David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

It is good for the State if the electorate has seen enough of life to notice the similarities between “Lose Weight Without Dieting,” and “Hope.” The magicians say the more intelligent the viewer is, the easier he can be fooled. To put it differently, the more educated a person is, the easier it is to engage him in an abstraction.

It has taken me rather an effort of will to wrench myself free from various abstractions regarding human interaction. A sample of these would include: that poverty can be eradicated, that greed is the cause of poverty, that poverty is the cause of crime, that Government, given enough money, can cure all ills, and that, thus, it should be so engaged.

These insupportable opinions (prejudices, really), function, in the West, much like a routine of magic tricks. The magician pulls a rabbit out of a supposedly empty hat, and while one wonders, “How did he do that?” he is already diverting the audience to a new trick—for he cannot give the audience time to dwell upon the effect. Neither can he repeat it—for the trick is a confounding of cause and effect. We watch the trick, and, in our surprise at its conclusion, remember it as the demonstration of a proposition. (I will cause a live cockatoo to appear from the front of my frilly shirt; watch.)

That is what the mind remembers, but that is not what actually occurred; for, had the magician said, “Watch my shirt to see if you can find the cockatoo,” the audience would do so. No, the magician makes a magic pass or two, and the shirt, upon which we had previously devoted no attention, gives forth the cockatoo, AS IF FROM NOWHERE. But the cockatoo did not come from nowhere, it was the frill on the shirt.

The trick of the politician and his fellow mountebanks, “Earn big money while never leaving your house!” is an inversion of the above: the dupe is told the proposition (I will now change the frill into a cockatoo; I will raise productivity and, thus, wealth, by taxing everyone to death, and driving capital out of the market), and then he is distracted from the fact that the trick has no conclusion. The politician says, “Watch closely, watch closely,” and then “Wait, wait, wait . . .” and, while our attention is diverted, he makes off with the money.

What did he just do , the opposition asks? He ruined the economy, took our savings, destroyed our ability to do business, and indebted our grandchildren. “Wait wait wait ,” say the believers, “You fool : didn’t he say, ‘It might take time ?’ ” And should the believers grow restive, a new effect (crisis) is right around the corner.

It takes an effort of will to observe the actual effects of human interactions. And greater effort to accept and then act upon one’s observations. Of late, it seems someone has Led Us into the Promised Land, promising all things to all people of Goodwill. And if his, one must admit, rather vague, program (Change and Hope) has not yet eventuated in the Growth of the Magic Tree from the Magic Beans, it is obviously because the tree needs more water. As any but a fool could see.

And we are left not only holding, but watching the bag. But the laws of cause and effect cannot be superseded. The Left says of the Right, “You fools, it is demonstrable that dinosaurs lived one hundred million years ago, I can prove it to you, how can you say the earth was created in 4000 BCE?” But this supposed intransigence on the part of the Religious Right is far less detrimental to the health of the body politic than the Left’s love affair with Marxism, Socialism, Racialism, and the Command Economy, which one hundred years of evidence shows leads only to shortages, despotism, and murder.

Here they are like the victim of the confidence game, who pleads with the con men to come back One More Time, and turn the handle on the new-bought machine which turns cardboard into hundred dollar bills.

Perhaps “you can’t cheat an honest man” because the struggle to live honestly has of necessity created the habit of honest observation.

The honest man might observe, for example, that no one gets something for nothing; that politicians go in poor and come out rich; that the Government screws up everything it touches; and that the Will to Believe is best confined to the Religious Venue, as, to practice it elsewhere is just too damned expensive.

34

HOPE AND CHANGE

Of patriotism he did not know the meaning;—few, perhaps, do, beyond a feeling that they would like to lick the Russians, or to get the better of the Americans in a matter of fisheries or frontiers. But he invented a pseudo-patriotic conjuring phraseology which no one understood but which many admired. He was ambitions that it should be said of him that he was far-and-away the cleverest of his party. He knew himself to be clever. But he could only be far-and-away the cleverest by saying and doing that which no one could understand. If he could become master of some great hocus-pocus system which could be made to be graceful to the ears and eyes of many, which might for awhile seem to have within it some semi-divine attribute, which should have all but divine power of mastering the loaves and fishes, then would they who followed him believe in him more firmly than other followers who had believed in their leaders.

—Anthony Trollope, The Duke’s Children , 1879

We are a democracy, and as such do not generally elect our best people to office. How could we? They weren’t running.

Those wishing to be elected must appeal, in the shortest time, to the greatest number. They are generally those comfortable with, enamored with, or incapable of understanding the potential harm of questionable generalities, which is to say, of mumbo jumbo. As with the football team, we like to elect the attractive to positions of management. Quarterbacks are handsome, as the most handsome kid, starting from the days on the sandlot, is elected quarterback; and, since the days of the first televised debates, the more attractive candidate usually wins. Attractive people are, more than the less favored, used to getting their way without effort, and so may possess that relaxation in front of a camera which may pass for assurance. We forget that most candidates are, in public appearances and those presentations we accept as debate, not only reading prepared speeches written by others, from a teleprompter, but, in response to questions, listening to cues from an offstage staff of experts, relayed to inner-ear receivers.

A politician I knew was fond of relating an anecdote his father had told him about Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt died, the man’s father came upon a workingman crying. “Why are you crying,” he asked, “did you know him?”

“No,” the man replied, “ he knew me. ”

Good story. But what can it mean? That Roosevelt “understood the fellow’s pains and troubles”?

If so, then he likely would have been more circumspect before tearing apart an economy the workings of which he neither understood nor wished to.

“ He knew me ” means that the fellow felt Roosevelt knew him. How was he brought to that feeling? By the President’s actions? More likely by his presentation. For Roosevelt spoke soothingly. He was a good radio performer, he had good writers, and so the listener was soothed. “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” is, indeed, a nice phrase—in the event, it would have been truer had he added, “And an out-of-control and ignorant Government intervention in our daily business.”