The Secret Knowledge

by David Mamet

  74 As have all stateless people. See Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America, his examples including the overseas Chinese, the Indian population of Africa, the Ibo, et cetera.

  75 I challenge the reader to supply any other example in history of such behavior. Were the perennial returns acts of altruism? No. They were undertaken at the insistence of the United States and the United Nations. But this merely begs the question: Why was Israel, uniquely in Modern History, held by the world to possess its legal State only as an act of sufferance, and, attacked, required to surrender land it had won from its attackers?

  76 This genre, the Superhero who must hide his “everyday” identity, is a creation of and the fantasy of the Jews. Superman (Siegel and Shuster), Batman (Bob Kane, né Kahn), and the Marvel Superheroes, created by Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), were the fantasies of the outsider who was accepted, indeed revered, only when he was saving society, that is, doing that from which someone else benefitted; otherwise, he was ignored—a nonentity. Clark Kent couldn’t even get a date.

  77 What Conservative has not had the experience of concluding a discourse with a Liberal friend in which the Liberal acceded to all the Conservative’s points but on being asked, “Well, then why do you vote Democratic?” replied, “I’m a Democrat.”?

  78 “The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize–winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. . . . Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010) “Climate scientists allied with the IPCC have been caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception that could spell the beginning of the end for the acceptance of man-made climate change theories. On Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr. James Hansen, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. ‘This is startling,’ reports the London Telegraph. ‘Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its ‘worst snowstorm ever.’ ” Paul Joseph Watson, PrisonPlanet.com.

  “Similarly, the Washington Post announced in July 2001 that Peruvian glaciers were rapidly retreating because of global warming. Their expert? . . . Benjamin Morales, ‘the dean of Peru’s glaciologists.’ Morales said, ‘The temperature was rising very slowly until 1980, and then’–he swept his arm up at a steep angle. However, had Morales looked at the climate records of surface temperature or satellite-measured air temperatures (at elevations where glaciers reside), he would have discovered that since 1979 Peru had been experiencing a cooling trend.” John R. Christy, “The Global Warming Fiasco.” Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose chief interests are satellite remote sensing of global climate and global climate change.

  79 Fear of Global Warming was, in the seventies, and as propounded by many of the same scientists, a fear of Global Cooling. See also Malthus’s early-nineteenth-century assurance that as population outstripped agricultural production, Humanity must soon and inescapably starve. See also the Y2K scare, antinuclear hysteria, and the yearly assurance that some new influenza is going to devastate the population.

  80 “So the life you describe . . . that’s what we want to reward.” (President Obama, September 20, 2010; emphasis added) Can one imagine a statement more chilling from the elected leader of a Democracy?

  81 Here is an example: Family members may hurt each other; it is impossible, in the intimacy of the family, not to transgress feelings, and, indeed, not to break laws. Family members might steal from each other, and the victim might feel anger, rage, disappointment, and similarly imaginable feelings. But that a disgruntled family member might denounce another to the IRS is beyond anathema.

  We all understand the difference. Yet where is it written? The written law proceeds from the unwritten law. The unwritten law is worked out over millennia, through actual human interactions. It is learned through immersion in the unit-in-question: the country, the city, the profession, and, first and most importantly, the family.

  This is why the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, is the story of a family, and how the lessons learned therein extend horizontally and vertically and construct the society. All dictators work first to destroy the family; the Liberal State, in its insistence upon secularization, globalism, “diversity,” and so on, apes this operation of a dictatorship.

  82 Else we, the spectators (the electorate) are paying not to see how the teams progress, but how the ref feels on that particular day (legal activism).

  83 See the Nazis’ insistence on involving as many as possible in the murder of the European Jews. Those who complied had burned their boats, inextricably wedding themselves to the Nazi cause, as to be conquered meant to risk execution as murderers.

  84 Is the Government capable of funding actual innovation? It is disposed to fund only that which benefits the current officeholders. I tax the readers to supply instances to the contrary, and remind them that, for years, the Government has funded only that “science” which supports the fiction that the earth is warming, that it has marginalized or debunked information to the contrary, and that it has called this process, “research.”

  85 See Government Healthcase (Obamacare). on the verge of bankrupting the country, and so attractive to the individual buyer that his failure to avail himself of it will be a Federal Crime.

  86 Thomas Sowell cites the severe housing shortage in wartime San Francisco. At the conclusion of the war, the government restrictions on housing were lifted, and the housing shortage disappeared immediately, in spite of the influx of the returning servicemen.

  87 The terrible danger of these formulations lies in the excision of the subject—“the Government shall take from each according to his ability,” and “the Government shall give to each . . .” etc.

  88 The newscaster.

  89 As they were once widely used to pay eugenicists—those “social scientists” who advised upon which classes of citizens should be sterilized in order to ensure a healthier population.

  90 Note that however Marxist one may be, he, if he possesses the funds, is going to take his severely ill loved one to the best doctor he can find, putting aside, for the moment, the question of global inequality in compensation.

  91 California has, for quite some time, had the highest taxes in the nation. Yet our schools are broke, and the citizenry has put on the ballot an initiative calling for a surtax to fund education. Where did all the previous money go?

  92 Is this impossible? It is inevitable. If all medicine is under Government control, the good surgeon, unable to exercise the panache, initiative, intuition, and liberty which may have led him into the profession in the first place, will have no incentive to investigate further than the bad—his desire to spend more time with or use more facilities on a patient will be thwarted by the rules which the Government—in order to control costs—must install. To work harder, longer, and, so better than the less accomplished or inspired surgeon will not only be contrary to the terms of his employment, but may, should he persist, cost him his job. Should this seem outlandish, consider the horror tales of doctors not only dismissed but blacklisted by the HMOs which employed them. It is not that the inferior surgeon will be paid as much as the accomplished, but that the wages of the accomplished will be reduced to parity with his lesser colleague—and, as the wages are reduced, so will be the quality, inevitably, of his work, for he will be told that in spending more time he is wasting the Government’s money.

  But what, you might ask, of that surgeon so inspired that he, irrespective of the strictures placed upon him by that Government w
hich has, effectively, reduced him to the status of a medical clerk or technician, what if he, in the age-old spirit of the Hippocratic oath, “bootlegs,” his own time, and expends his own resources to bring a patient to health according to his best lights? Q. Is this not the essence of the Spirit of Medicine? A. It has been down through the ages, but the tradition, for the reasons above, must cease with Government control. Q. But what if the courageous surgeon, true to his creed, insists in this traditional dedication, in excess of that which the Government prescribes? A. Well, then, shouldn’t he be paid more?

  93 See the Wisconsin union teachers calling in sick (lying) and employing their stolen treasure picketing the state capital for greater “rights.” Many wore T-shirts reading PROUD TO BE AN EDUCATOR.

  94 Some will doubtless cavil that the above is merely a restatement of the Victorian canard that “every man should be happy in the place to which it has pleased God to call him.” To the contrary, it is the assertion that he be allowed the freedom to improve himself, the judge of his accomplishments or “worth” to be not the State, but those individuals, his fellow citizens, whom he has pleased with his goods and services. This may or may not be “fair,” but it is the basis of a just society.

  95 Note that even if all elected officials were wise, patient, and capable of all discernment—if they were not the power-mad vote-mad corrupt or corruptible individuals all human history has shown them, in the main, to be—if these officials were actually able to determine solutions to the ancient and heretofore ineradicable problems of unfairness, poverty, greed, and envy—if they were sufficiently capable to supplant the rule of law with their own intuitions, and to codify these intuitions into plans, the plans would still be administered by the same functionaries we see today in Government jobs, with whom we have to deal, pleading, begging, asking, stunned, for justice, and for fairness in the application of the laws (which is to say, for that result we desire).

  96 Is it not evident that any organization believing itself “too big to fail,” will more likely, indeed, inevitably, make disastrous decisions? Why should it not—it is Too Big to Fail. But the first rule of any healthy concern is prudence.

  97 Thomas Sowell replies, to the canard of the Left, “Yes, but what would you replace it with?” “When a fire is extinguished, what do you replace it with?”

  98 Statism must devolve into totalitarianism, as, the state’s power growing, political antagonists will find more commonality with each other than with those not invited to the party (the voters).

  99 Correspondence from a friend: “I remember, as a student at Columbia, Mark Rudd and his ilk would storm the Dean’s office and burn our transcripts. Of course he never bothered to ask whether we wanted them burned or not.” (R.T., 2010) But it was change.

  100 “Things change. The world’s best rapper is white, the best golfer is black, and France is accusing Israel of Colonialism.”—Jacob Dayan, Consul General of Israel to the United States

  101 “Multiculturalism” and “diversity”—now insisted upon as a basic tenet of education, is, of course, directed at Whites. What Black or Hispanic enclave or group insists upon the presence of Whites? Why should they? Why, then, is the White population devoted to this show-and-tell? It is the essential counterweight to affirmative action—the postmodern version of busing. The enormity of these programs is less that they, fatuously, endorse the exposure of whites to People of Color, but that they operationally support the inverse, the idea that these People of Color benefit from White condescension. As such, “diversity” is the stalking horse of affirmative action—it is a happy proclamation of Black inferiority.

  102 As Thomas Sowell said, one might complain that this or that activity “ruins his neighborhood”; but that one does not own his neighborhood—he merely owns his house. The attempt to have governmental bodies enforce zoning (and environmental) rules for the benefit of incumbents is a misuse of the power of the State.

  103 “The sense of community perceived in Cuba was not only nurtured by the political designs and ideology of the system, but had its subterranean reservoirs and supports in the stereotype of the joyful, life affirming attitude, attributed to the musically gifted song-and-dance loving natives, their natural and politically engendered vitality.” Susan Sontag wrote, “The Cubans know a lot about spontaneity, gaiety, sensuality, and freaking out. They are not linear, desiccated creatures of print culture.’ ” (Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims, quoting Susan Sontag’s Some Thoughts)

  104 In his book Political Pilgrims, Paul Hollander quotes Simone de Beauvoir on her visit in the 1950s, to China: “. . . not a model prison; it was simply the only one in the city area . . . what a difference between this and the American system. (Here) they have a field for sports at their disposal, a big courtyard with a theatre where a movie is shown or a play presented every week. The day I was there they were rehearsing a play of their own. There is also a reading room stocked with books and periodicals where they can sit and relax.” Quoted from de Beauvoir, The Long March.

  Please note “the day I was there . . .” the coincidence between de Beauvoir’s visit, and the “happenstance” of the staging of the play. Was this woman a complete fool, or just criminally deluded? And, finally, to those who suffered under Mao, and to those on the Left inspired to deny their sufferings, by her recitation, what is the difference?

  105 The Obama administration (on April 6, 2010) announced a new directive regarding our Nuclear Arms—that they will never be employed against a Non Nuclear Power. Such a power, now, is free to use biological warfare, germ warfare, poison gas, and so on, free from worry about response from our superior technology. Whom, in the name of God, does this directive benefit save our enemies?

  106 (Whittaker Chambers, Witness, 1952)

  107 President Obama, in a radio interview at a ballpark, was asked if he, as a Chicagoan, preferred the Sox or the Cubs. He claimed he was a Sox fan, twice mispronounced the name of Comiskey Park, twice referred to the umpire as “the judge,” and, asked for his favorite White Sox, past or present, could not come up with one name. Sigh.

  108 Note that, to a parent, most fatuous of pronouncements, that of the childless upon child rearing, which begins, “my niece . . . ”