Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
Chapter 2 - THE AMERICAN REALITY
Chapter 3 - CULTURE, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS, THE AUDIENCE, AND THE ELEVATOR
Chapter 4 - ALCATRAZ
Chapter 5 - LOST HORIZON
Chapter 6 - THE MUSIC MAN
Chapter 7 - CHOICE
Chapter 8 - THE RED SEA
Chapter 9 - CHICAGO
Chapter 10 - MILTON FRIEDMAN EXPLAINED
Chapter 11 - WHAT IS “DIVERSITY”?
Chapter 12 - THE MONTY HALL PROBLEM AND THE CONTRACTOR
Chapter 13 - MAXWELL STREET
Chapter 14 - R100
Chapter 15 - THE INTELLIGENT PERSON’S GUIDE TO SOCIALISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM
Chapter 16 - THE VICTIM
Chapter 17 - PURITANS
Chapter 18 - THE NOBLE SAVAGE
Chapter 19 - ADVENTURE SLUMMING
Chapter 20 - CABINET SPIRITUALISM AND THE CAR CZAR
Chapter 21 - RUMPELSTILTSKIN
Chapter 22 - MY FATHER, AL SHARPTON, AND THE DESIGNATED CRIMINAL
Chapter 23 - GREED
Chapter 24 - ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 25 - OAKTON MANOR AND CAMP KAWAGA
Chapter 26 - FEMINISM
Chapter 27 - THE ASHKENAZIS
Chapter 28 - SOME PERSONAL HISTORY
Chapter 29 - THE FAMILY
Chapter 30 - NATURALLY EVOLVED INSTITUTIONS
Chapter 31 - BREATHARIAN
Chapter 32 - THE STREET SWEEPER AND THE SURGEON, OR MARXISM EXAMINED
Chapter 33 - SELF-EVIDENT TRUTH
Chapter 34 - HOPE AND CHANGE
Chapter 35 - THE SMALL REFRIGERATOR
Chapter 36 - BUMPER STICKERS
Chapter 37 - LATE REVELATIONS
Chapter 38 - WHO DOES ONE THINK HE IS?
Chapter 39 - THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE
Acknowledgements
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
SENTINEL
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in 2011 by Sentinel, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © David Mamet, 2011
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Mamet, David.
The secret knowledge : on the dismantling of American culture / David Mamet. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-51535-8
1. Right and left (Political science)—United States. 2. Political culture—United States. 3. United States—Politics and government—21st century. I. Title.
JK1726.M36 2011
320.51’30973—dc22 2010049347
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This book is dedicated to the memory of my father.
Most initiations are about the devolution of responsibility. At the same time, initiations often double as a long and confused moment of shared truths. Essentially, what the adults, elders, or senior members of the group share with the initiates is the knowledge they possess, and then they admit to a terrible secret, the secret of the “tribe”—that beyond the knowledge the initiates have just been given there is no special knowledge.
—Anna Simons, The Company They Keep
1
THE POLITICAL IMPULSE
All religions stem from the same universal needs. Each contains awe, obedience, grace, study, prayer, and submission. Each religion will order and stress these elements differently, but their root is the same—a desire to understand the Divine and its intentions for humankind.
The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.
Emotions may elevate practical partisan differences to the realm of the spiritual or doctrinal, which is to say, the irreconcilable—Democrats, notably, are more likely to credit terrorists taken in battle against our country rather than Republicans, and many liberal Jews to believe the statements of Hamas rather than those of Israel.
In the election of 2008, environmental, social, and financial change were the concerns of both parties. The Right held that a return to first principles would arrest or re-channel this momentum toward bankruptcy and its attendant geopolitical dangers. It suggested fiscal conservatism, greater and more efficient exploitation of natural resources, lower taxes, a stronger military. The Left’s view was to suggest that Change was good in itself—that a problem need not be dealt with mechanically (by acts whose historical efficacy was demonstrable) but could be addressed psychologically, by identifying “change itself” as a solution.
The underlying question, common to both sides, was how to deal with this problematic change; the Conservative answer, increased exploitation of the exploitable and conservation of needless expenditure—in effect, sound business practice; that of the Liberals a cessation of the same. Each were and are interested in Security, the Liberals suggesting détente and the Conservatives increased armament; each side was interested in Justice, the Conservatives holding it will best be served by the strict rule of law, the Liberals by an increase in the granting of Rights.
This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.
My early plays, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Glengarry Glen Ross, concerned Capitalism and business. This subject consumed me as I was trying to support myself, and like many another young man or woman, had come up against the blunt fact of a world which did not care.
I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad, although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings. I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.
As a youth I enjoyed—indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered—the agitprop plays of Brecht, and his indictments of Capitalism. It later occurred to me that his plays were copyrighted, and that he, like I, was living through the operations of that same free market. His protestations were not borne out by his actions, neither could they be. Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system—which is to say by the accrual of wealth—house, support, and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.