David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

A woman on a transcontinental flight was having problems with her three-year-old twins. She swatted them, the stewardess came over to correct the mother, and the mother and she had some words. On landing, the mother was taken off the plane, indicted and convicted of terrorism, and served three months in prison. For she had disrupted a flight, and had spoken rough to a flight attendant and that, it seems, is now a Federal Crime.

The wise society must deal with transitional periods of youth. The young are confused, frightened, energetic, and require not stringency, neither laxity, but guidance , which will consist sometimes of the one and sometimes of the other. The guidance required by the rowdy nine-year-olds is also required by college students: They are full of idealism, but have no experience. They may so easily be subverted into sloganeering, for it gratifies the ego and, more importantly, obviates the fear of the unknown (adulthood). If everything one needs to know one knows now, there is no need to learn discernment, or to choose —there is no wisdom greater than “people are people.” And if all oppression must be stopped and there is nothing further to learn, then you are the fellow to do it. This demagoguery looses the student from the very constraints of thoughtfulness, courtesy, respect, circumspection, and patience, which, at age twenty-one, it is his final chance to learn. These habits, even absent a marketable skill, may help him begin to earn a living. But the recitation of aggressive, invidious slogans meant to shame stand little chance of doing so.

It is not that this Liberal Arts Student has too much leisure, he has nothing but leisure. I have spent forty years sitting alone at a typewriter, and will report that it takes time, and effort, trial and error, to learn how to structure one’s day productively when there is no one there but you.

It is impossible that the eighteen-year-old, in the laissez-faire of the Liberal Arts courses of Identity Politics, can do so. Of course he will look for certainty, and he will find it in the herd. Being equipped with neither experience nor philosophy, he will adopt the cant of those around him; and his elders, far from correcting him, endorse him, and, indeed, charge him for the experience, and call it “college tuition.” But it is Socialist Camp, and creative not of productive Citizens, but of intolerant, uneducated, and incurious graduates, who now, at age twenty-one or twenty-two, must either look for work bagging groceries, or defer the trauma of matriculation by a further course of “study.”

“Are gay people people too?” I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. “Are they aware of that fact?” I asked him. And he responded similarly. “Then why,” I asked, “as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?”

“Ah, but,” he said, “the straight people should see it.”

“Ah, but,” I said, “the straight people don’t care. They may reward themselves for the ability to be bored by a play with a Good Message, but they, just like the gay people, come to the theater to be entertained. Your enlightenment is insufficient to capture the audience’s attention for two hours. Would you like some hints on how to do so?”

But the class was over, and I left feeling like a fool, and sad. For the class members were not stupid, they were, as they should be at that age, idealistic; and the university’s disinterest in educating them to be of use in their society had turned their natural energy and idealism into a developmental difficulty. They were being drugged with self-indulgence.

I believe that the Liberal Arts University has had it. Like bottled water, the expense and the illusion of exclusivity are still attracting buyers, but what do they buy and what is it worth? The elite schools sell certification, which perhaps has some theoretical value in some theoretical marketplace, though little in the institutions into which these graduates pour.

What family or graduate is going to benefit from a degree in film or gender studies or, indeed, English literature? What are these people going to do, save spread the gospel of the use of their particular discipline in the hope of obtaining a place in the continuation of the farce?

We scoff at the hereditary Mandarin positions as “Keeper of the Buttonhook,” or “Strewer of Rose Petals in the Back Garden,” but what else is “Associate Professor of Gender Studies”? It means the particular institution wishes to display status by the conspicuous waste of treasure and time and so inveigle the insufficiently investigative (parents and students) to come, buy its hogwash, and swell its coffers. But as the economy implodes, there will be fewer and fewer students and families blinded by the display, and more and more sitting down at the kitchen table with paper and pencil, asking the question, “What do I give, and what do I get ?” which is the essence of responsibility, and it’s a question of which the developmentally challenged youth are unaware.

Scrooge asked, “Are there no Prisons? And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” and I might ask the same of the Trade School, the ROTC, the Military, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the Synagogues and Churches which have, traditionally, functioned to aid the youth toward a matriculation into society, and so to an actual sense of self-worth. But the sloganeering of the Liberal Arts school teaches the young not self-worth, but arrogance, and much of the rage and rancor these sloganeers project against the supposed unenlightened oppressors is uncathected rage against the adult generation which has abandoned them to the rowdy and inappropriate disruptiveness of their own devices.

Children crave discipline. Its absence frightens them, for they know themselves incapable of independent function; and the placards and “revolutionary Humanism” of today’s college students are nothing other than the four-year-old’s tantrum: he throws the tantrum in front of and for the benefit of his parents; he acts out his aggression in a protected setting. The child whose parents are absent, who is in the care of others, will not throw a tantrum, for he recognizes no one cares, and he had better figure out how to get his needs met in an environment not disposed to tolerate his nonsense.

25

OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA

In the fifties, Camp Kawaga was the Chicago Jewish summer camp. At Camp Kawaga (D.M., summers 1955–58) they played a recording of Taps each evening. It was preceded by a recording of “Ave Maria,” sung by one of the counselors with artistic ambitions. But the Camp was Jewish exclusively.

And on Sundays we had “Chapel,” at which, in the spirit of the Jew endeavoring to intuit the content of Unitarianism, the camp director read a poem by Douglas MacArthur.

The General had written, in love, a poem not to, but about his young son Arthur, and the poem had, somehow gained a wider distribution.

“Build me a Son, Lord,” it ran, “who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid,” et cetera, closing, after the conclusion of the recipe, with, “And then I, his father, may dare to whisper ‘I have not lived in vain.’ ”

I remember thinking, aged eight, that this was hot stuff.

I came across the poem after fifty-some years, in William Manchester’s biography of MacArthur, American Caesar , and found, reading the first few words, that I could quote the whole from memory. So I suppose it had made an impression.