David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

The wastrel son gambles, at no cost, for the thrill it provides; the wastrel politician does so in pursuit of fantasy (good works), or money. The money may be in direct support for his campaigns, or in free redecorating of his summer home; or it may be issued in the form of plaques recognizing his good works, which plaques, on his retirement from office, may be traded in for money.

33

In the late sixties I was driving a cab, and stopped for a cup of coffee at Mike’s Rainbow Café, the cabdriver’s all-night joint. I began talking to a fellow driver, a man around eighty, who, he told me, had in his youth driven for Robert Todd Lincoln.

34

Which is the essence of “Affirmative Action,” however else it may be described.

35

E.g., the U.S. Constitution.

36

Is this fanciful? Consider the case of Creekstone Farms of Kansas. During the Mad Cow scare of 2003, this beef producer developed and sold to the Japanese its own beef, raised, tested, and guaranteed to be absolutely free of the disease. The United States Government ruled that it was not free to do so. Why? Whom could this ruling possibly benefit, save those meat producers who did not choose so to raise their beef; and why in the world would legislators take up their ridiculously transparent and immoral cause if they were not suborned?

37

Compare Keeper of the Royal Bedchamber with the Hollywood studio title Director of Development. For the lay reader: No movie has ever been made from “development.”

38

As the Wrights did in their bicycle shop.

39

What, detractors might ask, does this prove? Does it mitigate against the “Crimes” and “Colonialism” of Israel, as popularized by the United Nations? I deny these crimes exist, and that Israel is an oppressive or colonialist power (to those interested I suggest the following books: The World Turned Upside Down, Melanie Phillips; What Went Wrong? , Bernard Lewis; and Myths and Facts:A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Mitchell Geoffrey Bard.)

But, let us assume you feel that Israel is neither a laudable precious democracy, nor an ordinary Western country neither good nor bad, but is guilty of all the horrors alleged of it—I assert that you would still fight with every force and argument at your command to get on the Israeli plane, you and every hard Leftist and every head-shaking misinformed One-Worlder and anti-Semite up to and including Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky, would, if the issue were his life, suspend his most cherished convictions of Israeli perfidy, and plead for the protection of that state he would then not only acknowledge but assert to be his ally, and further assert, as such, that their intercession in his fate was simple human decency toward their own kind—a member of a Western democracy.

There is nothing any reader of this book would not say or do to get himself and his family on the Israeli plane. Thus, delight in reviling the Jewish state reveals a certain inconsistency.

40

What is the Liberal’s dilemma? That he is forced to choose —to weigh rationally two positions, and base his choice upon an honest assessment of his own probable actions under similar circumstances. He is asked, finally, to be moral —the cost, however, of such action, is too high. It is his exclusion from the Group.

41

The Liberal West “enjoys” the Plight of the Palestinians much as it enjoys the purchase of “fair trade” coffee—it is a stimulant additive—self-righteousness being superadded to the morning’s newspaper and caffeine.

42

And the video that shows the now smiling child rise and remove his bandage when the still-photographers leave.

43

The Left’s hatred of the Right is based, as is most hatred, upon fear. The Left truly does not understand what the Right means—the principles of Conservatism are not merely foreign, and not even, primarily, objectionable, to the Left. They are incomprehensible, and so inspire the fear of the unknown. This fear is expressed as hatred of evil. What is the Conservative position the Left is absolutely incapable of understanding? That we have a choice .

44

“One aspect of social organization is to be found in economic activity, and this, along with the other manifestations of a group activity is to be found in a P.O.W. camp. . . . [T]hrough his economic activity, the exchange of goods and services, [the prisoner’s] standard of material comfort is considerably enhanced . . . he is not merely ‘playing at shops.’ [This is] a living example of a simple economy [and] its simplicity renders the demonstration of certain economic hypotheses both amusing and instructive. . . . But the essential interest lies in the universality and the spontaneity of this economic life; it came into existence not by conscious imitation but as a response to the immediate needs and circumstances.” (R. A. Radford, “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp,” Economica vol. 12, 1945.) As does and as must any free economic organization.

45

“Perhaps the first thing a visitor to Cuba notices is the enormous energy level. It is still common, as it has been throughout the ten years of Revolution, for people to go without sleep—talking and working several nights a week . . . it seems sometimes as if the whole country is high on some beneficient kind of speed. And has been for ten years.”

“Cuban culture lacks any equivalent of the Protestant ethic to draw on; people must be inculcated about matters we take for granted.” (Emphasis added.)

“Our charge (AMERICAN RADICALS) is seen as not one of forming but of dismantling (emphasis in original) a consciousness . . . hence the anti-intellectualism of the brightest kids: their distrust of books, school.”

“The sense of community perceived in Cuba was not only nurtured by the political ideology of the system, but had its subterranean reservoirs and supports in the stereotype of the joyful, affirming attitude, attributed to the musically gifted song-and-dance loving natives, their natural and politically engendered vitality” From: Susan Sontag: “Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,” Ramparts , April 1969.

There we have from a supposedly intelligent and observant human being, not only a recitation, but an unconscious confession of her immersion in a fantasy: The workers, though naturally happy, have not seen the potential increase in their joy brought about by continuous work without sleep; they must be inculcated in the new, political reality. American children, likewise, must discard books and schools and intuit their responsibility to dismantle their culture, reverting, thus, to the bliss of the song-loving natives off our coast.

46

“Never let a good crisis go to waste.”—Rahm Emanuel

47

For a perfect dramatic representation of this crisis see Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai . He has spent the whole film building a bridge for his enemies, the Japanese. It is only at the film’s end, as he is trying to stop its destruction by his own army that he realizes his crime and says, “What have I done?”

48

The Nazi swastika was a cross. The USSR’s hammer and sickle, just somewhat less identifiably, was one also.

49

Any theory put into practice may have its failure ascribed to underfunding, insufficient time for results, or the unfortunate, still insurmountable burdens placed upon it by a previous administration—this being the totality of the Obama administration’s explanation of its dismal performance.

50

Compare Marcus Garvey’s “Up, you Mighty Race, you Race of Kings. You can accomplish what you will.” (recorded 1921)