David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

See the lyrics of songs. These, in my youth were moony, about the One Boy and Girl, then became about the joys of Freedom from Entanglement, and the folly of love, and now, in rap music, actually assert the desirability of spousal abuse and misogyny. Here we have a glimpse into the operation of evolution, and how the social and the genetic are linked; human life will change not because we have eaten more or less leaves off the trees ( pace , the environmentalists) as if we were giraffes, but because we have become infected with the bacillus of socialism—destroy the family, and trust the State.

But to follow the reasoning one step further, is it possible that the actual delusion of Socialism is a reaction to scarcity or to the perception of scarcity? That the herd, troubled by a burgeoning world population, has simply decided to stop: to stop breeding, to stop producing (the Net Exports of Goods & Services fell from–$78 billion in 1990 to–$669 billion in 2008) to stop consuming (green movements) and exploring (environmentalism)—that the herd reaction to supposed scarcity is a return to the savagery of the savannah, which, after the fact, is rationalized as Socialism?

I saw a Prius on the street, with a bumper sticker reading “The only nuclear reactor I want is 93,000,000 miles away.” Fine, but if one rejects nuclear, and coal, and drilling for oil, what will run the presses that print the bumper stickers?

The battle between Left and Right can be seen to take place on a chemic level. The Right says one must breed, one must produce, and explore, to keep our civilization vital and strong. The Left says we must stop doing all these things, and simply widen the herd. That if we widen the herd sufficiently there will be no more struggle and, so, no more anxiety—thus those institutions which sequester property to the use of its producers (the nation-state, marriage, etc.) may be and, indeed must be discarded as divisive and productive of rancor. The blather about “Americans’ image in the world” is an instance of this unconscious implication of a fraternity of the good-willed, from which we, because of (fill in this space) have been excluded.

What would make the Islamic Jihad happy? Our death, according to their repeated assertions. How might one placate them? One cannot (see the State of Israel’s efforts over sixty years). What, then, is our Image in the World?

Socialism is attractive because the effects of individual enterprise are unforeseeable and the weakened individual is incapable of dealing with anxiety.

One could not predict air travel in 1850, or penicillin in 1920, or the personal computer in 1940. One can, no less, predict today the marvelous and less than marvelous effects of free enterprise, either for the nation or the individual. The effects of the Socialism at the heart of the Left’s agenda, on the other hand, are completely predictable: a disappearance of the nation-state, and its conquest by the stronger-willed. This horrific vision offers only one benefit: it is completely predictable. See the Jews pleading with Moses to go “home” to slavery. “Were there not enough graves in Egypt?” (Exodus) But the magic return to nature seems to awaken no fear, for then we will simply love each other, share everything, and care for the earth of which we are stewards. Well and good, but under what system of laws? And what of those who, though recipients of our wisdom, want something more than or different from that which we have in our kind wisdom awarded them?

And who will guide this return to nature? Will there be many attempts to simplify our lives, and do away with pollution, and disease, and poverty, and care and worry, or will there be just the one, that of the State, from which all blessings flow, which never wanes but always waxes in power, and which cannot be wrong?

And how would the leaders of such a State be chosen? By vote? And how would they raise the money for their campaigns? Or should we all simply mass behind a leader so charismatic and well-spoken as to induce in the electorate that state of bliss which, though it may momentarily be indistinguishable from madness or satori, necessitates eventual return to a world made more complicated by our surrender?

A man the bulk of whose income is taxed has less incentive toward monogamy.

A weakening of monogamy will weaken and eventually destroy the ability of the family, any family, to transmit familial values and wisdom. This function will be taken over by the State (to a large extent it has been—see social studies classes in school and identity politics in college).

School vouchers are a grand idea, if for no other reason than they allow the family choice of institutional tenor and bias . An amusing school in my neighborhood has a billboard upon which one of their staff posts, weekly, ultra-Liberal and diverting messages. This week we find, “What about nationalizing the banks . . . hmm?” We have seen, in the past, also “Leaks—some good, some bad.” 66

This, in addition to brightening my drive time, is perhaps a good idea generally. Consider if each school were allowed, or indeed forced to post on a sign its political bias. It would make the job of parents easier. Well-to-do parents have a choice; everyone should have a choice, if for no other reason than to weaken the power of the State to form good-willed programs of social indoctrination.

27

THE ASHKENAZIS

I am the tag-end of that generation of Jews linked to the Ashkenazi Immigration.

The Ashkenazi, the Eastern European Jews, were, in the main, unassimilated in Europe. They lived in the Pale of Settlement, banished there by the Tsarina, in 1772, and, save in extraordinary circumstances, were barred from residence in cities. They were poor, they lived apart from their neighbors who, periodically, descended upon them, in Pogroms, notably, in my grandparents’ time, during which over two thousand Polish Jews were killed, 1903-1906. My grandparents left, on my mother’s side in 1918 and, on my father’s in 1922. Those who stayed behind, in Warsaw, and on the Bug River, the Russian-Polish border, died, killed by Stalin or Hitler.

My grandparents came to the United States. My paternal grandfather, Jack, made a bit of money investing in Chicago real estate with his brother-in-law in the twenties, lost it all in the Crash, and lived as a traveling clothing salesman, on the road throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana, gone five days a week.

My father’s mother was deserted by her husband, my grandfather. She raised her two boys, my father and my uncle Henry, by herself, in the Depression, working at an assortment of jobs, the highest paid of which was as a clerk in the Fair, a downtown Chicago department store.

All four grandparents came here with nothing—with little or no command of English, and all their children went to college, and, if not on to great success, to comfort and stability. The boys enlisted in the Army, the girls got married young and were—as was then the norm—housewives.

I and the people I knew, my friends and their families, had a close relationship with the immigrant generation. On Friday nights we went to celebrate Shabbos at the grandparents’ house. We celebrated the Jewish holidays together, we heard their stories of life under the tsar and under Stalin; of pogroms, raids, forced enlistment—dragooning of Jewish males for twenty-five years of military service; of attendance (of my great-uncle) at the first Zionist Conference in Basel in 1897. Other than that, we, in my own as in many Ashkenazi families, had little or no Family History. Every house had the samovar, which, along with the Shabbos Candlesticks, was all that remained from the Immigration—indeed, it was usually all that came over. By my teenage years, the samovar, in our house and that of our friends, had first been turned into a lamp, and then had vanished. The Shabbos candlesticks remained, but, on the passing of the grandparents, were not used. For we were assimilated Jews.