David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

My daughter asked, “Who puts it there?”

The heiress paused for a while, and said, “ . . . I don’t know.”

The great fault of my generation is not ingratitude but incomprehension. Someone must make the money. Someone must provide the goods and services we all enjoy. Someone must look ahead, and struggle or be inspired to create those things which will improve our lives. It is not only the production of goods which requires money, it is invention. It needs the investment capital necessary to devise and gamble upon those wildest schemes which become the automobile, the airplane, modern pharmacology and medicine, the computer. The money has to come from somewhere. And it comes from the productivity of the American worker, his urge to create, his desire to consume, and his willingness to invest.

The Left sees only waste and greed. But the plastic bottled water from Fiji is no less destructive of the environment than the bottled soda from Akron, Ohio; and the American Military and its leaders are no less subject to both altruism and error than the leaders of Greenpeace, MoveOn.org, and so on.

The Left is ignorant of this: we are all in it together. The person before you in the traffic jam has as much right to his journey as you do to yours. You alone did not pay for the road, the road was built through tax dollars for the benefit of all, and carping about urban sprawl and desecration of the seashore and woodlands is finally just elitism—they are owned by all. 102The fellow with the snowmobile is as entitled to use it in the National Park for his vacation as is the millionaire to fly the private plane down to his beachfront house in Hawaii. The taxes are progressive, but the commonality—the environment and the blessings of democracy, are there to be enjoyed by all . A high income should not allow a greater say in the disposal and control of natural resources. Why is the Sierra Club’s desire to restrict access to and use of common land more worthy of respect than the oil drillers, who, after all, will be distributing the oil to consumers? You say some of the oil drillers will get rich? Why not? If their actions benefit the consumer. And the investor. Why not?

Who puts the snack in the refrigerator? Someone does.

The flow of traffic on the highway can be seen as a blot on the landscape, but only by the unthinking. A moment’s thought would reveal that the offensive vehicles and their offensive exhaust bring to the offended the goods they require, bring to the theatres the viewers whose ticket purchase pays for the moviemakers’ mansions, bring to their various workplaces those whose productivity makes the country strong and safe. One might say, “but there are so many of them, clogging the highway.” Yes, and you and I are two of them, and no more entitled to the space than anyone else—unless a higher income rate (or, indeed, a “more advanced view”) entitles one to a higher percentage of government services. (Which is, finally, the position of the Sierra Club.)

The great fault of my generation is ingratitude. The ignorance stemming therefrom leads to folly destructive of that very world which, while it may not be the unachievable, inchoate utopia the Left desires, is a wonderful place to live in, and has given us a great country.

What is this Utopia? It is the vulgate version of Heaven, where the lion lies down with the lamb, and no one is in want, where the believer has seventy virgins, and the supporter of All the Good Causes rests in peace, adored by the recipients of his Goodness.

But will human nature there be abolished? Will not the Politician look around, at this heaven, and see a bunch of sheep ripe for the picking, the womanizer glide among the now docile women, the thief, et cetera. Would not these be their Heaven?

And what of the Heavens on Earth, the Workers’ Paradises which foul villains have created? See reports of their operation, of Harry Hopkins’s 1930s visit to Russia: “I have seen the future and it works.” Of Jane Fonda’s trip to Hanoi: “No prisoners of war were mistreated.” Of Susan Sontag’s visit to Castro. 103These are and were lies. The committed were looking at hell, its horror screened, a false-front stage production presented to their happy credulity. 104

And yet, the current administration plans for a Socialist Utopia, where wasteful competition is gone, and America is “liked” overseas. But someone puts the yogurt in the little refrigerator.

My ungrateful generation, rich and poor, has been living off a trust fund: the productivity of our parents, and of the two hundred and more years work of those who preceded them. We want the Government to replace those parents from whose support we were never weaned. We, like the infant, think that crying harder makes the breast appear, that the wage earner is a fool not to perceive he is involved in waste, the boss that he is involved in exploitation, and our fellows indictable for their vicious unconcern for Mother Earth. And we wonder why Arab fanatics felt safe in bombing us.

36

BUMPER STICKERS

A bumper sticker of my youth read “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow Than Be a Victim of a Nuclear Bomb.”

This was the precursor of the gentler, more contemporary “War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Small Creatures,” and “War Is Not the Answer.” These of course, present a false choice: between death and surrender. But war may be forced upon one, in which case the choice is not between war and peace, but between defense and death. “War Is Not the Answer” supposes that the bumper sticker is going to be read by those questioning, in the abstract, the relative benefits of war and peace. The identity of those people escapes me.

Other possible readers of this philosophy might be those intending us harm—the bumper sticker here, acting, presumably, as a deterrent. But as the motto is attached to the hated possession of a despised, to their mind, depraved and subhuman denizen of a loathed civilization to the obliteration of which the reader has dedicated his life, its deterrent value is debatable.

To understand the motto’s deeper meaning, one might consider its antecedent. For, aside from identifying the driver to his philosophic like (such fraternity based upon another driver’s possession of the same bumper sticker), it is a call and an exhortation to an actual action, the action being surrender.

The sad but wiser possessor of the wisdom that War Is Not Good, in that it brings harm to the innocent, neglects to take into account that it is precisely for this reason that terrorists engage in it. “We spent several days being chauffeured, in that foreign land, by the nicest man, and we engaged in some very good debates, and I think that, at the end of our stay, we established some common ground.” Which of us has been sufficiently blessed as to have been spared the recitation of the Reasonable Cabdriver, and of the ensuing triumph of true humanitarian diplomacy?

But war occurs in the absence, the failure, or the impossibility of diplomacy. What common ground was there between Hitler’s desire to turn the world into a Nazi slave state, and the West’s desire to remain free? Or between the Arab vow to obliterate the Jewish State and the Israelis’ intention to remain alive and in possession of their country?

What is one to do if one’s opponent has determined that war is the answer—and if such opponent, further, obstinately holds to its position in spite of the well-meaning’s attachment to his car bumper of a suggestion to the contrary?

Well. If we look to the “Hands and Knees” progenitor of today’s more postmodern expression, we see the answer is preemptive surrender.