David Mamet - The Secret Knowledge

For it did not occur to the author of “Hands and Knees” that the choice is false, that one need neither be the victim of a nuclear bomb, nor crawl on one’s hands and knees to Moscow. One may arm oneself sufficiently to dissuade one’s opponent from War, and display sufficient resolve in the face of his threats, that he believes that our weapons, should their need arise, will absolutely be deployed. 105

Fifty years of that Cold War so decried by the Left kept the peace, and kept the nuclear bombs from being deployed. Had a sufficient number actually or figuratively crawled on their knees to Moscow (for example, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Susan Sontag, and the radical Left tout entière ), had they ended our nuclear armament as they ended the Vietnam War, it is possible that Communism, rather than having fallen, would now be the law of the land in an America turned into yet another of their slave-states.

What can it mean to a potential aggressor—the proclamation that one will not fight ? Note that such is not a pacifist doctrine, not the ahimsa of the committed Buddhist, nor the inviolable stance of the Quaker, but, rather, a proclamation of good-heartedness in the hope that it will win over the Aggressor State (the USSR, the Taliban, Iran, Al Qaeda).

“There is nothing you can do to me, my children, or my country that will cause me to defend myself,” is an accurate paraphrase of “I Would Rather Crawl on My Hands and Knees to Moscow.” But, the fundamental religious vows above excepted, there are some things the owner of the bumper sticker would do to defend, if not that in which he believes, that to which he is sworn. Would he fight to protect his wife from an intruder, his children from a rapist, his house of worship from an incendiary?

Perhaps yes. Then what, to his mind, is the difference between an individual act of defense and a concerted opposition to criminal, immoral actions on the part of another State? First, the Liberal’s feeling of exemption from service; next, his adoration of State Power, which may, most accurately, here be described as “slavish.”

If Fidel Castro and Che Guevara rob a few banks, and shoot a few landowners, they may or may not be considered criminals, but if they put up a flag, and proclaim a new Government, and remember to characterize this Government as “For the Workers,” they become, in the assessment of the Left, immediately worthy of respect. This hides the deep-seated wish of the Left for the existence of a wise and all-powerful State, a State which will Take Care of the individual, saving him from worries not only about health care, but about every other choice in his life.

The Left worships power, because it feels that power can be used to Do Good, and Absolute Power, could it only be achieved, because it could eradicate evil. The record of all human history does not suffice to eradicate this delusion; neither will the threat of death nor of our country’s dissolution. Who would offer the choice between walking on the knees and death by nuclear bomb? Our sworn opponents. The display of the bumper sticker is an acceptance of their proposition—it is preemptive surrender, signaling an absolute refusal—let alone to fight —to consider any defense (intellectual or military) of the American Way. The same supine love of power, today, in its hatred of Israel, in its love of that Victim Philosophy adopted and exploited by Arab Terrorists, announces surrender of the American Way to those gratified to hear of the choice.

If Peace is Good and War is Bad, and that is the end of the argument, if America and the West are incapable of progressing from the nursery rhyme to a consideration of realpolitik, then War can, indeed, be avoided, simply by giving our opponents everything they require, including, of course, the State of Israel, and the lives of all the Jews worldwide, and of nonbelievers, and the children of the same, and of the lands they possess.

In the study of jiujitsu one strives to apply a hold on his opponent and increase the pressure just sufficiently so that the controlled, if he finds no escape, signals his acknowledgment and the hold is relaxed. This is called tapping out. My young son and I were practicing jiujitsu. “In a real fight,” he asked, “you can still tap out, can’t you?”

“No,” I told him, “the definition of a real fight is one in which one cannot tap out.”

“Well then,” he asked, “what do you do?”

And I explained to him that in such a case you’d better win.

On his ten-year-old face incomprehension fought with the beginnings of maturity.

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LATE REVELATIONS

I did not serve in the military. I was deferred. However, had I not had this deferment, I would not have gone in any case, so the exemption which served me then cannot serve me now.

I knew no one who went to Vietnam. I knew no one who suggested that it was my duty to go to Vietnam. In the many years since my eligibility for the military, I regretted my exemption. I felt the lack of the military experience as a loss, and envied those who had served. It has lately occurred to me that my feelings in this regard were immoral—that a truer or more moral name for my nostalgia was not loss, or envy, but shame ; and that to characterize it as loss was merely to claim for myself another unearned exemption.

The Rabbis teach that the road to Glory (redemption) must begin with shame, and I ratify their insight in this case; for nostalgia and wistfulness can only intensify through time. They are, finally, just self-involvement in fantasy: an infantile wish for the benefits of a choice one did not make. But shame, a breaking open of the heart before God, leads, so the Rabbis say, to that true self-knowledge necessary for change.

For how can one change who cannot identify and accurately name the problem?

The Obama campaign slogans suggested the opposite: that change (by which one must understand them to have meant amelioration ) may happen absent not only real effort but the mere psychological honesty necessary for specificity.

I don’t think I have changed very much in my life, or in my self, over sixty years.

I was given a gift for dramatizing things, and have had the great fortune to practice it in the most congenial and exciting surroundings and with the salt of the earth. I’ve used this gift to support myself and my family, and have worked to learn the various skills involved happily—as their increase added to my satisfaction and to my larder.

I’ve worked hard at very few things, chief among them learning how to write a plot. This study involved wrenching myself free of an infatuation with my own talent, and, so, it was an encounter with shame.

I look back on my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder—as another exercise in self-involvement—rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

My twenty-year marriage has been an unrelieved joy. (Tolstoy wrote that there is no such thing as “working at” a marriage—that it is all or nothing.) My children and I adore each other; and the vicissitudes I have undergone as part of my profession have either been unavoidable (the press) or elective (whoring around Hollywood).

The question “What would you do differently?” I am privileged to see, as a result of my aperçu about the Military, is not only a foolish but a costly indulgence. The useful question is, “What will you do now ?”