proud until it nominated her husband for President. But this “mean, mean country” sent soldiers from the North to eradicate slavery (an action, I believe, unique in the history of the world), in a war fought at shocking cost, which would confer upon those who willingly risked their lives no benefit other than their participation in a cause they knew to be right. More than 360,000 Union soldiers died freeing the slaves. This is an actual abiding and permanent legacy of slavery. They died to extinguish evil.
Many in the West enjoy not the suffering, but the contemplation of the suffering of the Palestinians.
For a film one buys a ticket. What is the ticket one buys to enjoy this other spectacle? Its price is the indictment of the State of Israel, in contravention of history, of facts, reason, international law, and affinities, national, cultural, and traditional.
Just as at the movies we would resent the fellow in the next seat explaining the effects, so actual information about the Middle East conflict is considered an intrusion and a distraction from the spectacle. One has made one’s choice (bought one’s tickets) and would like to be left in peace to enjoy the show.
In films the villain is identifiable because he wears the black hat; in the Middle East spectacle he wears a yarmulke.
In 1895 Theodor Herzl was sent by his paper Neue Freie Presse to cover the trial of Dreyfus. Herzl’s cultural awakening came in seeing Dreyfus stripped of his badges of rank while the crowd screamed not “death to the traitor,” but “death to the Jews.”
It was a better story that way in 1895, and it is a better story that way today. But it is just a story.
The question, “Excuse me, what has Israel ever wanted except peace within its borders?” is greeted, largely, in the West, by the response: “Shut up, I’m watching the news.”
The bifurcation of Humanity (as opposed to acts) into two identifiable camps, Evil and Good, is, essentially, a childish act; the notion that one may gain merit from this division, and that this merit makes one the superior of the unenlightened, is the act of an adolescent.
Should such reductionism result in any actual social change, the adolescent intellectual is immediately supplanted by the Man of Action (the Tyrant), as observed by Eric Hoffer in The True Believer.
For just as the con man capitalizes upon the reluctance of the mark to ascribe evil motives to a chance acquaintance, the Jacobin, his motives limited to pursuit of power, easily supplants, and, traditionally kills, the fool dreamer who thought he was creating a paradise.
17
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bsp; PURITANS
He did not, like a Puritan, torment himself and others with scruples about everything that was pleasant.
—Macaulay, The History of England, 1848
Have we turned into a nation of maiden aunts?
Must one, upon risk of exclusion from polite society, decry all life as waste, and all differences of political opinion as heresy? Must the opening salvo of any conversation, interminably, be “Did you see what he/they did today?”
For, at least, one could say of Hitler and his assassins, that they enjoyed their anti-Semitism. But the Left proceeds, from day to day, in a sort of sad, wistful fury at all the things of life not recognized in its cosmogony.
To them, in an inversion of the truly, historically, Liberal philosophy, everything not permitted is forbidden.
But the Talmud cautions that when a man dies, he will be called to account for all the unenjoyed, permitted pleasures of this life, which, after all, were given to him as a gift.
And we have become a nation of noodges.
I have seen visitors at an art exhibition clear their paper plates of the residue of bad cheese, and put the plates in their purse, so as to avoid the waste of paper. Is this fun? Is it productive? Or is it just, rather, the physicalization of that same do-goodishness the apotheosis of which is the bumper sticker?
Do bumper stickers save whales, and free Tibet? By what magical process?
Dennis Prager said that the beautiful one-word haiku, the bumper sticker “Coexist,” that cunning exhortation both verbal and pictorial, its letters made of the Islamic crescent, the Cross, the six-point star, et cetera, that this work of art appears in the country on earth and in history uniquely dedicated to and achieving freedom of religion. He remarked, further, that were one to affix this bumper sticker to his car in Iran the car would be keyed and its occupants beheaded.
