David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

Those who could master languages could, in our periodic dislocations, survive; those who could not would be deprived of the opportunity to reproduce.

Our cultural ratification of the mastery of Torah, thus, not only spiritually but as a matter of day-to-day existence, fulfilled God’s promise: that the Torah would be a Tree of Life to those who held fast to it. For the Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaic, and the Talmudic commentaries by Rashi in their own alphabet; the Chasidic masters taught in Yiddish; and the Talmud Hocham, the person learned in Talmud, is devoted to making connections between one part of the scripture and another, between one language and another, between one idea and another. He is celebrated for his ability to discover and cogently express his comparisons—regularizing the apparently disparate, and finding ambiguity in the supposedly unquestionable: vide, the success of the Jew.

The Jews’ survival mechanism enabled us not only to survive but to thrive. For the expansion of world trade required not only interpreters but middlemen and merchants, whose bonds transcended the national, who shared not only a common language but a moral system, who, as they were strangers everywhere, had no recourse other than allegiance to their particular sovereign, and whose business probity would be beyond question. Why beyond question? Because, as Jews, our lives were subject to the mere whim of the native population—why would they, who could “kill us for the sport,” hesitate to do so at the suspicion of malfeasance?

The paradigm of Joseph, who was second only to Pharaoh, is repeated over and over again not only in the Western World but in Arabia, where, intermittently, the most trusted advisors, ministers, and doctors were the Jews.

See President-Elect Obama, whose first appointment was the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a Jew; see Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under Bill Clinton, who discovered in late middle age that she was Jewish; see Kissinger in his relation to President Nixon. Disraeli, most trusted prime minister to Queen Victoria; Lord Beaverbrook, that is Max Aitken, closest ally of Churchill, and so on. The observable fact is, shockingly, that the world trusts the Jews.

The great American phrase has it: “He beat him like a redheaded stepson.” We Jews have been, since antiquity, the redheaded stepson of the world, which is to say, the Designated Victim. Having no country, we were a convenient object of loathing. Now, having a country, we retain our historical position in the world’s eyes as “usurpers”—as if it were possible to house anyone otherwise than on land to which someone must have had some previous claim. (The State of Israel was, in the main, purchased, at exorbitant rates, from the Turks, it was created as a British mandate ratified by the League of Nations, its existence as a State later ratified by the United Nations. It has existed by universally acknowledged right of self-defense. It has been under attack continually since its inception, and, time and again, it has vanquished its attackers, pushed them back, and then returned to them the lands from which they attacked . 75And yet, uniquely, in the history of the world, there are supposedly good-willed souls shrieking that its existence is a crime.) Well, the world distrusts foreigners, and however helpful a servant may be, he will pay for his acceptance when the silver teaspoon disappears; for his master-employer-host, will then react against his own supposed “generosity.”

So my people learn languages, which, historically, include the languages of law, medicine, finance, and the arts.

Our ability to master tongues is seen in the standup comic, who, like me, is essentially a societally supported smart aleck, and in his unemployed brother. This no-good brother is known as the Luftmensch, which means the fellow who lives on air. The Luftmensch survives through his ability to manipulate language, to be sufficiently charming, entertaining, and diverting to slip through life without doing a goddamn thing. This person was, in my father’s language, known as a “bum.” Growing up, I always believed that this was to be my place in the organization.

I could talk a great game, but as far as anyone (myself included) knew, I never did anything.

I loathed school. I never opened a schoolbook, I failed every test given to me (I was sent back from second to first grade, and was enrolled in remedial reading classes). It never occurred to me to point out the books that occupied all my leisure time, and suggest that perhaps they left me little time for Dick and Jane (“Oh Dick, see Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Jane, see Spot run,” et cetera).

The habit, inculcated at school and at home, of thinking myself a failure persisted through my school career, and, of course, it is to this ingrained assumption that I, in moments of despair, confusion, or indeed, boredom, default.

For, Common Wisdom (and what are the schools if not forcing houses for such?) can never be phenomenological; it must always be operational. The schools and the media must exist, that is, to disseminate and to inculcate and endorse only that “knowledge” already approved by the mass. This is neither a risible nor an unimportant function, as society must, to function, share attitudes and information likely to induce cohesion, but these studies bored me to death.

As a kid I loved comic books. My favorites were, unsurprisingly, the adolescent male fantasies: Superman, Batman, and so on. 76I never was a fan of the Archie comics, which were a lighthearted (that is, to me, worthless) look at essentially harmless juvenile hijinks. But one aspect of the Archie comics intrigued me. He was bracketed by two young women: blonde-haired Betty, who loved him, and black-haired Veronica, whom he loved but who scorned his advances. A close examination, however, revealed that, aside from the color of their hair, they were the same girl.

I have tried to apply this insight to many situations in life, and have found that it often answered. We subdue feelings of powerlessness with the illusion of choice; addicted to cigarettes, we are convinced that we are Camel rather than Lucky people; Coke rather than Pepsi people, Democrats rather than Republicans, 77and so on. These staunch loyalties, in addition to gratifying our feelings of perceptiveness, are the placeholders for those doctrinal differences, which once plagued the Christian West.

I knew, though I could not articulate, that while the schools existed to inculcate habit, they had and could have no interest in the dissemination of knowledge. This is not to say that schools did and do not spread information, of course they do, both good and bad, but this information, reducible in its benign form to the three Rs, can be learned as easily or more easily outside of school, where it is less apt to be tainted by the spurious though amusing doctrines which of late have come to characterize our Education System.

School bored me. And I was so sunk in the shame of my failure there that it took many years’ distance to see that school bored most everybody. As an autodidact, know-nothing, or “enthusiast,” and as one self-deprived of the benefit of “common knowledge,” I was inspired to create that unified theory of existence which, in its wholesale appearance is called philosophy and in its retail, drama.

Darwin tells us there must be variation in order to create balance. Balance cannot exist without variation.