David Mamet: The Secret Knowledge

62

I do not hate women. I do not like that woman.

63

“So the life you describe—one of responsibility, looking after your family, contributing back to the community—that’s what we want to reward,” President Obama, to a working-class questioner at a town meeting, September 20, 2010.

A study of Black “Toasts,” that is, song-sagas, records a couple of ditchdiggers singing, while, above them, a folklorist makes notes on their quaint ways. The folklorist tires, takes out a pocketknife, and, absently, begins throwing it into the ground. One of the ditchdiggers interpolates, into the toast, “We’re down here, and we’re ’most dead. He’s up there playing mumblety-peg.” (Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me )

64

And note, Ms. Steinem, that it is not the job of an actor to “express her real self.” (Which of us knows what his real self is?) It was her job to entertain the audience . That was her job . And she did it as well as anyone who ever acted. What entertainment has ever come from your beloved solipsism? Would you go to see such a performance—an evening of someone “expressing her true self”?

65

Senator Clinton wrote that it takes a village to raise a child. But she, as the good mother she appears to be, would not consider having her daughter raised by a village, which she would, correctly, see as a dereliction of duty as the kid’s mom. A village neither can nor should raise a child. That, as the Senator knows, is the job of the Family. Further, where are these supposed villages the Senator would like to reconstitute as orphanages? We are no longer a rural population, and the small communities the Senator names as the village’s assigns have, in the main, been destroyed by Government good intentions.

66

The B.P. Gulf oil leak, that is, was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on Wikileaks was good. Why?

67

Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man ; see also Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell.

68

Which word’s most basic meaning is “awareness.”

69

If the distribution of benefits according to a person’s genes is wrong, if absolute renunciation of such is a hallmark of a just society, then affirmative action must be as injust as chattel slavery. Is it less pernicious? For the moment, yes; is it less unjust? No. It is a distortion of law, which is to say, of conscience, in the name of sympathy—it is the sin of Nadab and Abihu.

70

How could it be otherwise? There is only so much money, and the government cannot provide “aid” to everyone. Whose claim, then, will be smiled upon? Only that which enhances the power of its administrators. What human being, in office, would do otherwise? He who is pure-of-heart? How in the world would he have been elected?

71

These laws are the great possession of the American people, and they change as the ethos of the time changes, the fugitive slave law being superseded by the Fourteenth Amendment, for example.

72

No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”

73

As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will necessarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.

74

As have all stateless people. See Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America , his examples including the overseas Chinese, the Indian population of Africa, the Ibo, et cetera.

75

I challenge the reader to supply any other example in history of such behavior. Were the perennial returns acts of altruism? No. They were undertaken at the insistence of the United States and the United Nations. But this merely begs the question: Why was Israel, uniquely in Modern History, held by the world to possess its legal State only as an act of sufferance, and, attacked, required to surrender land it had won from its attackers?

76

This genre, the Superhero who must hide his “everyday” identity, is a creation of and the fantasy of the Jews. Superman (Siegel and Shuster), Batman (Bob Kane, né Kahn), and the Marvel Superheroes, created by Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber), were the fantasies of the outsider who was accepted, indeed revered, only when he was saving society, that is, doing that from which someone else benefitted; otherwise, he was ignored—a nonentity. Clark Kent couldn’t even get a date.

77

What Conservative has not had the experience of concluding a discourse with a Liberal friend in which the Liberal acceded to all the Conservative’s points but on being asked, “Well, then why do you vote Democratic?” replied, “I’m a Democrat.”?

78

“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize–winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders. . . . Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010) “Climate scientists allied with the IPCC have been caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception that could spell the beginning of the end for the acceptance of man-made climate change theories. On Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr. James Hansen, announced that last month was the hottest October on record. ‘This is startling,’ reports the London Telegraph . ‘Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its ‘worst snowstorm ever.’ ” Paul Joseph Watson, PrisonPlanet.com.

“Similarly, the Washington Post announced in July 2001 that Peruvian glaciers were rapidly retreating because of global warming. Their expert? . . . Benjamin Morales, ‘the dean of Peru’s glaciologists.’ Morales said, ‘The temperature was rising very slowly until 1980, and then’–he swept his arm up at a steep angle. However, had Morales looked at the climate records of surface temperature or satellite-measured air temperatures (at elevations where glaciers reside), he would have discovered that since 1979 Peru had been experiencing a cooling trend.” John R. Christy, “The Global Warming Fiasco.” Christy is a climate scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville whose chief interests are satellite remote sensing of global climate and global climate change.

79

Fear of Global Warming was, in the seventies, and as propounded by many of the same scientists, a fear of Global Cooling. See also Malthus’s early-nineteenth-century assurance that as population outstripped agricultural production, Humanity must soon and inescapably starve. See also the Y2K scare, antinuclear hysteria, and the yearly assurance that some new influenza is going to devastate the population.

80

“So the life you describe . . . that’s what we want to reward.” (President Obama, September 20, 2010; emphasis added) Can one imagine a statement more chilling from the elected leader of a Democracy?