Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbors.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenseless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

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Harvard University has no shame

By David Mamet

On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighborhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

Were women being exploited by the Suits? Everyone was. The agents were lying both to their clients and to the Studios; nobody knew what a “manager” did. Very few artists got anything like a fair count, and the awards were generally for sale, as were the results of audience surveys.

Many a studio Head (I will name no names) rose to the gig through training as a pimp. Those who could offer sweet young things to The Money from Back East became The Power. (See Marilyn Monroe, herself, infamously enlisted to extend birthday greetings to JFK at Madison Square Garden: “Happy Birthday, Mr President.”)

Nothing fails like success; and when the studio system’s long decay accelerated in the Eighties, sharp-eyed hustlers observed that films unencumbered by infrastructure could be made for a fraction of the studio costs. Many of these independent producers came to film through expertise in other shakedowns and hustles: arms and drug dealing, money laundering, and racketeering.

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Spy fiction has become reality

By David Mamet

Those hep to the jive saw the incredible waste of the studio film, the lack of oversight and the resultant possibility of fraud, both in production costs, and in accounting. Film, additionally, contained the Best Present Ever; artists manipulable through appeals to their ego, many of whom would, finally, either work for nothing, or accept a promise in lieu of a payment. It was (and is) standard practice, for example, for independent producers to come to the director just before shooting and confess that the budget is short, and that the director will have to waive his fee.

The Independents also employed the traditional sexual amuse-bouches to attract or please talent and investors. Being nekulturny thugs, however, they were not averse to resorting to the not-quite-sporting. The fellow they got laid could be in their debt not only for the nice workout, but for the tapes of his unlicensed encounter.

Now, power.

Way back then, I was friendly with various politicians in an unnamed eastern city on Boston Harbour. I have never seen such a collection of devoted whoremasters. Show business may bring out the worst in people, but politics, it seemed, turned them into randy swine. “Gimme that one, and gimme that one…” was their entertainment’s name. They were enjoying not only young companionship, but the exercise of power and the thrill of its exemptions.

It’s easy to take older guys to the cleaners. In fact, we’ll take ourselves. As men age, sexual desire and performance decreases, they’re attracted by what’s forbidden.

The short-eyes of the lustful, aged male are drawn to the women who looked-like-that when he was young; if they excite him, must he not, then, in some sense be “young” too? His fantasy is equal to that of the woman who devotes her mature years to cosmetics, surgery, and so on. They do not make her young, but assert that she is aware of the problem, is addressing it — and must that not be worth consideration? Ageing is a bitch.

How many do we know who firebombed a home, wife, and kids, to run off with the pilates instructor? Their act of male folly seems, to them, to be not the most but the sole important thing in the world. At that time.

Sadder than the spectacle of the drooling old goat with the nymphet is the upcoming butcher’s bill: not only will they have nothing to talk about in the morning, but, should he wed, in 10 years he’ll be napping, she’ll be legitimately unfulfilled, and he’ll be old, divorced, and broke.

Which is why there used to be whorehouses.

Our age’s most brilliant proponent of these was Hugh Hefner. His Playboy clubs were the bourgeois’ dream of a bordello. They offered good food and drink, superb entertainment, and scantily clad and pleasant young women servers. Most attractively, to the middle-aged businessman clientele, they sold the promise of sex, which the customer (deep down) knew would remain unfulfilled — for which he was grateful. He could delude himself that one of the Bunnies was going home with him; indeed, they were schooled to create that illusion. When his quest failed, he could assure himself of his manhood in that he’d “tried”, and, most importantly, go home without adultery guilt.

Louis XV had his own private whorehouse, The Deer Park, staffed by underage girls recruited throughout the land by his pimps. Just as with Hollywood. It seems that Jeffrey Epstein knew French history, or anyway human nature, and flew his powerful friends down for a bit of surf and turf offering the irresistible: protected sin; just as Hefner sold the (unstated) protection of continence.

Were Epstein’s guests aware of the possibility of blackmail? Perhaps they were, but the old Yiddish proverb has it, when the putz rises the brains bury themselves in mud. Men are stupid. Each, myself included, is foolish about this or that, and all are foolish about sex.

Epstein was shooting fish in a barrel — exploiting contacts who had relied upon him for cooze, and shaking down those who were more exploitable as victims than as debtors.

Did he kill himself? If ever there was one begging to be offed it was he. If we assume the powerful whose lives Epstein could ruin by videotape would do anything on earth to retain their position short of killing him, we need to get out more.

Alternatively, perhaps Epstein could not face decades of (well-deserved) incarceration for sex trafficking. My cop friends inform me that he’d made several previous suicide attempts, and that conditions in the lockup were so wretched that the conjunction of various lapses in oversight was not only probable, but by-the-book laxity. Perhaps.

Will we ever know?

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The power of the Kennedy Myth

By David Mamet

The Trump DOJ assures us that all the info on the Kennedy Assassinations, and on that of Martin Luther King will be forthcoming. They do not, however, define forthcoming, leaving us to supply our own definitions. This is called a “cliffhanger”.

I love a mystery; you, dear reader, do too.

We saw it during the Biden jollity. Those astounded by various government conspiracies were denounced as “conspiracy theorists”. But those conspiracies existed: the Russian collusion hoax; the fraudulent FISA warrants; the ginned-up impeachments, the placement of Candidate Trump on the Spot. They were no less conspiracies because those decrying them were dismissed as “theorists”.

All governments are potential conspiracies against the governed. Those in power may now oppose and now collude with warring groups for momentary leverage over the governed (us saps).

Our Constitution exists solely to address this human tropism. Might we, the governed hope for complete transparency from any government? Yes. Will we receive it? Likely not. Even if we did, our legitimate love of salacious gossip would induce us to discount any “final” revelation. If we accepted it, after all, wouldn’t we just have ruined a good mystery?

Epstein’s death — however caused — creates a well-deserved entertainment. All men are fools for sex, and our various inducements (legitimate and otherwise) and our transgressions have always existed simultaneously with our exploitability by both the badger game, and political and social shakedowns.

Human nature is a bitch. Were it not, we’d be spending our evening reading Jane Austen rather than watching the news, for the thrill of decrying the sick savagery of both our political opponents and our neighbors.

                                                                       Tom Lehrer, 1945

Lehrer wrote the song during his sophomore year at Harvard, mocking the (in his estimation), effete school’s pretensions to a football team. I saw him regularly in Harvard Square in the Sixties during my employment there, clerking at Schoenhof’s Foreign Books. They had dictionaries in 250 languages, and I had to have sufficient knowledge of the stock to direct the seekers after knowledge.

In the late Eighties, I moved from Manhattan to Cambridge. Part of the impetus was the appointment of the late Bob Brustein as head of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. Bob was an important theater critic, theoretician, and director. He’d brought me to the Yale Rep in 1977 as a CBS Writing Fellow, and put on my feet my first pair of Bass Weejuns.

He left Yale for Harvard in 1979 to run their American Repertory Theater, and sent to me that invitation longed for by any artist: “Come and do whatever you want.” I did. We staged the world premieres of many of my plays — Oleanna, Boston Marriage, The Cryptogram, and The Old Neighborhood — at the school’s Hasty Pudding, and later moved them to New York.

We disagreed absolutely about aesthetic philosophy; and I am in his debt for many years of unconditional support on the order of that of the Chicago cops for their partners: “Fuck it, you’re right; and if you’re not right, fuck it anyway.” Bob was the quintessential Old-School Liberal, who’d “defend to the death my right to say it.”

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Why didn't Jews vote for Trump?

By David Mamet

We premiered my play Oleanna at the Pudding in 1992 with Rebecca Pidgeon and Billy Macy. At the dress rehearsal an audience member, a student from Brown, said, “Don’t you think this play is politically irresponsible?” It was the first time I’d heard the phrase.

I had an office in Harvard Square for 15 years, among the dour proto-elites. For, other than the perpetually soused jokesters of the Harvard Lampoon, no one seemed to be having any fun.

The Lampoon folks were the leaven in that self-satisfied atrophy. Doug Kenney and Michael O’Donoghue took the Lampoon commercial with the National Lampoon, and its inspiration of Saturday Night Live. May Harvard be remembered for them, and for Tom Lehrer; and for Bob Brustein, traditional liberals all. And may the school be disgraced in perpetuity for its anti-liberal, disgusting antisemitism.

Suggested reading

How Trump can make education great again

By Jacob Howland

When Harvard was ordered to revert from “Affirmative Action” to merit-based admissions in the Sixties, they magicked up a policy of “Geographical Representation”. The then-dean of admissions explained that too many of the successful merit-based applicants came from the “doughnuts” around American cities; a Jewish student replied, “They aren’t doughnuts, they’re bagels.”

Harvard, once laudable as the cradle of Abolition, persisted into the 21st century in sophistry: excluding Jews by alleging the probity of admissions’ policies of “personality”. Yes, they acknowledged race-based admissions were now illegal, but the school was free to exclude applicants whose “personalities” (read race) were deemed unsympathetic.

Now, though, they openly support Jew-hatred, abiding anti-Jewish riots. What are the students actually “protesting”? If it is Israeli national policy, why target and vilify fellow students?

Claudine Gay, disgraced ex-president of Harvard, explained that the call for murder of Jews was not hate speech, per-se, but must be considered in context.

Yeats wrote, “How can you compete, being honor-bred, with one who, were it known he lies, was neither shamed in his nor in his neighbor’s eyes?” Gay knew no shame, and, though deposed, her pitiable and despicable shamelessness remains the school’s policy. For, ordered to observe not only school policy, but US anti-discrimination laws, they first refuse then extrude a “task force,” and then sue the government which seeks to enforce compliance.

Harvard’s pathetic response to the violence has been the creation of a “task force.”

1) What “task force” has ever accomplished anything? 2) No “task force” is required, just enforcement of the school’s policies, and compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

The school’s response that they are defending the rioters’ free speech is one with the disgraced Gay’s “it depends on context”. “From the river to the sea,” and its like, are calls for the murder of Jews. Incitement to violence is not free speech. Harvard broke and continues to defy the law, pandering to radicals.

Why would Harvard do so in contravention of law, custom, decency, and their supposed mission of education?

For money.

They have had a bloated endowment, tax-exempt status, and income from the full-fare foreign students. Harvard, finding all at risk, turns on the government, and insists on its right to abandon Jewish students and retain exchange students whose criminal behavior invalidates their visa status

Harvard is dead and stinking to high heaven, and will not consider apology, let alone reform. It should be stripped of support, both governmental and individual. Affronted students, Jew and non-Jew, should resign and look elsewhere. What could one possibly learn at such an institution, after having learned it does not believe in human dignity?

Historically, Ivy League schools flogged the prestige of their diplomas as a luxury marque, supposedly a fungible indication of status, independent of further utility (e.g. education).

Now, I, like many, view an elite degree in the “soft sciences” (read “froth”), as a mark against a job applicant. Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning (1914)), observed the universities’ degeneration into mere merchandising. His book was originally subtitled “An exercise in depravity.”

The phrase “conspiracy theory” was once synonymous with delusional, rationally absurd notions. And yet our executive, intelligence community, and Justice Department have undeniably conspired against Donald Trump and other perceived threats to the state. At the same time, Israel’s Mossad has executed unprecedented operations against its enemies, some of which would be literally unbelievable — exploding pagers? Really? — had they not actually happened. Is it conspiratorial to note that these are beloved tropes of spy fiction?

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Where might Islamic Jihadists have discovered the idea of flying aircraft into iconic structures? In Tom Clancy’s techno-thriller Debt of Honor (1994), a Japanese terrorist flies a 747 into the Capitol, and in Thomas Harris’s Black Sunday (1975), Islamic terrorists rig the Goodyear blimp as a bomb and fly it into the Super Bowl.

Many writers were literally secret agents. Frederick Forsyth, the creator of the techno-thriller, was a spy for the British secret service while working as a journalist. So, too, were Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Ian Fleming worked in wartime London as a strategist for Churchill’s saboteurs, the Special Operations Executive. His Bond books, though enjoyable, are neither technically interesting nor especially informative. In Casino Royale, for example, Bond carries a .25 caliber Beretta, a purse pistol, which any shooter will tell you is a “good thing to have if you don’t have a gun”. In his next outing, 007 has upgraded to a .32 caliber Walther, which is not much better.

When enlisted in the War Effort, Fleming’s imagination conjured a plan to capture a German seaplane, fill it with British commandos, then stage an engine-out landing near some Nazi ship or base that needed destruction. It was never implemented.

One of the grandest wartime schemes did become a book: The Man Who Never Was. It concerns Operation Mincemeat, which was a plot whereby a British vagrant, who had died from ingesting rat poison, was dressed and accoutred as an officer in the Royal Marines. His body was carried by submarine to the coast of Spain where it was ejected and swiftly washed ashore. The briefcase handcuffed to his arm carried correspondence indicating that the upcoming British invasion would target Sardinia. The Nazis fell for the ruse, diverting forces from Sicily — the actual Allied objective. One of the authors of the original Operation Mincemeat memo was Commander Ian Fleming, so that’s a horse on me.

Operation Mincemeat was also memorialized in a rather good 1956 film starring Clifton Webb. A lesser-known version is Duff Cooper’s 1950 novel Operation Heartbreak. Not only a novelist, Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich (1890-1954) was also a prominent Tory politician, First Lord of the admiralty, and, after the war, ambassador to France. During the First World War he served in the trenches as a Lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards. During Churchill’s time in the “Wilderness”, and, in his Prime Ministry, Duff was his closest ally. In his retelling of Mincemeat, he has a British colonel, who just missed combat in the Great War, trapped on desk duty in the Second. After he dies of a heart attack, it is his body used in the ruse.

At least we know Mincemeat definitely happened. We have no such assurances for its prequel, a story that blurs the lines between fact and fiction even if it never ended up on bookshelves.

Richard Meinertzhagen was chief of British military intelligence in East Africa at the outset of the First World War. Transferred to Egypt, he operated in Palestine against the Turks. He’s most famous for the so-called Haversack Ruse, the older brother of Mincemeat. On reconnaissance, Meinertzhagen contrived to get too close to the Ottoman lines — which promptly tried to shoot him. Despite nearly falling off his horse, Meinertzhagen managed to gallop back to safety, though not before dropping a haversack full of (false) information about General Allenby’s plans for the recapture of Jerusalem. It’s a cracking tale, and as its appearance in Mincemeat suggests, a tactic probably as old as warfare. And perhaps it’s even true.

Why should I doubt it? Well, off the field, Meinertzhagen was a colossal fraud. Acclaimed as one of Britain’s premier ornithologists, he sent back undiscovered specimens from his posts around the world. Their pride of place in museums was marred only by the discovery that they were, universally, cut-and-paste assemblages of unrelated birds. Such is the fondness for Meinertzhagen in the Spy Thriller community that a homage was paid him in one of the Smiley books. Smiley has assembled and dispersed his beloved “watchers” to surveil an opponent. He names them, and among them are “the two Meinertzhagen girls”.

As a fellow fraud, John le Carré must have loved the rotter. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century and along with Patrick O’Brien, and our George V. Higgins, he elevated the genre novel to something superior — to the status of “art”. His books, like Joseph Conrad’s spy classics, are suffused with pathos and sadness. He was one of the century’s most successful writers, both artistically and financially.

Suggested reading

The breakdown of the CIA

By Edward Luttwak

Who, then, would indict him as a fraud? Le Carré himself, self-confessed as a hypocrite — not as a writer, but as a spy. All his books concern the fight of the secret service against the Communist threat, even as its agents battle Whitehall corruption and treason. All his work is about disillusionment, none more so than A Perfect Spy (1986), whose hero, like le Carré himself, was raised by a confidence-man father. The protagonist, unlike le Carré, becomes a double-agent, so enamoured of acceptance that he serves two warring powers simultaneously. Upon being discovered, he goes mad and takes his own life.

A fictional soldier of fortune for America was Joe Gall. He featured in 20 thrillers by Philip Atlee. These were yarns featuring sadism and pornography — unsurprisingly attractive to me as an adolescent boy. In each of the books he (like James Bond) falls in love with a new woman who is murdered by the book’s end.

The mythic Gall was a contract agent for a government outfit so secret it even lacked a name. He was notable for his various martial skills, and for an absolute immorality in the service of his country. But more to the point is the author’s pedigree. Philip Atlee was James Atlee Phillips, brother of David Atlee Phillips, who, it seems, was the CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald. Now that we are able to peruse the JFK assassination files in which he features, we can not only enjoy the light they shed on conspiracy, but also look forward to the subsequent conclusion that the files themselves have been faked.

The contest was more equal when police used impact weapons. A baton, nightstick, monadnock baton, Kubota, saps, and so on, allowed the officer to stun, control maneuver or incapacitate a recalcitrant suspect. A pistol displayed in the hands of an officer the felon understood was reluctant to use it, was probably less effective in affecting compliance, than a sharp blow to the wrist, elbow, knee, or shin. But impact weapons use has been banned by most jurisdictions as brutal, and control techniques like the knee-in-the-back, and the carotid choke have also been generally abolished – methods which enabled a trained smaller and lighter officer to subdue a larger opponent.

The female officer, thus found herself stripped of tools allowing her to protect herself and the public from larger male offenders. (Short of lethal force, the use of which would take her off the force and give her to the courts.)

Women were admitted into American police forces to correct discriminatory practices. But without the impact weapon, pain avoidance techniques, and the control of jiu-jitsu, the woman street cop is at a disadvantage. Most streetfights go to the ground, and, there, she is in danger. But government, which can never be seen as wrong, equaled the playing field. Under California Penal Code section 242: resisting arrest, is now generally charged only as a Class One Misdemeanor and prosecuted infrequently.

Then, in the 2020s California District Attorneys had shoplifting decriminalized. Any theft under $1,000 was allowed, and neither store employees nor the police intervened nor were allowed to do so — the cops, first hamstrung, were then ordered to “stand down”. Like the tactical evisceration, this move led to the (internally) logical suggesting that police be banned altogether. See: The Knock-on Effect: fairness in diversity hiring; fairness to suspects, then fairness to criminals, after which, there would be no need for police.

This adolescent confusion of fairness and justice has led our country to the last brink of dissolution. For the question is “who is being fair to whom?” Is fairness to female officers unfair to the now under-protected citizens who pay them? Is depriving them of adequate offensive and defensive weapons fair to police?

We’ve had a decade of shrieking about “fairness”, by those unfit to ponder Milton Friedman’s: “When some government program is proposed to ‘help’ a group, we need to ask, ‘Whom does it harm?’” The question, historically (if aspirationally), was addressed not through a debate about “fairness and equity,” but through the process of jurisprudence.

Justice means deciding between the conflicting claims of two petitioners by reference to previously determined laws. A mature citizen understands that every claimant (himself included) initiates his claim with some reference to “fairness”, but that this fairness can only mean “That result I prefer”. Every loser in a court of law knows he was treated unfairly. The universal (and moot) claim of “fairness” allows the protestor potential access to the news-cam, the podium, and a leg-up in a court system dedicated to “Social Justice”.

There is no such thing as social justice. It means “fairness”, a metaphysical concept defensible, finally, only by a reference to “feelings”. But its application is easier (as improvisational) than a dedication to the codified common sense of the community, that is, Law.

Further reading

LA's dreams went up in flames

By Joel Kotkin

Perhaps even more than that of the cops, the brotherhood of firefighters seems unlimited and inviolable. The police are always at risk, but much of that risk is potential, while the firefighter, every week in the career, will be working at on or in a burning building, at the end of the hose, or going up a ladder to save lives. Their mutual devotion, as Joe Wambaugh explained in Fire Lover (2002), grows, in shared, mortal danger, undertaken with the absolute assurance that his brothers will back him up and come for him unhesitatingly at the risk of their own lives. But, at some point, up the chain of command, that brotherhood was replaced by a commitment to “DEI”, a concept not recognized by fires.

Today, Los Angeles is still burning. My family was evacuated, and has just returned after two days to our house, which is still in the “warning” area. Many of our friends have lost their homes.

It has been known for decades that massive brushfires were fueled by debris and blowdown, which should have been regularly cleared. On August 31, 2023 Circling the News reported that Pacific Palisades Community Council President Maryam Zar contacted her Assemblyman about concerns regarding brush abutting her land. “She was put in touch with Richard Fink, California State Parks District Superintendent II. He attended the August 24 Community Council meeting and explained that the state does not do brush clearance of park land because ‘we’re here to protect the natural habitat’.”

In an email to Circling the News, it was explained, “The department works closely with the Newsom Administration and other State departments to improve and expand forest management on state owned land to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildlife fires and improve forest and wildlife health.” But where the state land ends, habitation begins, and what unutterable fools would suggest a wildfire would respect the boundary? Answer: the Newsom Administration.

Brushfires on uncleared State Land have been devastating California for years, and the ecosystem Newsom’s commission was protecting did not extend to human beings and their property in the Palisades, or Altadena, or Franklin. And, so, the largest and most catastrophic fire in Los Angeles history resulted from fairness. Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Bass, and Fire Chief Cowley, though not on the hose, have been in the frontline of the Struggle for Fairness.

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Fire Chief, Kristen Crowley, wrote to the Board of Fire Commissioners on December 4, 2023, that budget cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations”. Karen Bass had just cut 17.8 million dollars from the fire department’s budget. But according to CSB News, “When asked about the budget cuts at Thursday morning’s Press Conference (January 9, 2025), Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said they did not impact the department’s ability to handle the ongoing fires.”

Yet many hydrants had been stolen for scrap and never replaced, as periodic inspections had been cancelled due to budget cuts; and hydrants ran dry in the Palisades and in Altadena, where firefighters were reduced to filling their tanks from homeowners’ garden hoses. County officials said this (shortage) was to be expected due to the constraints of the municipal water system, which LA County Public Works Director Mark Pestrella said, is “not designed to fight wildfires”. (LA1st) One must ask why it is not so-designed, and, as always, what happened to the taxes we pay to insure public safety?

So where did the 17.8 million go? According to the department’s website: “Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities are Chief Crowley’s priorities, and she is grateful for the opportunity to serve the City of Los Angeles.”

Mayor Karen Bass just returned from vacation in Ghana during the fires, was interviewed by Sky News last week. Asked if she had anything to say to the victims of the disaster, had she any apology to make, and where was the money cut from the fire department, she remained silent.

These selection processes are composed of physical tasks, but designed primarily to test the applicants’ will. For, however challenging the test, had they been applied not to Olympic-grade athletes, but to regular folk whose lives depended upon their completion, it’s possible the pass-fail ratio might not be drastically different.

The training memoirs all cite the magnificent physical specimens who opted out during some phase of training when other less likely men persevered. Which was the purpose of the training: to select those who could learn to make the body do the mind’s bidding.

***

Israel’s secret weapon, as Golda taught, was Ain Brera: No Alternative. A companion phrase is Herzl’s Im Teratzu, ein zo Agadah. This is generally rendered “If you will it, it is no dream.” A better translation: “It is no fable (or tale).” The tale to which Herzl refers is The Torah. I understand him to mean that it is not merely a tale, that it is a promise: that God will return the Jews, from the ends of the earth, to their homeland. Herzl’s phrase is a reminder that the promise will be fulfilled, but we must act to fulfil it. That, as the age of miracles is past, God can only act in the world through human agency.

The handiest and most destructive phrase for the challenge begins “I wish”. No desire framed as a wish can ever be fulfilled. For who would fulfil it, if not the utterer, whose plea is actually a confession of failure? The replacement of the introductory “I wish…” with “I will” is Herzl’s instruction.

Through the Five Books of Moses — the Jews repeatedly face the lesson of the SAS: the test does not begin until one is assured the test is over and he has failed.

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

The escapees from Egypt found themselves wedged between Pharaoh’s murderers, and the Red Sea. They cried to God, and cried out against Moses: “Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt that you brought us out here to die? It would have been better to be slaves in Egypt than to die in the desert.”

Moses told them to stand firm and see what God would do to rescue them. He continued in what, to me, has been a most instructive verse: “The Egyptians you see today, you will never see again.”

I’ve found this a reliable comfort in a life with a sufficiency of both challenges and failures. I understand it thus: not that trust in God will bring about a foreseen resolution, but that although it may not, it will bring about God’s intended ends, which are finally, unknowable, save that we should trust.

The verse promises that acting on such trust will eradicate our fear; and, so, inspire courage in the subsequent trials we will surely encounter. But that the Egyptians — that is, the trial confronting us today, faced today — we need never face again.

Our lives are short, and we are often affronted, and often confused. The Torah acknowledges our insufficiencies as the human condition: that we, unaided, are incapable of facing, let alone surmounting, tasks beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is limited.

The alcoholic is addicted to both alcohol and to doubt, which he understands as certainty. That he cannot go through life without alcohol is the surest thing he knows, in fact, it is the central belief of his life. He tells his sponsor in AA that he can’t imagine life without a drink and is told no one can; and is asked to do something quite different: to go through the next 24 hours without drinking. Like the Jews at the Red Sea, he is challenged to enter a state, which he can only understand as death. But without death, there is no rebirth.

The Special Forces ordeals are designed to break the mind, so that it can be reformed first to imagine then to accomplish that which, prior to the reconstruction, the applicant would have been considered impossible.

The Rededication of the Temple in 165 B.C.E. required oil sufficient for eight days of purification. The Maccabees only had enough for one day. They did not, however, wish that God would perform a miracle, but listened to God, who told them to proceed in any case. They did so, preferring God’s understanding to their own — an event worthy of consideration.

Happy Hanukkah.

On October 7, 2023, savages murdered, raped, and kidnapped 1,200 Israeli citizens. American Jews reacted by voting for the Democrats.

This November, blacks, Hispanics, gay and straight Americans decided they’d had enough of Government corruption, incompetence, malversation, contempt, and crime and voted for a return to common sense and the protections of the Constitution. They forsook identity politics, save to identify themselves as Americans. Absent from the roll call of groups rebranding themselves as citizens were the Jews.

The Obama-Biden-Harris regime coddled Iran, the sponsor of World Terrorism; they admonished Netanyahu to exorcise “restraint”, not to go into Gaza, nor to bomb Iran. Not only did Harris “cut” him in his visit to Congress, she arguably cost herself the election, sucking up to supposed Muslim voters by bypassing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. She chose instead a grotesque nonentity, who’d abandoned Minneapolis to rioters.

Christian and Muslim citizens, across the country, rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and for peace.

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Only the Republicans can stop Jew hatred

By David Mamet

They saved the Jewish State.

A Democrat victory would have signalled Israeli isolation. Iran would have escalated, compelled Israel to strike, and brought about a World War. They had made it plain that the United States looked with disfavour on the right of the Jewish State to survive.

To my fellow American Jews: what in the world do you think you were looking at during the last four years? Jewish students were harassed and terrified on campuses receiving Government funds, antisemitic brutality was not given the status of “Hate Crimes”, our President and Vice President shunned their constitutionally mandated duties to greet the Prime Minister of not only a foreign power, but of our supposed ally. Congressionally voted funds for Israel defence were withheld by executive fiat. Our government issued continual calls for Israeli “restraint”, while withholding similar requests from Iran and her proxies.

And my fellow Jews voted for these people.

It is a mistake to suggest that he voted against his own best interests. But what is the American Jew’s benefit in voting Democratic?

The Democrats were the party of immigrants: my grandparents and parents, the first American Generation. Republicans, in my youth, were (fairly reliably) identified as Country Club Wasps — the party of Big Business, while the Dems were for the worker, the unions, and so on. Those were the party’s log-lines.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later “Affirmative Action”, and its bastard child, DEI.

But the new arrivals voted Democrat and have continued doing so until today. Are they just “passing”?

Other minority groups have not only abandoned the Big Stick of the Left, but identity politics toute entière. They voted as citizens. They stood up, not to promote “their party”, but to protect their home. Our country.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents — but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

It is said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago, and American Jews criticised the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.

For 2,000 years, we Jews didn’t have a country. We survived by accepting the various strictures of those governments which grudgingly allowed us (intermittently) to live; and when the strictures abated (to whatever extent) we called it a blessing. And voted, for example, for Franklin Roosevelt “A friend of the Working Man”, whose administration sent thousands of potential immigrant Jews back to their deaths in the ovens.

Suggested reading

A year of hatred

By Howard Jacobson

We grew up with the slander of “Jewish Guilt” — that the Jews were, somehow, children of Original Sin, which could only be expunged by good works, and a dedication to whatever identified itself as social justice.

But Jewish anxiety is not caused by insufficient compassion, it is caused by insufficient Judaism. We cannot escape “the hot thumbprint of God” on our hearts. If we could, we would have assimilated millennia ago.

“I am Jewish but not That Jewish,” or “but I’m not Observant,” or, “but I despise this man Netanyahu,” and so on, are the utterances of fugitives, willing to vote for their own annihilation, rather than face their Jewishness.

But in what does this Jewishness consist? Each person must, of course, answer it for him or herself. The Torah is a traditional guide; its advice, strictures and contradictions and their consideration, are certainly more productive and more rational than the absurd blather of legacy media.

The world is corrupt, and has always been so, as human nature is corrupt. The Bible teaches that is because we’ve fallen away from God; the media, because of Donald Trump and Republican deplorables.

And, yet, the Democratic Party and their chaos has been defeated by our fellow citizens.

The Gay Rights Movement’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” is wisdom. Antisemitism is not the Jews’ problem, but that of our opponents.

To my fellows, you can be proud you are an American. Do so, and you will, subsequently, be proud you’re a Jew.

The show they see on an opening night will consist of two things in existence prior to rehearsal: the actors, and the script. The actors don’t need to discuss the script, they understood it when they read it. They don’t need to zhuzh up their performance through elaborate analysis, they just need to show up and speak up — the subsequent performance will be appreciated on their ability to do so, and on the worth of the script. No performance can enhance a bad script, and a good one needs no help.

Prior to the Twenties, the director was known as the stage manager. It was his job to block the actors such that the audience could see them and hear them, and they didn’t trip over the furniture. “Louder, faster, pause here, don’t fidget while the other fellow is speaking”: these were the panoply of the director’s tools.

But the cobb salad of psychoanalysis and the method replaced the stage manager with the director. His job was to analyse the script psychoanalytically, and lead the actors in a month-long encounter group called the rehearsal process. None of it made any difference to the audience, save that the self-consciousness the charade engendered in the actor, transformed him from performer, to lay analyst. After all, anyone reading a play text understands it sufficiently to appreciate the interactions. And the better a play is, the less it needs a set — Shakespeare plays just peachily on the radio.

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America's decline is inevitable

By David Mamet

So past simply staging, then, in his responsibility to the audience, how might the director (ex-stage manager) be of use to the actor? In one thing: a subtle alteration of the actor’s intention. The fellow playing Iago understands that he is going to avenge himself on his boss by falsely accusing Desdemona. The actor might play a scene revealing the false clues to Othello as “conveying a favour”; the director might suggest, rather, that he play it to “refute a false claim”. The words are the same, but the intention (known as the objective) is somewhat different, and the change will influence the performance subtly.

Note that in neither case is the actor asked to “feel” anything, or to “believe” anything, he is simply asked to reimagine the objective.

The Crispian speech in Henry V is the greatest in our language, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” It can be played as an exhortation to a crowd, or as a quiet pledge to fellow warriors. The determination of intention can influence performance. Inversely, when baffled by performance in human interactions we can seek clarity by determining intention. For example, Obama’s stated goal was “Hope and Change”; Harris’s seems to be “Joy”. The only intentions inferable from the slogans was obfuscation and the desire to seduce.

Our objective in the Second World War was the destruction of fascism. In Vietnam it was “to win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people — a task for which the Armed Forces were horribly ill-suited; and no one has creditably explained why we invaded Iraq to find “weapons of mass destruction”, which, even if they had existed, posed no threat to the United States.

Our Middle East objective, under the direction of Obama, Biden and Harris, has been opposition to the Jewish state, under the heading of adjudication of the conflict. But a conflict on which external rules are imposed is not a war, it is a duel — ultimate power, thus, displayed by neither party but by the referee. The very term “The Peace Process” indicates an acceptably interminable engagement. Peace is never brought about by a process, but through breaking one side’s will to continue fighting.

After our administration’s abandonment of Israel, the Netanyahu government has, correctly, decided to cease not only its subservience but its acknowledgement of “world opinion”, destroy its enemies, and, so, bring peace to Israel. For “he who dictates the terms of the battle dictates the terms of the peace,” as Napoleon said.

The Terms of the Battle, in stage language, are the Objective. Determined here not by a director, but by an interested referee. Those in the Middle East were dictated to Israel by America, in service to Iran, a criminal folly which led to October 7, and the ebullition of world antisemitism.

Now, various of the good-willed are calling for bookstores to boycott the works of Jewish authors who do not denounce the Jewish state. I was approached to sign a petition decrying this brutality, and to supply a quote. My heart sank, not at the savagery of Sally Rooney and the woke mob, but at the notion that a list of names could decrease savagery.

I, of course, signed the petition to fight antisemitism, but washed up short and queasy thinking of a quote.

I’ve always bragged that I could write in a car crash, but was unable to add my wisdom to this good cause. I wondered why, and determined this: it is pointless to “fight” antisemitism — it presupposes an ongoing (thus extendable) process.

Our objective should be to stop antisemitism.

As Jew hatred is a delusion, it cannot be stopped by any appeal to reason. No exhortation will convince, only the application of dissuasive force to those enamoured of brutality.

My responses have included visiting Israel, to show the flag, and voting for Republicans who will defund institutions permitting the violation of Jews’ civil rights, remove the institutions’ tax-exempt status, and prosecute those threatening and assaulting Jews.

Every Victorian reader understood allusions to The New Zealander, a rhetorical figure in Thomas Macaulay’s 1840 essay. He was a traveller to a long-vanished civilisation, and gazes, uncomprehendingly, on the ruins of St Paul’s Cathedral. At around the same time, Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary stage of decay, from which communism could come into being. We see his prediction proved correct — in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela and, now, in the United States. But his vision was of decay-into-perfection; rather than into chaos, savagery and dissolution, which we see to be the case.

Marx stopped too soon in his equation. For if force was necessary to replace Capitalism with Communism, it would be necessary to ensure its continuation. Tsar Nicholas was replaced by Stalin, and Batista by Castro; the Philosopher King was not on the ballots as there were no ballots. The people were “saved” through the imposition of a force — no less necessary after their unconvinced salvation.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the firemen of the future exist to set fire to books, the reading or possession of which is a crime. Books are, today, being censored and banned by destructive forces, and, soon, these will take to their burning, as, today, they burn flags. The joy of their licensed rage is augmented by their unity with a zeitgeist, or time-spirit.

We might understand this as an era-specific fashion that runs in a cycle. But, from a greater remove, the zeitgeist can be seen as a progression. Here, however the quiddities of politics or fashion appear as the result of human reason, civilisation, being an organism, evolves towards its own death and dissolution.

Some day we will be gone, and the monuments we have built will be one with those we have desecrated. Even those books which might remain will eventually share the fate of the little plastic phones. How are we to behave while we’re here? It’s no wonder that our operating manual, or quick-start guide, the Bible, is denigrated by anarchists and dismissed as absurd by intellectuals. They are both on the same team, unconsciously in the service of acceleration.

Walter Scott wrote that the sword outwears the sheath, as the heart outwears the breast, and all that lives must breathe, and love itself take rest; and our contemporary, Tom Ropelewski similarly concluded his 1990 film Madhouse, with Kirstie Alley’s “after the nuclear war, only two things will remain, cockroaches and houseguests”.

A quarter of a century later, Seattle is now distributing hard drugs and paraphernalia gratis, to any requesting them. New York is importing illegal immigrants and housing them in hotels, and the Governor of California wants to pay “unemployment benefits” to illegal immigrants.

Future generations, with a kibbitzer’s interest in our history, will opine we were as foolish, and intermittently fortunate, as any other lost civilisation: we will be understood as one not only with Nineveh and Tyre, but with the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest, doing the best we could while contending not only with Nature and depredations, but with our own nature.

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Will Trump make me Poet Laureate?

By David Mamet

Will our Millennial folly be considered more savage than the Aztecs’ yearly slaughter of 20,000 victims; our economics more absurd than the Haida’s destruction of surplus through the immolations of the Potlach? Will our genital mutilation of children be seen as less savage than the clitoridectomies of Islam or the sub-incision of African tribes? The Left’s ferocious proclamation of the primacy of abortion, of transsexualism, and of non-procreation is the propitiatory prayer: “I will forgo my right to progeny: but spare me.” Their prayer is the acknowledgement that something is terribly wrong.

People in a state of panic (as opposed to mere “fear”) will search for a bearable proximate cause. To Leftist Israelis, it is not the savagery of Iran and the world’s rediscovery of Jew-hatred, it’s Netanyahu; to the American Liberal, it’s not the decay of the cities, but Trump. To the world-at-large, it’s the Jews. The abused child always sides with the abused against the passive parent, as the passive parent has proved him or herself too weak or unwilling to offer the child protection.

The dying civilisation, like the dying individual, will display symptoms consistent with those of its predecessors in decline. Machiavelli writes that the cure of a disease in its preliminary stages would be simple if a diagnosis could be correctly made; but when the disease progresses sufficiently to have “declared itself”, the cure is difficult.

Chicken Little screamed: “The sky is falling, run for your lives!” All school children delighted in the idiocy of her claim, inspired by a pinecone falling on her head; more adult appreciation is that, if in fact it were falling, there would be no point in flight.

Suggested reading

Why America stopped dreaming

By Chris Arnade

Today, we are not simply witnessing, but participating in a civilisational displacement. We are too close to understand it easily, save as the interplay of comprehensible forces: Left vs Right; Islam vs Christianity; Communism vs Capitalism. The attendant allegiances and enthusiasms will be as puzzling to future scholars as the internecine wars of Christianity, over points of doctrine, and Greta Thunberg’s historic truancy as a “response to climate change” understood as analgesic: treating intellectual challenges by curtailing education.

What is the “cure” for our civilisational decline? There is no “cure”, for it is an organic progression. We can no more return to the healthy unionised working class of American Industry of the Fifties than we can to the slash and burn cultivation techniques of the Australian Aboriginals.

We may prognosticate more clearly after the coming election, in which the conservatives propose a return to prosperity and peace, and the liberals “joy”. The West will die at some point, but it need not do so on November 6. It might even continue in some revised but operable and recognisable form — in a rededication to the Constitution and the Judeo-Christian writ and ethics which inspire it.

On the other hand, it would be a signal honour to be tapped; and, more importantly, a chance to partially fulfil a debt not only to my country, but to Mr Trump and those who’ve stood up in its defence.

I was reminded of the story of the Shadchan, the traditionally Jewish matchmaker. He comes to the Goldbergs’ house and asks if they would entertain an offer in marriage of their son, Shmuel, from Princess Margaret of Great Britain. The Goldbergs go into conference. “Yes, she is not Jewish, but on the other hand, her family is quite religious; yes, she is older than he, but they tend to live long…” And so on.

Eventually, they come back to the Shadchan and announce: “Yes, we would entertain an offer for our Shmuel from Princess Margaret.”

“Great,” the Shadchan says, “my job is half done.”

Now, after Mr Biden was deposed, I was saddened by a third alternative: that Mr Trump would be defeated, and I would be deprived of his proposition.

What does a Poet Laureate do? I don’t know, but I suspect the job might entail a semantically supportable fulfilment of its title: to sing the country’s praises, or present the work of those who have. And since it would be unbecoming to flog my own works from an official pedestal, I’d have to confine myself to endorsing the working of others.

My problem is this: what passes as American poetry leaves me unfulfilled. That represented, of old, to school children is largely drivel — Walt Whitman and Robert Frost’s work would not be out of place on greeting cards. Whitman’s grand but unfortunate contribution to the genre was the abandonment of rhyme, form and rhythm. Whitman heard America singing, and he sang about it himself; but poetry would have been better off if he’d limited his singing to the shower.

By contrast, there I would be, on Day One of the Restoration, on the podium in my ceremonial robes, all dressed up with nothing to say. But, in my fantasy, I had a job to do, and my job was to do it.

Who, then, were the poets? For certainly, there were many who could both write and praise our country. I name: Huddie Ledbetter, Hank Williams, Randy Newman, Johnny Mercer, Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Carol King, Leiber and Stoller, Bob Dylan and Lead Belly.

The poets above wrote the American Songbook, which is the soundtrack of our lives. It was said that 80% percent of the kids born between 1950 and 1965 were conceived to the music of Frank Sinatra, much of which was written by Johnny Mercer. The poetry of Sandburg, Emerson, Whitman, and so on, is icky. Who needs it? Not I.

But, you might object, the songs above, most of them derivative of the Blues, are sad. Indeed they are, and life is sad. And the Blues are the spark of the soul in that sadness.

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Jews for Kamala are living in denial

By David Mamet

Tragedy is that celebration of life as God-given sorrow, and the possibility of finding strength and dignity within it. And the American Experience is, finally, tragic. Not because our country is evil, but because it is a country. It is the vast conglomerate of separate groups with not only different opinions but with irreconcilable differences. And yet, the differences must be reconciled, and however much effort is expended towards that goal, there will still be injustices, tragedy, crime, and error.

Our country was named for the cartographer Americus Vespucci. Amer in the Romance Tongues means bitter. The word comes from the Hebrew, Marab.

Moses was prohibited from entering Canaan because of his actions at Marah. God told him to address a rock and waters would pour forth. Moses, instead, struck the rock, twice. The incident was not mentioned until Moses stood on the heights overlooking Canaan. God told him he was not to enter, because of his disobedience.

But, mythologically, he was not punished; he was instead spared the experience of his people living in freedom. At the conclusion of Deuteronomy, Moses sings a song of leave-taking, and presentiments of blessings and peace. He was quite mistaken, as was proved when his charges crossed the River Jordan into Canaan. The Song was continued, here, by the Blues.

God Bless America.

I was recently invited to a presentation by IDF veterans wounded in Gaza after October 7. The organiser, a friend who taught at West Point, brought several of his cadets to hear the stories too grim to make the news, from the soldiers they might soon be fighting alongside. There were other guests; they were older Los Angeles Jews, like me.

When the floor was opened for questions, there was little more for the veterans to say; they fought to protect their country from savagery, and they were wounded. The questions, in any case, coming from Jews like myself, were predictably statements. They were expressions of outrage, followed by suggestions: the state of Israel must be helped by “Changing the Narrative”, which invariably meant “changing the minds of others”.

I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through 50 years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function — they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter one’s thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced antisemitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.

All the guests at the presentation were enraged at the eruption of American and international Jew hatred. The World Court, whatever that is, had indicted the Israeli Prime Minister as a war criminal; our President and Vice President pointedly insulted him on his visit to Congress; the administration withholds the release of arms voted by Congress for Israeli defence in contravention of the Constitution; and so on. The affronted Jews each proclaimed what he considered a solution, but which I understood as cries of anguish.

Islamists at home and abroad have been demonising the Jewish State since 1948: why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by “changing the narrative”? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated, they merely wanted peace, which, to their minds, might be achieved, rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding.

Suggested reading

Why the Left failed on October 7

By Hadley Freeman

The proximate solution to Jewish vulnerability — which I saw but did not say — was not in persuading others to think differently, but in so-persuading oneself. The problem that day was not to be found in “world opinion”, but in that room. We Jews, without a country for 2,000 years, have always been second-class citizens, where we were not “guests”, which is to say “visitors on suffrage”. The assimilated successful German Jews of the 19th century embraced reform de-accesionism (divestiture of language, observance, and tradition) and assimilation, which included an indictment of the other: their poor co-relgionaries in the East, whose arcane practices, they agreed, explained much of the hatred leaching over onto “Civilised Jews”. They offered their reasoned betrayal of their brothers as part of the initiation fee into the liberal world, a process we find repeated today. (See: Noam Chomsky, George Soros, Bernie Sanders, Tom Friedman, Anthony Blinken.)

We American Jews, traditionally, vote for the Democrats, since we look around and see social ills — and believe it is the job of the government to eradicate them. But this concern with social justice is a warped understanding of the Biblical injunction to do justice. The Bible admonishes us not to respect the claims of the rich, nor of the poor, but to pursue justice. It can be pursued, we learn, only through application of previously determined rules: set by, for example, the Torah, the Talmud and the Constitution.

“Social Justice”, though, is the appeal to the sentient to assert that the rules are insufficient, and that “surely there must be a better way”. But there is not. A dedication to law, as untidy and indeed absurd as it may sometimes be, is the firewall between peace (even precarious peace) and anarchy.

“You cannot spill a drop of American Blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Herman Melville in 1849. “Be he an Englishman, Frenchman, Dane or Scot… We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality — whose blood has been debased in an attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.”

Melville might have stuck to his whales, but he also trots out his antisemitism, turning his proclamation of an American Brotherhood into an oxymoron. Jews are despised for enforced separatism and for attempted assimilation; as we are loathed as a minority up until the moment when minority status is preferred but is denied us, and we concur that that’s fine, too. Our problem is not public opinion — but denial.

Today, the Democrats have become the party of antisemitism. Obama and Biden’s policies have given money and arms to Iran, and withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Israel — and yet Jews vote Democratic. Charles Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, is a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. He pointedly insulted Prime Minister Netanyahu, on his visit to Congress, refusing to shake his hand. For whom was Schumer performing his discourtesy? Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him, and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?

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The self-delusion of secular Jews

By David Mamet

Kamala Harris, as Vice President, is President of the US Senate. It was both her responsibility and her honour to preside over the Joint Session of Congress convened to hear Netanyahu. Instead, she chose to attend a reunion of her college sorority. Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that, under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. And yet American Jews will support her.

I believe that a Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool. I know that no one ever acts for any reason other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. What is the idea good enough to induce Jews to side with antisemites? It may be called liberalism, but it contains the unavowed fear of demonisation. The good news is that the Jew need not worry, as he has already been demonised.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

One of Berlin’s first hits was the 1911 “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, whose lyrics were rewritten during the Vietnam War. “You can hear a bugle call like you never heard before / So natural that you’ll want to go to war.”During the Vietnam War, Berlin rewrote the lyric: “So natural you’ll want to hear some more.”

I recall, similarly, how the lyrics of the old Ashkenazi melody about Hanukkah — “One [candle] for each night, they remind us of fights” — were updated for delicate baby-boomer ears: “One for each night, they shed a sweet light”. Hanukkah, however, is a commemoration of the Jewish martial victory, in 168 BCE, over the Syrian armies of Antiochus Epiphanes, who desecrated the Temple.

In 1883, the Hebrew Union College, the first Reform Seminary in America, graduated its first class of Reform Rabbis. The ceremonies concluded with a banquet of lobster, shrimp and pork: the famous Trefa Banquet. What were the Rabbis celebrating? A commencement, we know, means the beginning of a new thing. The new thing here was not the commencement of a life of service to the Jews — but of freedom from Judaism’s constraints.

The Reform Movement began in 19th-century Germany among those members of the despised race who were honoured by their admittance, and intent on maintaining the exemption. What is it that Jews cannot do? We can’t stop passing for white. Instructive here is Nella Larsen’s masterpiece, Passing (1929), which tells the story of several light-skinned black women facing the conundrum of racial identity and solidarity versus wider opportunity. The women’s dilemma is not only practical, but social, as, however they may pass among white people, they cannot escape their content in being black among black people. They meet in white society, recognise each other, and exchange advice and sympathy. But everyone in the black community, sympathetic or not, knows they are black. The novel’s women neither think they are, nor desire to become, white. Their blackness is not a curse, but an ineluctable identity.

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How the Democrats betrayed the Jews

By David Mamet

Among us Jews, however, it is quite different. Like the new lyrics of the Hanukkah song and the emergence of the Hanukkah Bush, Reform Judaism itself and its dedication to an antisemitic Democratic Party are attempts at self-delusion.

In “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair)”, a hit Christmas song from 1959, the little heroine wants only red ribbons for Christmas. Nothing else will do, so the mother prays hard enough for the unnamed power to relent and supply them on Christmas morning. The assimilative urge of Jews is the prayer for Scarlet Ribbons. First, they ain’t a-coming. Second, if they did, we would tire of them instantly. And lastly, who, then, would “believe”, let alone feel awe, for a deity which concerned itself with our prayers for ribbons?

Since the readmittance of Jews into Germany, and our success there, we have been praying to be spared the weight of Judaism. The impulse dates from our Exodus from slavery. We were free, Moses went up the mountain to receive the Law from God, and we, at the foot of the mountain, began our preemptive counterstrike: the creation and worship of an inanimate object. We feared the Word we knew Moses was bringing us, rioted, and called our panic Reason. Just as we do today.

The assimilated Jewish worship of Good Works and Right Thinking has been requited, for 2,000 years, by our slaughter. Implicit in our murderers’ worldview was the belief that “you can fool yourselves, but you can’t fool us”. For the Jew Haters were and are neither interested in our “accomplishments” nor outraged by our supposed misdeeds — but only interested in killing us.

The assimilative urge is thus a delusion: since we can’t actually fool ourselves, how in the world might we fool our enemies? This delusion can only persist through a universalism that holds our murderers actually aren’t our enemies, but are misunderstood, or abused, or legitimately angry — and, thus, finally, not subject to the same laws and expectations as the rest of humanity. Further, as we see in today’s “pro-Palestinian” demonstrations, the aggressors are understood as incapable of sin. What being is capable of violence but incapable of sin? Only an animal. This is how the anti-Jewish Left understands Hamas’s murderers — as animals untainted by conscience.

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Inseparable from this is the notion that something must have inspired this hatred. What, the assimilated Jew thinks, could this be? And then he answers: other Jews. These, the trouble-provoking Bad Jews, were anathema to the assimilated. Their outlandish old-world practices drew notice to all Jews, and, thus, endangered the tenuous-as-factitious emotional security of the assimilated.

“Look,” the Reform Western Jew traditionally held, “I deserve consideration for my sacrifices. I have sacrificed my ‘Jewish’ name, my practice of prayer, of Kashrut, of endogamy, of religious instruction of the young: what more could anyone want?”

The answer, of course, is: “Your lives.”

Which brings us back to the basic question: why? Christians often ask me why the Jews are so hated. The traditional Western Jewish answers are, however, a finessed attempt at exculpation. They describe various antisemitisms as the result, however misguided, of our enemies’ human reason and aspiration. But the true, horrific, Biblical answer is that they are the work of the Devil.

We are told, in the Torah, that Amalek — the ineradicable force of Evil — is with us in every generation. But how can this be, and how can a modern man actually state it in a world we know is based upon human reason? I can state it, because I observe it; and I do not observe the rule of reason most anywhere — neither about me, nor in history. We human beings are cursed with the capacity for thought, which means for self-delusion. (For how little else is it ever employed?)

Western Jews have traditionally voted for liberalism, which is to say for inclusion in some imaginary coalition of the right-thinking. We support the United Nations, a Potemkin village of remittance men hired to denounce Israel, and we elect politicians who kowtow to murderous antisemites. We send our children to elite universities, which teach antisemitism and support anti-Jewish demonstrations, and then advise them to “stay safe”. Can you name another group which behaves similarly?

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MeToo unless you're a Jew

By Nicole Lampert

After the liberation of Dachau, citizens of Munich were marched through the camp and forced to look. The 45-minute Hamas-filmed montage of bestiality should be aired continuously on all media, so that no one can say: “I didn’t realise.” Shelby Steele said that his beloved fellow black citizens have been confused by 400 years of slavery. As have my fellow Jews, since the eradication of the Temple, by life on sufferance.

Slavery creates a slave mentality — to survive or die. Black Americans survived the Middle Passage, chattel slavery and segregation through reliance on the family and religion; the Diaspora Jews had our cultural contiguity and The Torah. But that necessary and inescapable cohesion was shattered by the bright promises of acceptance; and our reference to religion as a guide broken by the Enlightenment (the Haskalah) in the 19th century.

Afterwards, the re-establishment of the Jewish State in the Levant offered a home to the tortured remnant of European Jewry, but their return exacerbated the antisemitism of the Arab world, and did nothing to expunge the seed of slave-thinking in the diaspora. The seed also flourished in a largely secular Israeli Jewish Left, still concerned with a curious inversion of reason called “fairness”. The utter fatuity of this view was seen on October 7.

Mike Tyson remarked that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose. Diaspora Leftist Jews have tried to escape punishment by staying out of the ring — and acknowledging our enemies’ right to an opinion, and our responsibility as Jews to defend that right at whatever cost to our interests. The American Civil Liberties Union stands up for the right of protestors to demonstrate — that is, to “act out” — in favour of genocide, much as their co-religionary Aaron explained to Moses: “What could I do? They took the gold and threw it in the pot and this calf came out, and we worshipped it.”

Jews were not instructed to worship fairness (a human concept, incapable of absolute determination), but to worship God and keep his ordinances. Indeed, a devotion to God and the Word of God is the sole protection we poor weak humans have against doing evil. Our devotion will not protect us from the evil others do, however — and that’s why we have armies.

© 2023, D. Mamet

But the movie stars were contemptuous of the New Form, and hung back until the dam broke. (I recall casting discussions in New York in the Seventies themed: “Do you think he would consider doing a Movie of the Week…?”) Still, television and film rubbed on, misharnessed, until the current amalgamation. In 2013, I wrote and directed an HBO film, Phil Spector. On hearing of it, my young son said: “Dad, you’re doing a Made-For-TV Movie. That’s shameful.”

Now the new technology has, again, upset the applecart. Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information — and, so, in determining content. Industrial production requires and rewards economies of scale and expenditure. The corporation buys in bulk, with neither time nor interest in that which one might call artistic integrity, which a comptroller, looking at numbers alone, could only understand as insubordination. The actually talented — those disposed and able to bring their idiosyncratic vision (art) to manufacturing — are as much of an obstruction as Chinese devotees of Feng Shui would be to the Hyundai production line. (To disrupt a production line is the original meaning of sabotage.)

There is a hopscotch effect in show business — it may be universal, but this is the only racket I know. The entrepreneurs and adventurers jump on the new thing. Some become successful, and the creators, actors, hucksters and thugs may exist in some sort of equilibrium until the tide turns.

With the coming of television, producers searched out the famous, to draw the viewers, but also hired the unknowns to work cheap. Early TV scripts were farmed out, one or several at a time, to individual writers (previously known as “writers”). There was a writers’ room, generally, only in comedy shows. No writers’ rooms were required for horse operas, and Warner Television churned them out on their lot, distinguishable only by their theme-songs. With the success of The Industry, land values increased. The movie lots — belonging to Paramount, Warners, Universal, Fox — cut down or eliminated the backlots where the films were made, turning them into cash. (Century City was the backlot of 20th Century Fox.)

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Independents then took to the streets and the countryside, to film on location — a process greatly simplified by the invention of the Steadicam in 1975. Now, one didn’t need to lay “dance floor” to allow the heavy cameras to move; and the more sensitive film stock lessened the need for elaborate lighting. Filmmaking, then, migrated first away from Hollywood, and then out of the United States, as the unions caught up with the economies enjoyed on location.

When I first showed up, movie scores were recorded on a soundstage in New York or LA by a full orchestra, the conductor watching the film projected, full-sized, behind them. Today they’re recorded over the internet, or its equivalent, by musicians in some Baltic Land, while the conductor watches the film on his iPhone. The number of working film musicians in Hollywood decreased from thousands in the Forties to virtually none today. But the number of writers increased.

Music is, of course, the universal language (except for Disco), but writers of English-language films require only the entry-level skill of speaking English. So, Hollywood, in the age of mass streaming, and tsunamis of “content”, needs writers. The writers work in Hollywood, rents here go up, but salaries go down. This is the ancient contretemps between the workers and the owners, capital and labour.

The workers, however, have always been split between the crafts and the industrial unions. Marx, that jokester, said that all the worker has to sell is his potential for labour. Well and good for a miner or cotton-mill girl; but a craftsperson, let alone an artisan or artist, has something more to sell: the productions of his unique talent and skill — and, to be Marxian, its potential beauty. Artisans have little in common with those on the assembly line; in Hollywood, however, they are in the same unions.

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Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

As for the unions, like any organisation evolved into life, they develop their own hierarchies and agendas, which more closely resemble those of management than those of the shop floor. They take form from the struggles of shop stewards, delegates, and negotiators within the union; as with our government representatives, they live in a hermetic world, separate from those they are elected to represent, and amassing power through their control, which is to say, their manipulation. The relation of union leadership to management is like that of opposing parties in Congress. Whatever differences they profess or portray, they play golf together, and, on the golf course, complain or joke about their constituents, who make it so tough to get along.

Interchange between the parties may sometimes appear static, but it is always in flux. Greater pay causes an influx of union members, which gives the union more clout in making demands, and more dues with which to enlarge recruitment, “research”, and similar bureaucratic metastasis, and to raise the salaries of their litigators and staff. Successful wage hikes force management to reduce profits or forgo modernisation.

Or changes in technology may incite management to attempt to cut employment, prompting the unions to insist on the status quo. The negotiations that follow inevitably result in higher costs to the consumer, which weakens the producer. Finally, these, like all negotiations, are a game of chicken, played by teams with catchy slogans on their sweatshirts: “We owe it to the stockholders”; “We owe it to our brave union and martyrs.” (Essentially the teams’ mascots.)

The United Auto Workers negotiated the richest deals in the history of organised labour in the Sixties — workers won great benefits in wages and pensions, but, 20 years later, American Automakers were, effectively, paying three sets of salaries where the Japanese, unhampered by unions and thrilled to employ automation, could make a better car cheaper, and so, captured the market.

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How fear consumed American theatre

By David Mamet

Few gold rush miners got rich. The big money was made by the folks who sold the shovels. On the other hand, the Aboriginals of Australia were doing swimmingly for millennia, until the coming of the Europeans in 1780. The newcomers saw what they thought were ignorant savages; but the Aboriginals had worked the land, and managed it, through inventive technologies of crossbreeding, fertilisation, and controlled burning, and could find water, and both sustain and consume the odd local fauna. The Europeans could do none of the above, and starved until the next ship arrived. They drove off, killed, or enslaved the Aboriginals, who were displaced by a technology (firearms), which has the power to coerce, but none to create.

The slash-and-burn methods of Australian Aboriginals can be called primitive, or magnificently effective methods of environmental control — harnessing natural processes for human sustenance, through understanding of the cycles of growth-and-decay. The ash of the burnt-over areas fertilised the ground for new growth, not only of planted crops, but of shoots and berries to attract and support the food-source wildlife.

A similar, though unintended, example can be found in the auto industry. Allied bombers destroyed the industrial capacity of both Germany and Japan, and then American money rebuilt them with new technologies, to compete with American production’s outmoded plants and the cumbersome employment contracts based upon the old technologies.

Q. Are technological changes beneficial? A. To whom, at what time? Radio wiped out Vaudeville; some performers persisted, but it was only for a while (as did some Neanderthals with the advent of homo sapiens).

Has society benefited by the ubiquity of streaming? Endless internet outlets have resulted in the proliferation of chaff, and the inevitable reduction of writers to the status of stoop labourers. Yet thwarted inspiration will always search for an outlet, which can most easily be found today in the writing of refrigerator magnets — for if they do not amuse, shock and delight, they aren’t purchased. The consumer here has a choice, as he does not with industrial entertainment (buy the subscription and take it or leave it). One, however, cannot spend the evening with a glass of vodka appreciating a refrigerator magnet.

How will it all end? It will not, but will continue, will-he, nil-he: the unfolding Grand-Guignol of human nature, rushing, like the wild river in flood, unchecked, and so on, carving its own banks and channels, while some in the lowlands adapt, flee or pray, and some, thinking themselves immune, picnic on the high ground, clucking at the spectacle, and suggesting to each other that Something Must be Done.

With thanks to Pat Shipman for ‘Our Oldest Companions’.

Copyright © 2023 by D. Mamet

New York, in my lifetime, had always been a Jewish city: the rhythms, the accent, the humour always felt to me like home. Because they were home. The populace, of whatever ethnicity, was formed or noodged by Yiddishkeit, much as the Chicago of my youth was by the culture of the Irish and the Poles.

The New York Times and The New Yorker were run by Jews; they were both our Rialto and our Bible. New York Theatre, in my lifetime, had always been Jewish. The playwrights were Miller, Odets, Elmer Rice, Ben Hecht, Sidney Kingsley; and, later, Arthur Laurents, Lillian Hellman, Neil Simon, Woody Allen, Norman Mailer, Wallace Shawn, and myself.

We New York Jews have always voted for the Democrats, as their policies appealed to the immigrants and the first generation (my parents). A Fair Shake, a safety net, and unionism were manna to the newly arrived — in spite of (in both their and my lifetime) quotas and antisemitic discrimination. The immigrant Jews did well here, and voted for Franklin Roosevelt. And we are voting for him still.

His Advisor on Jewish Affairs (jude-suss, or “house-Jew”) was Rabbi Stephen Wise, the “dean” of the American Rabbinate. He referred to FDR as “Boss”, and brought home to his community Roosevelt’s assurance of aid to the dying Jews of Europe. Yet Roosevelt’s aid stopped with his assurances, and tens of thousands of Jews died because of his restrictive immigration policies, and millions in Europe because of his refusal to interdict the Holocaust.

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Still, today, Jews vote Democratic: electing Presidents who refused to meet with the Israeli Prime Minister (Obama and Biden) in times of “peace”, who gave and give aid to the terrorist state of Iran in exchange for some semi-specified “deal”. American “Aid” to Iran pays for the equipment and ordnance, which is, at this moment, eradicating Jews.

Why do Jews vote Democratic? Partly from tradition — conservatives have heard a Liberal Jew, when asked to defend or explain various absurd or inconsistent Democratic positions, shrug and joke: “I’m a Congenital Democrat.” I understand, for I was one, too.

But there is no more cosy mystery in the antisemitism of the Democratic Party; Representatives are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists and pro-Palestinians, calling for the end of the state of Israel — that is, for the death of the Jews. And Democrat Representatives repeat and refuse to retract the libel that Israel bombed a hospital, in spite of absolute proof to the contrary, and will not call out the unutterable atrocities of Hamas. The writing is on the wall. In blood.

Moses was instructed to have the Jews smear blood on their doorposts to identify themselves, and, so, avert the wrath of the Angel of Death. Mythologically, the blood can be said to be their own: the message, that if they chose to stay in Egypt, their blood would not mark the doorpost, but would wash the floor.

Many German Jews served the Kaiser during the First World War, and explained to the Nazi thugs that they were Good Germans. And they were killed. And many defended themselves, in the Thirties, by admitting, among themselves, that the Eastern Jews were uncouth; just as today some Western liberal Jews “agree” with the Squad that the terrorists, though they have “gone too far”, “may have a point”: that Israel’s desire to exist is not consonant with an enlightened humanism. This is, in effect, a plea for exemption, not only from terror, but from conscience, for the liberal Jew means the Israelis “are making it hard on the rest of us”. Which is true; for if Israel’s innocent anguish is acknowledged, he will have to admit he has been living a terrible lie.

Many good German Jews in the Thirties ignored their brothers and sisters to the East, and later died with them. My generation, born right after the Holocaust, wondered: “Good God, didn’t you see what was happening around you? Are you literally willing to die rather than admit you were mistaken?” The answer, today, to many liberal American Jews, is “Yes”.

In response, the world’s Leftist media calls for the chastisement of Israel and support for Palestine, while those who consider themselves mere “liberals” moderate their cowardice by calling for a “ceasefire” — which is to say, a pause while Hamas re-arms. This is where the libel of the hospital bombing is instructive. It is, quite literally, another example of the West’s oldest, most reliable, and most permissible sick entertainment: the call for Jewish extinction. The invitation, here, is no different from that of the carnival barker: thrills, chills, and excitement galore.

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It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

Christianity came into being with the destruction of the Jewish State — the adherents were Jews whose Temple and culture had been destroyed. Every new religion, in its foundation myths, slanders its parent faith. In maturity it may revise, “reinterpret”, or ignore the earlier statements. Pope Paul VI’s Bull, Nostra Aetate, repudiated antisemitism.

But the Jewish libel persisted as, since 77 CE, there was no Jewish State. The Jews had no protection whatever: from Cossacks, peasants, pogroms, the Crusades, Hitler, Stalin, and so on. And, so, we were convenient victims as we were powerless, in effect the battered wife of the West. We were at the mercy of anyone who wanted anything we had: our possessions, our children and women, our lives, our hair to make mattresses, our bones to make fertiliser, and our trauma to make Holocaust porn and “News at 11”.

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Unprotected, we appealed to Power for decent consideration as Human Beings; and Power in America, the Democratic Party, was always happy to take our money and our votes, and ask us to wait in the Outer Office. As it does today.

The position of the Jews changed in 1948 with the foundation of the Jewish State. But the habits of 2,000 years, now of Liberal Jews (in the diaspora and in Israel) have not changed. These appeal, in the name of humanity, to powers which may believe in humanity, but, unfortunately, do not consider Jews human.

And so, the carnival barker titillates us with the thrills available for a pittance: one dime, one tenth part of the dollar. But the sick thrill of antisemitism also has a price: the surrender of reason, and, with it, of conscience.

© 2023, D. Mamet

But the movie stars were contemptuous of the New Form, and hung back until the dam broke. (I recall casting discussions in New York in the Seventies themed: “Do you think he would consider doing a Movie of the Week…?”) Still, television and film rubbed on, misharnessed, until the current amalgamation. In 2013, I wrote and directed an HBO film, Phil Spector. On hearing of it, my young son said: “Dad, you’re doing a Made-For-TV Movie. That’s shameful.”

Now the new technology has, again, upset the applecart. Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information — and, so, in determining content. Industrial production requires and rewards economies of scale and expenditure. The corporation buys in bulk, with neither time nor interest in that which one might call artistic integrity, which a comptroller, looking at numbers alone, could only understand as insubordination. The actually talented — those disposed and able to bring their idiosyncratic vision (art) to manufacturing — are as much of an obstruction as Chinese devotees of Feng Shui would be to the Hyundai production line. (To disrupt a production line is the original meaning of sabotage.)

There is a hopscotch effect in show business — it may be universal, but this is the only racket I know. The entrepreneurs and adventurers jump on the new thing. Some become successful, and the creators, actors, hucksters and thugs may exist in some sort of equilibrium until the tide turns.

With the coming of television, producers searched out the famous, to draw the viewers, but also hired the unknowns to work cheap. Early TV scripts were farmed out, one or several at a time, to individual writers (previously known as “writers”). There was a writers’ room, generally, only in comedy shows. No writers’ rooms were required for horse operas, and Warner Television churned them out on their lot, distinguishable only by their theme-songs. With the success of The Industry, land values increased. The movie lots — belonging to Paramount, Warners, Universal, Fox — cut down or eliminated the backlots where the films were made, turning them into cash. (Century City was the backlot of 20th Century Fox.)

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The naked persecution of Donald Trump

By David Mamet

Independents then took to the streets and the countryside, to film on location — a process greatly simplified by the invention of the Steadicam in 1975. Now, one didn’t need to lay “dance floor” to allow the heavy cameras to move; and the more sensitive film stock lessened the need for elaborate lighting. Filmmaking, then, migrated first away from Hollywood, and then out of the United States, as the unions caught up with the economies enjoyed on location.

When I first showed up, movie scores were recorded on a soundstage in New York or LA by a full orchestra, the conductor watching the film projected, full-sized, behind them. Today they’re recorded over the internet, or its equivalent, by musicians in some Baltic Land, while the conductor watches the film on his iPhone. The number of working film musicians in Hollywood decreased from thousands in the Forties to virtually none today. But the number of writers increased.

Music is, of course, the universal language (except for Disco), but writers of English-language films require only the entry-level skill of speaking English. So, Hollywood, in the age of mass streaming, and tsunamis of “content”, needs writers. The writers work in Hollywood, rents here go up, but salaries go down. This is the ancient contretemps between the workers and the owners, capital and labour.

The workers, however, have always been split between the crafts and the industrial unions. Marx, that jokester, said that all the worker has to sell is his potential for labour. Well and good for a miner or cotton-mill girl; but a craftsperson, let alone an artisan or artist, has something more to sell: the productions of his unique talent and skill — and, to be Marxian, its potential beauty. Artisans have little in common with those on the assembly line; in Hollywood, however, they are in the same unions.

More from this author

Race is a delusion

By David Mamet

As for the unions, like any organisation evolved into life, they develop their own hierarchies and agendas, which more closely resemble those of management than those of the shop floor. They take form from the struggles of shop stewards, delegates, and negotiators within the union; as with our government representatives, they live in a hermetic world, separate from those they are elected to represent, and amassing power through their control, which is to say, their manipulation. The relation of union leadership to management is like that of opposing parties in Congress. Whatever differences they profess or portray, they play golf together, and, on the golf course, complain or joke about their constituents, who make it so tough to get along.

Interchange between the parties may sometimes appear static, but it is always in flux. Greater pay causes an influx of union members, which gives the union more clout in making demands, and more dues with which to enlarge recruitment, “research”, and similar bureaucratic metastasis, and to raise the salaries of their litigators and staff. Successful wage hikes force management to reduce profits or forgo modernisation.

Or changes in technology may incite management to attempt to cut employment, prompting the unions to insist on the status quo. The negotiations that follow inevitably result in higher costs to the consumer, which weakens the producer. Finally, these, like all negotiations, are a game of chicken, played by teams with catchy slogans on their sweatshirts: “We owe it to the stockholders”; “We owe it to our brave union and martyrs.” (Essentially the teams’ mascots.)

The United Auto Workers negotiated the richest deals in the history of organised labour in the Sixties — workers won great benefits in wages and pensions, but, 20 years later, American Automakers were, effectively, paying three sets of salaries where the Japanese, unhampered by unions and thrilled to employ automation, could make a better car cheaper, and so, captured the market.

More from this author

How fear consumed American theatre

By David Mamet

Few gold rush miners got rich. The big money was made by the folks who sold the shovels. On the other hand, the Aboriginals of Australia were doing swimmingly for millennia, until the coming of the Europeans in 1780. The newcomers saw what they thought were ignorant savages; but the Aboriginals had worked the land, and managed it, through inventive technologies of crossbreeding, fertilisation, and controlled burning, and could find water, and both sustain and consume the odd local fauna. The Europeans could do none of the above, and starved until the next ship arrived. They drove off, killed, or enslaved the Aboriginals, who were displaced by a technology (firearms), which has the power to coerce, but none to create.

The slash-and-burn methods of Australian Aboriginals can be called primitive, or magnificently effective methods of environmental control — harnessing natural processes for human sustenance, through understanding of the cycles of growth-and-decay. The ash of the burnt-over areas fertilised the ground for new growth, not only of planted crops, but of shoots and berries to attract and support the food-source wildlife.

A similar, though unintended, example can be found in the auto industry. Allied bombers destroyed the industrial capacity of both Germany and Japan, and then American money rebuilt them with new technologies, to compete with American production’s outmoded plants and the cumbersome employment contracts based upon the old technologies.

Q. Are technological changes beneficial? A. To whom, at what time? Radio wiped out Vaudeville; some performers persisted, but it was only for a while (as did some Neanderthals with the advent of homo sapiens).

Has society benefited by the ubiquity of streaming? Endless internet outlets have resulted in the proliferation of chaff, and the inevitable reduction of writers to the status of stoop labourers. Yet thwarted inspiration will always search for an outlet, which can most easily be found today in the writing of refrigerator magnets — for if they do not amuse, shock and delight, they aren’t purchased. The consumer here has a choice, as he does not with industrial entertainment (buy the subscription and take it or leave it). One, however, cannot spend the evening with a glass of vodka appreciating a refrigerator magnet.

How will it all end? It will not, but will continue, will-he, nil-he: the unfolding Grand-Guignol of human nature, rushing, like the wild river in flood, unchecked, and so on, carving its own banks and channels, while some in the lowlands adapt, flee or pray, and some, thinking themselves immune, picnic on the high ground, clucking at the spectacle, and suggesting to each other that Something Must be Done.

With thanks to Pat Shipman for ‘Our Oldest Companions’.

Copyright © 2023 by D. Mamet

Having asserted a claim to literacy, I will now tell you what I’ve been reading, and why. I read for pleasure, and find as much pleasing in browsing as I find drudgery in study. But I am preparing a film about the assassination of John F. Kennedy — and so, I have returned to books I originally cherished just because.

Here is Jack Ruby’s Girls, a 1970 fiction supposedly written by two of his strippers as a factual account. But, under their imprimatur, his girls are not B-girls and whores, but funny, quirky dancers; and Jack is not a thug, but a warm-hearted, civic-minded old bear. All criminal memoirs are selective at best; this one’s a mere cartoon, interesting for what it suppresses. What might that be?

Another recurrence on my bedside table is The Great Zapruder Film Hoax (2003), a compilation of essays by photographers, photo-analysts, and ballisticians, each establishing the falsity of the sole remaining film of JFK’s assassination. What’s wrong with the film? To begin, several frames are missing. No one has ever suggested a logical reason for their excision other than suppression of evidence. The blood-spatter explosion of the President’s head is, goes the claim, clearly painted on. It exists only for one frame, 0.04 of a second. In frame 312 it is absent, in the following frame it’s there, and in the next frame it’s gone — not dispersed or dispersing, but gone.

The alteration of the film in two instances proves its worthlessness as a document of anything other than deceit. For the film did not alter itself, and the various cameras confiscated in Dealey Plaza did not dispose of themselves. What did happen? Well, JFK was sharing a girlfriend with Sam Giancana of the Chicago Mob; Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald knew each other well; Oswald’s mother had been the girlfriend of Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans Mafia, and so on. But the Warren Commission into the assassinating concluded that Caesar was not Ambitious, and Brutus is an Honourable Man.

We may handily overlay the popular notion of mafia organisational structure onto that of the British nobility. The monarch appointed Dukes, Earls, Barons and Counts, each awarded both a domain and a responsibility. The nobles constituted themselves, as a whole, against the commoners and peons. They banded together to pass laws criminal, civil and religious, to ensure their hegemony and the integrity of the realm which preserved their position. Periodically, nobles warred with each other for supremacy under the ruler. See the Wars of the Roses, Cromwell, the Five Families of New York.

Over time, however, successful associations, born in brigandage, go straight. Today’s British monarchy is a ceremonial outfit, and the various American crime families, either disappeared with the times (see Boss Tweed’s control of New York through Irish immigrants), were changed by the times, or were subsumed by a larger and more powerful group (such as the Democratic Party). Repeal forced urban bootlegging mobs to branch out into drugs; two world wars impoverished Britain and its nobility; and Britain’s entrance into the European Union, after 900 years of power, was, in effect, that act of “going legit” — which, to any liberal looks like advanced reason, but which his enemies interpret correctly as inviting attack.

It seems the sole political entities that didn’t start as crime families have been the democracies. These emerge not from powerful scheming to create that order which will support them at the cost of their opponents, but from a consensus of the Wise or Concerned, legislating peace through understanding of human weakness, and the attendant need for justice and order. Democracies, then, like monarchies, must eventually fall when prosperity weakens resolve: when the fat cats rule only because their progenitors were strong.

But those Capos di Tutti Capi who have inherited their place must be inferior, in strength, reason and viciousness to their forebears for they did not win, but inherited their position.[1. We accept that the owner of an NFL team will bequeath his ownership to his descendants; but even they, happy in their enjoyment of primogeniture, would not hire a quarterback solely because his father was a Heisman winner. (See also the Greatest Generation and its inevitable aftermath.)] Anyone might inherit good looks or physical strength, but not perspicacity and resolve, and never to a degree equal to that matured through existential struggle.

***

Ancient Israel was the nexus of the Asian silk road and African and Mediterranean commerce. Merchandise, culture and fashion spread from the East over land and over the sea to Greece, to Sicily, and then to Italy.

The Sicilians inherited, adopted or had forced upon them many cultures, and, like any border people, sought safety in the Clan. For it was not that any current rulers and customs of the state might be supplanted, but that they would. What could be trusted but blood ties? Nothing.

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The Sicilians (and the ‘Ndrangheta and Camorra tribes), always subject to conquest, could operate only as a state-within-a-state. They, and the Irish border folks, took their insights into the New World (see Ethnic America by Thomas Sowell, 1981). These became the political machines: organised crime was its harness-mate, and the crossbreeding (actual and ideological) gave birth to various American political dynasties.

These dynasties, like monarchy, attempted control of the mass through myth. The myth of the royals is the divine right of kings, and their wisdom, benignity and devotion to public service. This last — a low-cost, though fragile tool — is theoretically susceptible to public scrutiny through a free press. Absent this scrutiny, the myth of hereditary public service reveals its essential nature as the happy face of violence to the dissenting. We see this operation in religious wars, supposedly about doctrine, but, in essence, about hegemony.

***

Today, the Left’s protestation of benevolence is everywhere unsaid by its real threat of immediate ruin: the manner in which the various territorial claims of the Left’s clans — MeToo, Marxism, Feminism, Occupy, Anarchism and so on — spawn new collusion (intersectionality) and then aggression (gay rights vs. transgender rights) as one group tries to break to the rail. Life may be “the war of all against all”, but each prosecutes it with as much aid as he can muster; and that aid was, originally, the family.

The Scottish term for clan is Sept; the Hebrew word is Svat. Both mean seven; that is, the number of families making up a clan. The clan, then, is a military-company-sized group of individuals tied by blood, whose allegiance may be theoretically relied upon.

Yet the modern Left works, consciously or not, to destroy the family as the basic unit of loyalty, working to replace it with allegiance to the state, which can only mean those proclaiming themselves the champions of the state (political chieftains), the states’ incarnation (dictators), or their like in the states’ demise (effectively warlords). The decay of Western democracy has split the electorate into those accepting the new monolithic, unerring state and those preferring a constitutional accountability; that is, preferring democracy to subservience.

What of the family? For the past 50 years, it has been denounced as “the nuclear family” — and let’s note that, since 1946, the adjective has always meant “horrific”. The nuclear family has been destroyed: by technology, contraception, penicillin, travel and so on. Its destruction has been ascribed to the champions of its demise: humanism, globalism and atheism-as-reason. But these are only the beneficiaries of decay. In its place, membership to our various right-thinking groups is an unconscious attempt to reconstitute the family — that group which will offer protection. Just like life in the urban gangs.

***

The Hebrew Bible is the record of the growth of the state from the family. The family is the Jewish, religious polity. Chapter by chapter, mankind’s development is shown in the Bible through the family dynamic. Cain slays Abel out of jealousy; Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac; Jacob steals Esau’s birthright; his sons kidnap and abandon Joseph.

The last purely familial exchange is that between Moses and his step grandfather, Pharaoh. This will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a broken family. Pharaoh has raised Moses, effectively, to be his successor; but Moses displeases Pharaoh — not because he slew the Taskmaster (after all, he was the Prince of Egypt), but because he did so to protect a Jewish slave. Moses publicly demonstrated allegiance to that despised group from which he had been graciously rescued. He insulted the benevolence of his step-grandfather, who asked nothing of him but expected simple loyalty.

Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and in the desert the Biblical struggles of the family are supplanted by the horrors of creating and maintaining a unified state. In the Exodus, clans, tribes and individuals plot mutiny, challenge, disobey and infuriate Moses, and the story changes from interfamilial dynamics to the birth of democracy — with individual freedom and equality constrained by obedience to law and threatened not by the disaffected individual but by faction.

Moses’s power is depleted by age and he is spared the horror of his people’s behaviour in the Promised Land. The eternal struggle for power, absent operative myth and its defence, devolves into decay and the reversion of the state into the family or clan.

The Godfather, our American Myth, is the contemporary rendition of Greek Drama. They portrayed the family members as gods and demigods, each embodying a recognisable human ambition and its inevitable attendant flaw. Greek wisdom and drama cross-decked to Sicily, and, thence, to Hollywood, and the Corleone Family is the house of Atreus.

Every family will have a no-good brother-in-law, a crazed aunt or grandfather, a drunk, a homosexual, an unutterable secret; the envied, the despised, the tolerated, the shunned. It is a compendium of humans — as flawed as we each know ourselves to be — endeavouring or constrained to live together under a set of customs, both based upon and engendering myth. For myth is the expression of an otherwise ungraspable perception; it grows from necessity, and persists as it is useful operationally. When it is supplanted as unreasonable, blasphemous or absurd, it creates the chaos allowing for new hegemony, and, thus, new myth.

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This, however, though asserting a new, rational content, can only be based upon that human consciousness which requires the comfort or control of myth — and, though it may change its content, it is psychologically bound to its form. The Twelve Tribes become the Twelve Caesars, just as the House of Atreus becomes the Kennedys.

Neither I nor you know much about that family, and much that we know may be false, exaggerated or hagiographic; but the Myth of the Kennedys is that of a family beloved by both the more benevolent of the Fates, and their less easily amused sisters.

Are they more depraved, luckless, criminal, perverted, violent and so on than the rest of us? Possibly, as their remove or immunity from scrutiny may, logically, induce excess. The protected antics of the great have an analogue in the 19th-century display of Spiritualism. Here, the medium demonstrated his supernatural powers, loosening himself from manacles, or producing displays of “ectoplasm”, requiring only that they be done in the dark. The Kennedys are certainly more prominent. And we are all addicted to gossip, which is not only more exciting but less taxing than reason, and under whose sway we are enthused with licensed salaciousness — and a momentary sense of superiority to those we envy and fear.

© David Mamet 2023

Hamlet lists one of the screaming tragedies of life as “the law’s delay”. All of the affronted have anguished that “surely there must be a better way”. And there may, but if it has been previously discovered, that knowledge is lost to us.

Those who have served as jurors realise: “Oh. There’s nobody here but us chickens…” We’re instructed to put prejudice aside, and rule on the facts as presented under the stringent rules of jurisprudence. But we are flawed and prejudiced, and many of the procedures we are instructed to follow are, of course, absurd. Again, the question presents itself: can’t we find a better way? Are we really going to set this depraved murderer free because of a technical error? Do we actually have to deprive this mother of her child because of some ancient statute? And so on.

Any who have experienced the jollity of the court in any capacity know that all parties, ourselves included, will scheme to exploit the absurdities, technicalities and ambiguities of the system to our benefit. We are constrained from too obvious transgression by fear of discovery and punishment; but all decisions, even by the Righteous, if such there be, will involve a calculus of the cost of an over-nice obedience to The Law.

Back in Vermont, in the Sixties, the Old-Timers used to refer to a fellow’s lawyers as His Liars — a designation in which there is more truth than fiction. At what point does a shading of evidence, or the gentle preparation of a witness, tick over from a healthy prosecution or defence into misconduct?

The determination of that point is the lawyer’s main job, for success in which he’s lauded. That’s the Adversarial System, which in America’s case is what we got, which is the survival of trial by combat. Opposing attorneys, given the same rules of procedure, fight it out, and, consciously or not, we accept that the chance of the more just cause prevailing is perhaps equal to, but finally independent of, the actual merits of the case — should the victor stay within the rules, which is to say, escape discovery of their violation.

The Old Texas Verdict had it: “not guilty, but don’t do it again”. We know its application was not limited to Texas, for the law can free both Jean Valjean and Teddy Kennedy, and isn’t life like that? Where there is law, there is injustice. Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

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What of overt and unapologetic prosecutorial misconduct? The aim of the current legal thuggery is suppression of a politically threatening individual by an administration usurping power. Our democracy is no stranger to it. Gene Debs, the Socialist leader, was jailed in 1918 by the Wilson government for his opposition to participation in the First World War. He was convicted under the Sedition Act, which criminalised expression of opinion questioning our involvement. The act was passed under President, elected in 1916 with the slogan, “He Kept Us Out of the War”.

Power is arrogant, and none of us is immune to its intoxication. Each of us knows not only the bully, but the meek narcissist who bludgeons us through his passivity, ineptitude, or unassailable good will. The first recorded acts of humankind are crime and disgrace. Eve broke the one law she was given, and Adam denounced her to mitigate his sentence. He blamed his wife, and his wife blamed the snake, but the snake blamed no one. What was the snake doing in the Garden? God put him there — he represents that portion of our human depravity which is not ashamed to sin.

More recently, some pedestrians strolling outside the Capitol on January 6 were imprisoned, and many are still held without charge. It’s a tough world out there, and the Government isn’t unaware of the delights and uses of power; little has changed since ancient Sumer.

But, as Passover is here, we might ask: “why is this night different from all other nights?” Answer: the indictment of President Trump demolishes the line between prosecutorial sharp-practices and naked persecution. The fig leaf of judicial probity is, granted, often transparent. But its glib removal yesterday announces an advance past that last firewall against thuggery: shame.

What was her objective? We actually don’t know. She seems to be enjoying toying with the notion of loss. And we may enjoy her antics, as they are part of a series of serio-comic sketches. The Cherry Orchard does not have a plot.

Death of a Salesman is a series of sketches on a theme equating regret with loss. What is Willie Loman’s problem? He is not a very good salesman. Arthur Miller wrote of De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves that it was as if someone had photographed the human soul. But, for all its worth, one cannot say the same of Death of a Salesman. We come away having seen a play about The Other (with the exception of the scenes with Biff). This Other’s problem is that he’s a bad salesman, and we may, if we like, feel sorry for his state. But which of us actually has sympathy for another’s problems? (Part of the attraction of the Problem, Illness, or Diversity play is its invitation to convince ourselves that we do.)

The southern writer can present his regional emotionality as a party turn (Thomas Wolfe), or it may be the genius outpourings of an actual tortured soul, like William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. Mark Twain wrote that Ivanhoe was the book which ruined the South. This most famous of knightly tales grew out of the romances of the Jongleurs, Lancelot, Roland, and their mélange by Walter Scott into his creation of The Lost Cause. His was the eradication of Scottish Culture in the defeat of the Stuarts. The Southerners (Scots-Irish in the main) grafted that tragedy onto their own.

When Tennessee Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi, many veterans of the civil war were still alive. His parents’ generation all suffered under Reconstruction. They, additionally, were descended from Huguenots, French Protestants exiled in the 17th century; and, to conclude the entertainment, he was — for that time necessarily — a closeted gay man. And a poet.

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In A Streetcar Named Desire, which debuted on Broadway 75 years ago this week, what does Blanche long for? An imaginary past. What is her particular problem? She longs for an imaginary past. And she’s a whore.

Do the events in the play amount to, or are they structured around, a plot? Not particularly. But the poet is pregnant of his cause, and we are the beneficiaries, moved, if I might, not by the tragedy of Blanche, but by that of Tennessee.

Freud wrote that music is polymorphous perversity, which I understand to mean it moves us through the progression of notions which have no referent in logic: although the feeling they engender is exactly like that created by an enlightening syllogism.

The highest paid production staff in vaudeville were the Routiners, who would structure the evening’s seven acts into a whole emotionally similar to that of an actual drama: The opening production number, the duet, the rope-twirler, the slapstick clown, and so on, culminating in the headliner and the serio-comic act to send us on our way. That’s what Chekhov does in The Cherry Orchard.

Streetcar is less abstract. It is a melodrama. Here the characters are assigned qualities by which we may recognise them (white hat vs black hat; red nose indicating the drunk; ample form and high-flown speech, the Matron, flightiness, the Ingénue, and so on), given the theme of sexuality, and then allowed to play.

I never understood the plays of Eugene O’Neill. It was explained that his father was a drunk and his mother a dope fiend, and I began to understand his concerns; but I didn’t care, as the plays bored me.

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He paid his obeisance to that form no doubt taught by Professor Baker in his Harvard Drama course. But what did Professor Baker ever write? Nothing that I know of. But he had read a lot, and, no doubt, imparted his theories to O’Neill, who discharged the debt by the compliment of becoming academic.

Chekhov’s progenitors were the comics of the music hall, and the short stories he read and famously wrote. With the growth of wide-circulation magazines, the late-Victorian era created a grand market for the short-story writer, Chekhov and Tolstoy among them. Chekhov’s plays are, each, more similar to a collection of short stories with the same characters, than they are to conventional drama. He was creating — consciously or not — something which he had enjoyed, and practising it in a different form.

Tennessee’s forebears were The Romantic Poets, and he may be said to be the last of their line. There exist some few works about not the ineffableness, but about the agony of loss. Tragedy cleanses, as it affronts us with the human condition; which, here (as opposed to mere drama) we recognise unavoidably as our own. But no one feels sorry for either Othello or Desdemona. They are mechanical parts of a tragic progression. One would, as soon, be reduced to tears by Beethoven, and then feel sorry for the violin.

But we feel the loss of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and that of Frederic Henry at the death of Catherine in A Farewell to Arms. Does one feel sorry for Blanche? We may go as far as “too bad”, but that’s as far as we’ll go. Does one feel sorry for the author, a creature of Loss? I don’t think so, as he got to write a magnificent play, and to reap all the benefits on offer thereby.

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Streetcar, like The Sorrows of Young Werther, concerns a hero who is (one or both) just of too fine sensibilities to live in the world, or has a screw loose. But romanticism seems to be compounded of Love, Longing and Death, written by the non-artist we’re left with a love story, about a Jock who Cried.

Tennessee, by his own admission (to me) was addicted to rough trade — as if it required a ghost from the grave to tell us that. The addiction is an unquenchable longing for that imagined-as-male. Whether this is the male one feels he can never become, or him he can never have, is moot — one is not going to find this love in the arms of a whore, and, so, one is doomed to perpetual repetition, failure and loss.

Tennessee-as-Blanche imagines males with their clumsy, rough fingers, as raping, beer-swilling, poker-playing bowlers. She is, at once, the longing vessel and the professional — the rough-trade.

Gay drama in straight drag was taken up by Truman Capote 14 years later as the romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and two years earlier than Streetcar, in Noel Coward’s drama Brief Encounter. The first ends in a marriage possible as the couple is presented as heterosexual; the second, in a heart-rending abandonment of the affair as the couple (in underlying truth) are not.

At the end of Streetcar, Blanche goes nuts, which is neither a victory over her situation, or fate, nor an acceptance of her failure — it is a convenience allowing the play to end. The end of the play is the continuation of the Poker Game, or “men go on, amusing themselves with a male game not only in spite, but in ignorance, of the depth of women’s anguish”.

I beg pardon for the psycho-sexual dismemberment of a great play. Streetcar is dated, but at some point it will cease being dated.

Indeed, their suggestions fairly regularly force me to re-evaluate, if not their intelligence, at least their taste. “Love me, love my dog” is the law of life; and how sad it is to ask how one enjoyed my gift, and to perceive not only their lying endorsement, but the, perhaps preferable, fib that they had read it. I enjoy throwing books in the trash, as I enjoy mixing the various articles the environmentally conscious suggest should be separated for more easy recycling. In 1914, Carl Sandburg saw “the painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys”, and lately I have seen the various separated recyclables re-mixed in the dumptruck.

But we both survived the trauma. Sandburg until 1967, and myself, to this very morning of writing.

My native Chicago built some rather tacky Urban Renewal Housing on the North Side in 1960. The construction was cheap, and the style Talentless Architect, Friday Afternoon; but it was to be dedicated to Affordable Housing for — supposedly — The Worthy. Their identity would be determined, then as now, by the whim of the bureaucrats. The worthy here turned out, predictably, to be the well-to-do who knew someone at City Hall. Where do we not find human perfidy? It certainly is found in the book which is my subject.

It is Kingsblood Royal, written by Sinclair Lewis in 1947. He, like most Western literature, is forgotten today, and it’s a shame, as he wrote some very good and very important books. They, at least, were important to me, as they hipped me to literature.

I used to cut school in the Fifties to go read. I would spend two or three hours in the Public Library Reading Room browsing the open stacks. What a delight; there, as with the old, independent bookstores, one could follow one’s nose without the guidance of a machine electronic or political. In any case, I, 13-years-old, came across a book called Main Street (1920) by Sinclair Lewis and read until I laid it down. It was his breakthrough novel about the dreary life of a Minnesota Town, and it sounded just like my youth in and outside Chicago.

His Babbitt (1922) is the story of a real estate Booster — the progenitor both of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. The books are masterpieces. I will not suggest you read them, in the hope that you may. And he, a most prolific gent, wrote a bit of trash, some okay fiction, and a few outliers. Outliers include It Can’t Happen Here (1935), the story of Fascism’s arrival in America, and Kingsblood Royal (1947).

This is a race story. It is not the race porn of today’s literature-adjacent plaints of mistreatment or avowals of white guilt. No. It is the story of a returning white WWII Vet, a rising cashier at a bank, who lives in the country-club set. The set takes up a lot of the members’ time drinking and dissing the servants. Their servants are all black, and their dish is about how lazy, offensive, sub-human and so on black people are, and how they are getting too big for their britches. Neil Kingsblood, our hero, agrees, and joins in the jollity.

But Neil, lamed in the War, can no longer engage in his beloved tennis; and, looking for a hobby, he takes up genealogy. What does he find? He finds that his great-great-grandfather was black.

What to do?

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Note, this is 1947, where a mixed-race couple, walking down a street in the South or the North did so at the risk of their lives; where the entire country was Jim Crow, and blacks, who’d been hired in the war effort were fired at the war’s conclusion. And so on. Not that long ago.

Should he “confess his taint”, he and his entire family will be ruined. He now wonders if the white community in which he lives can discern his black blood; as, indeed, they claim: “I was raised in the South and I can spot a dinge with only one drop of Negro Blood.”

He meets a returning black aviator, a combat pilot and Captain, who is now working in a barbershop. They begin chatting, one vet to another, and Neil, little by little, gets drawn into the black community. He is invited to the aviator’s home, where he is treated with chill reserve. But when he blurts out that he is himself “a Negro” he is enfolded in compassion and love. He comes to realise that blacks are not arrogant or standoffish, but necessarily self-protective among whites, as he is among blacks. But as a black among blacks he finds community.

He falls in love with a black girl, who congratulates him upon being black. He makes the truest friends he’s known since the camaraderie of the war. The book becomes that love story of every new convert. In his decision, his new friends commiserate and advise him to continue to pass, as what good would it do to come out? (The phrase Lewis uses.)

But he hears his new friends, and blacks in general, abused and dehumanised at a stag party, and speaks up for them. His country club cronies start to look sideways at him, and one uses that phrase, well-known to my youth: “what are you, a n—r lover?” He blurts out that he is a “negro”.

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By Phil Klay

Well, his family turns on him, he loses his job, he is bullied and arrested, his home is taken from him, under a “restrictive covenant” he signed, affirming that he was Caucasian.

Is this polemical, forgotten book important? It is important to me. Here’s why: It is a book about delusion.

Anthony Trollope, a humane and compassionate author, wrote of one of his characters: “When one knew he was a Jew one saw he was a Jew.” This is the wise writer unconsciously revealing delusion. It made sense to mid-Victorian readers who, like Trollope, were unaware their consciousness had been warped into absurdity by prejudice. For the phrase cannot actually mean anything other than: “Jews do not look or act differently from Christians; but I am led to believe so, by their label.”

Neil Kingsblood, an accepted, respected, accomplished, white member of his white community, when revealed he had “one drop of Negro blood”, was found to possess all the unfortunate (and imaginary) aspects of blackness. The accidental revelation of his ancestry led him to the discovery of a community madness, of which he was, previously, unaware, and in which he happily participated.

Will some people today find the book objectionable? Yes. That they will is evidence of another community sickness, that of our own advanced time: that sensitive matters can only be treated by those claiming to be victims, and then only by their indictment of their supposed oppressors. (I will name whites, straights, conservatives, Christians — ingathered into that accommodating portmanteau: “Haters.”)

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Books about black-white relations (as opposed to books about, for example, being black: Native Son, Invisible Man, Passing) can only be written by an author belonging to one of the two groups. The group to which he does not belong will assuredly find humour and likely insult in this author’s ignorance. But what is one to do?

The only book featuring Jews and written by a Christian which I, a Jew, did not find ludicrous or enraging, was Ivanhoe. Everyone else gets it wrong, including George Eliot and her Daniel Deronda.

The Christian authors portraying Jews are like the Hollywood moguls who (with the exception of their casting of Paul Newman, a Jew, in Exodus) always cast a Christian as the Jew because, supposedly, to cast an “actual” Jew would outrage Christian sensibilities.

Returning to American Literature, here are two condign books. The first is Gentleman’s Agreement (Laura Z. Hobson, 1947). Here, a Christian journalist becomes aware of anti-Semitism, and sets out to investigate.

He goes to this and that hotel and restaurant, and tries to receive service as Mr Goldberg and is told to buzz off. His family and his community turn against him, and so on, the mixture as in Kingsblood Royal. In a bellylaff scene, he upbraids his Jewish Secretary, for being insufficiently Jewish, in using an anti-Semitic phrase. It was made as a film with Gregory Peck and won all kinds of awards for the Humanity of His Performance. Joe Mankiewicz said that its moral is you should always be kind to a Jew, as he might turn out to be a Christian.

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Will we escape our age of failure?

By Martin Gurri

Our lives, yours and mine, are full of sanctimony; in fact, a grand tool of self-diagnosis is recognition of the warm joy we take in sententiousness, and its big brother, righteousness. It is a lead-pipe cinch that these sugar-coat complicity.

A second book: In 1961, John Howard Griffin, a white man, took chemicals to darken his skin and travelled two months in the Jim Crow South, writing articles for Sepia about the plight of Southern blacks. These, published in book form as Black Like Me, record his actual experience of the fictive journey of Neil Kingsblood.

Sinclair Lewis’s story might have ended with Kingsblood’s discovery that he had been given the wrong genealogical chart, and that, after all, he did not have that drop of tainted “Negro Blood”. The end, therefore, which perhaps did not need further clarification, would have been that race is a delusion. As indeed it is. Its contemporary pre-eminence to the exclusion of all other human characteristics is our current-day sanctimony, as false and wicked as bussing, segregation, and Jim Crow; and, like them, a mantra in repetition of which one can seek escape from rational thought.

Reading seems to be my hobby; and, as a hobbyist, I am delighted by discovery of the obscure. The majority of the books beloved by their time are trash. Some are rediscovered and embraced, most are, blessedly forgotten. Some few have entertainment or educational value for those with a scholarly bent. Kingsblood Royal is a smorgasbord of the above.

The theatre, and tragedy particularly, offers a median between outright confession and conscious, rational (which is to say flawed or at least untrustworthy) understanding.

The tragedy is like the story around the campfire and, just like the joke, frees us from rational consideration. In listening, we are transported into another world. “Once upon a time”, just like “there were these two guys”, not only reassures but instantly bypasses our, necessary, quotidian concerns with our own position, well-being, and self-image.

In hearing these mystic incantations, we relax, because we know the story is not going to be about ourselves. Should we suspect, in our unprotected state, that we are actually listening to a cautionary tale (that is to say, to an advertisement), the spell is broken, and we must bring our self-protective capacities to bear.

Here we are like the radio listener, as the host describes the humiliation of some public figure, when he segues, unannounced, into a commercial for internet-image protection and we realise we were hearing an ad.

When we thought we were getting a bedtime story.

The bedtime story exists to address the child’s fear of the night and his understanding of his own frailty. He is not called upon to face it and to deal with it through reason (“There are no such things as monsters”), but he is soothed by a mechanism bypassing his frail consciousness, and his equally frail capacity to be soothed by the same. Which frailty the child shares with us all.

To address his fears by saying, “So remember, never be changed into a wolf”, is to make the same error as putting on plays with a “message”. These are a terrible misuse of the theatrical moment. As are the “talk-backs”, transforming an evening at the theatre into an English class.

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As free speech disappears like Jimmy Hoffa, producers and theatregoers are left with fear. Not only has a mechanism for relief been suppressed; the art form has been pressed into service of the repressive mechanism.

The theatre has long been turning and now, on its (potential) revival, will be found to have turned into the arena for the proclamation of right-thinking. The proclamation, that is, of the reign of the goddess Reason, that is, of mob rule.

We have seen, on Broadway, the usual forms of comedy, drama, and tragedy supplanted by the pageant. A pageant is a celebration of human accomplishment, intelligence, grace, or luck — finally of human power over nature or circumstance. It exists to celebrate a person (the birth of Galileo), a place (the founding of Des Moines), or an idea (National Farm Week, the Munich Rally).

It is a perfectly reasonable excuse for a performance and addresses our need for togetherness. But it is the opposite of the drama. Finally, it’s just, for good or ill, “the high school play”. We attend to applaud the notion presented in the pageant’s title. We will not and cannot experience those emotions nor, then, that catharsis for which the theatre has always existed. We will not leave the pageant cleansed, calmed, surprised, laughing, weeping, thoughtful, or disturbed. And we will not leave having had the burden of our consciousness momentarily laid aside.

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We know that he who rises refreshed from his prayers has had his prayers answered. Our prayers have, similarly, been answered in leaving the magnificent ballet, concert, or indeed football game: our burden had been lifted for a time. The pageant, however, answers not our prayers but the prayers of others. They, for good or ill, for whatever reason, civic pride, the hope of gain, the quest for adherents, have staged what is, finally, a demonstration.

The pageant has long supplanted the drama on Broadway, for the reasons following. Seventy-five percent of the Broadway audience are tourists. They come, legitimately, seeking an experience. They come to Broadway exactly as they come to Disneyland. As in that happiest place, they do not come to risk their hard-earned cash on a problematic event. (They might not like the play nor appreciate being “challenged”; they might just want a break after a day of shopping.) But no one need doubt that the teacup ride will function as advertised.

The knowledgeable Broadway audience, in the days of Odets, Miller, Williams, et cetera, is long in their graves, and their grandchildren basking in Scottsdale.

The middle-class New Yorkers (and the working class) supported the growth of the American drama. The tourist is not paying to do so, any more than he would pay to go to an amusement park with thought-provoking roller coasters.

Most plays are no damned good. The only way to write a play is to write a lot of plays. One learns through putting it on in the garage, in the storefront, off-Broadway, et cetera, trying and failing in front of a paying audience. There is no other way to learn how to write a play.

Suggested reading

American education needs a revolution

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Off Broadway, off-off-Broadway, are no more. The regional theatres have long devoted themselves to developing a subscriber-ship, “outreach”, “social consciousness”, and other means of destroying the possibility of attracting actual, ardent audiences.

No one says to his or her spouse, “Look online and see if there are any plays supporting the notion that (FILL INTHE BLANK) are people, too.” Or, “Get dressed, because, though you wanted to stay home and have a beer, it is the third Tuesday in the month, and we have to go use our subscription tickets to see some play.”

(By the way, what greater pleasure than recognising, of whatever event, that one is, at the moment, happier at home, and the tickets, whatever they cost, can go hang?)

Finally, to write a good play requires talent. There is not a lot of it around.

It was, I believe, Milton Friedman who, stunningly, said that the free market must exist to entice the able to reveal their abilities. If one has no possibility, in the theatre, of doing anything but staging platitudes, the talentless will (and do) step up, but the inspired have no reason to do so. The reward of the talented is unfettered creation.

Suggested reading

How artists lost their courage

By Jess De Wahls

The painter or composer may work in solitude. The creation of the dramatist is complete only with the addition of an audience. He is writing for them. To create, in them, a transformative experience (the laugh, the gasp, dead intent silence, or tears) is the greatest of thrills.

The hack is unaware of the existence of talent. He may happily take his pointless facility to producers happy to put on a show of no more actual worth than the monochrome canvases beloved of museum curators.

The New York Times, our newspaper of record, and the liberal media, in conjunction with the schools and colleges, insist that nothing shall be said or staged which does not express “right thinking”, that is, statism.

Outreach, education, diversity, and so on are tools of indoctrination. So, for example, are marine boot camp and the Bar Mitzvah. But art is the connection between inspiration and the soul of the observer. This insistence on art as indoctrination is obscenity, denying and indicting the possibility of human connection to truths superior to human understanding, that is, to the divine.

This is an extract from Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of A Free Lunch by David Mamet. 

© David Mamet 2022

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

Suggested reading

Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

Suggested reading

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

Suggested reading

Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021

This piece was originally published in November.

Two things. As these are not philosophies but tricks, they are less likely to affront; one can always say of a trick (and what are techniques but elaborated tricks?), “I just learned this last week…”

First: when the baby gets you up in the middle of the night, do not look at the clock. Anyone who’s had children will nod in understanding — you’re up anyway, why pay twice?

The second trick is The Designated Criminal.

My notion of hell is the cross-country road trip with the whole damn family. Here everything, of course, is always going wrong. Some kid is complaining, spouses are feuding about directions, and all is misery. Now this traveler and now that offends against reason and good order and everyone ends up blaming Father, who, as the sole voice of reason, will now turn belligerent. Hot, tired, weary, angry, thirsty and lost, the car rolls on.

How to get from Coast to Coast? Appeals for calm (from Mother), obedience (that’s right), fellow-feeling, and so on will not avail. But a technique (trick) may. It is The Designated Criminal.

On setting out the family must establish a rotation. Each car member, then, on his appointed day, will be The Designated Criminal. On his lucky day, everything that goes wrong in the car is his fault. The affronted family are happily then leagued against the diabolical offender in their midst.

It works like a charm.

But The Designated Criminal may also be practised as oppression. For there are families and other organisms which employ the technique not as a means of maintaining esprit-de-corps, but of exercising control. Here the criminal is designated once and for all time, and will live and die in his chains.

Suggested reading

The narcissistic fall of France

By Michel Houellebecq

In the co-dependant family one child or parent is always in the wrong. We have all seen it and some have been taxed with participating in the loathsome farce: that Dad is a fool, Mom is a dunderhead, Little Bob is a lazy good-for-nothing, Little Suzy is a pre-pubescent whore and if she doesn’t wear more modest clothes she will end on the street, and so on.

And we know of the continual indictment of The Jews, the Witch Trials of Salem and McCarthy, the chattel slavery of Black Americans, and the continuation of that vile racism as the indictment of Whites.

The mechanism of the Designated Criminal can be used both for social equilibrium, in the car, or, politically, for disruption of the body politic. The first case, The Orderly Rotation of Blame, is the essential engine of democracy. The Game’s Rules (The Constitution) are designed to ensure the periodic exchange of power. The Ins and the Outs, and their adherents and dupes, may not understand the transfer of power as a game; but they are involved in one as much as the folks in the station wagon.

The motorists enjoy a process which elevates family unity over individual discomfort; the voters, the self-importance of saving the world from mindless fools. But it’s the same game.

If played according to the rules the rotation of power promotes the health and longevity of the organism. The Ins are allowed to tax the limits of legitimate incumbency, the Outs to misuse the permitted latitudes of opposition. And then, as in a football game, offense and defence shift.

But what if the game is not played according to Hoyle?

What if a player or contingent takes advantage of the rules themselves to achieve a goal other than balance? What if put-upon Dad, for example, says, “I know which Young Traveller is today’s Designated Criminal, but Samantha has just done something so egregious that I am going to suspend the rules and humiliate her”.

Readers will feel the affront of the interjection. As will not only young Samantha, but the whole family. For they had agreed to suspend their individual feelings in favour of group unity. And Dad has just proclaimed that they were fools to do so — that they had made a bargain which, it seems, the car’s driver reserved the right to abrogate, and, thus, that anyone may be the next-accused.

Now, the once-happy car, all occupants free to enjoy not only the trip but the game, are forced into co-dependence. The game is over, and the Ref (of whose existence the car was previously unaware) has ruled that actual indictment of the other is now the order of the day and those not supporting the new rule will suffer. The enjoyment of Free Speech has been superseded by the necessity of obedience to power. The car has just experienced Terror.

Suggested reading

We need to talk about 9/11

By Lionel Shriver

The occupants, now, do not know what the new rules are, but only that they, having been changed once, may continue to be changed at will, by those possessing or bidding for power. Now, rather than the joy of improvisation (of the communal comedy), the rule of silence, obedience and denunciation is in force.

This is the state of the sick, co-dependant family. Here it is not that some things may be false, but that all things must be false. For if the subordinate members do not know what is and what is not permitted, they must devote themselves, in preference to any productive activity, to protection from power.

Far worse than the frowns of the car which does not know The Designated Criminal we now have the false smiles and the sad head shakings of the sick family, which is to say, of the Left.

When we know that it’s our turn on the electoral ducking stool tomorrow, we, when in power, may moderate our behaviour. In a crumbling Democracy, the power-mad, like Dad taking the reins, have come to the Dictator’s realisation. That is, “Wait a second. All I have to do is rig it so I can hold my seat indefinitely”. This, of course, is the aperçu of most every politician from dogcatcher to President, down through time. (George III said of Washington that if he chose to relinquish the Presidency he would be the greatest man who ever lived.)

***

One cannot credit the Politicians of the Left with even the delusion that they are Doing Good. And, if they do, then what? They did not take an oath to do good, but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

Must they come to bend and break the rules in favour of 1) their good ideas, 2) the necessity of staying in office, 3) theft? Of course. That’s why we have elections. To roll the dice. The co-dependant, terrified society comes to think that, having achieved the perfection of leadership, it’s a grand idea to call it quits, abolish the electoral college, mail ballots to everyone on earth, require no voter identification, import new voters, and so on.

Just as the inspired politicians see that perpetual hegemony might be had by mere suspension of their Oath; their dupes, the electorate, learn to suspend their reason, and substitute hatred of the indicted for their new-found fear of power — a fear so powerful it must be relegated to the unconscious.

Just like the children in the car.

When Dad trashes the rules he changes the whole point of the exercise. The building of family happiness and unity (which, we assume, was, after all, the whole purpose of the trip) becomes an indoctrination; and, the child sees, safety must now be his primary concern. He may keep silent, or join in the condemnation of Little Trevor, but should he object, “what about the Game?” he is, most certainly, now the new Criminal.

Our electorate is split into the affronted Right and the supine Left. Those who wish to preserve our Constitutional Republic, its rules, and the culture from which they spring, are indicted by those in momentary power (both political and asserted) ad-lib.

Suggested reading

Will magic defeat America's elites?

By John Michael Greer

There is no merit in supporting various contemporary blasphemies (“Birthing Parent”, and so on). Unless they are untrue. The merit comes from the affiant’s vocal sacrifice of his reason, and, so, of his self-respect, in support of The Cause.

This is the contemporary terror. Not that we’re faced with the enormities, the crimes, delusions, and lies of a Politician (when were we not?), but that we are now frightened of whomever was screaming last.

From “New Business Item 39” posted on the National Education Association’s website on July 5, 2021: “The N.E.A. will provide an already-created, in-depth study that criticises empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeniety, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarcy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of oppression at the intersections of society.”

This is the country’s largest Teachers Union. What do these words mean? That the teachers will be put in charge of criticising. Whom? Whomever the N.E.A. designates.

And how might one, however convinced, ensure that he will not transgress the rules? There are no rules, for the categories are infinitely expansible. (Larry Elder, an African American running for Governor of California, and a lifelong champion of America and of his race, was called “the Black Face of White Supremacy,” L.A. Times, August 20, 2021.) And what in the world are “the intersections of society”?

In Woody Allen’s film Sleeper (1973) he is transported to the future. There he learns that the world he knew came to grief in 1989. He asks how and is told: “A man called Albert Shanker got his hands on a nuclear warhead.” Albert Shanker was the head of the United Foundation of Teachers, and then the American Federation of Teachers.

This may be the rock on which the Left comes to grief: the insistence on infecting one’s children with hatred. Young parents four generations away from The New Deal are insisting that they will not abandon their children to the blasphemies of the N.E.A. and its servitors, the Democratic Party. They are finding that there is a mechanism created to protect them from a despotic government, and that it is The Constitution and the organisations derived therefrom.

It is not incumbent on us Jews to prove we do not drink the blood of Christian Children, nor of white American citizens to apologise, nor of citizens to assert their loyalty to various confederations of thugs, and shriek heresies and treason or risk blacklisting as “of insufficient zeal”.

What does it mean to be “cancelled”?

It seems to mean that some group asserting power has mobilised its forces in social media and that their indictments have, in turn, been echoed and endorsed by multitudes. But we all know, or should know, that the controllers of the algorithms are constantly aware of and manipulate our prejudices through their presentation of that called information.

Fear of the heretic is spread through social media, but who knows, and how could one know, that the numbers and the tweets are real? One cannot. They are pixels on a screen which stampede the fearful into actual action against the indicted.

Suggested reading

How Satanism conquered America

By Mary Harrington

Would the controllers of the blogosphere stoop to such subterfuge as cooking the numbers? They limit access to their outlets ad lib, banning any person or idea they do not endorse. Why would they not also warp the number or content of the blogs to suit or, indeed, confect them? (I worked, for a year, as a Contributing Editor (utility man) at a very prominent national publication. One of my duties was Letters to the Editor. This involved not only answering but writing them. I assume the practice was universal and that it continues in the new media.)

I live in a liberal neighbourhood outside of Los Angeles. The residents here are miserable. Traditionally it was Not Done to acknowledge each other’s presence on the streets. A “good morning” uttered to a fellow dogwalker was considered as if one had exposed oneself. (This latter, in fact, now accepted as a permitted practice of the Homeless.)

Since Covid, the masked or the unmasked cross the street to avoid each other, glaring.  Signs on the homes proclaim that Love Is Love, but the residents hate and fear each other. Nancy Mitford wrote of the Liberals, “they are all so unhappy, and all of their plans fail so miserably.”

I was elected a non-person by the Left many years ago. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s costly and sad to see the happy fields in which I played all those decades — Broadway, book publishing, TV and film — fold up and Hail Caesar, but there it is.

The question for the young is: what kind of country do you want for your children? The question for the aged (myself) is: “what did you do in the War, Daddy?”

I’ve been involved for near 50 years in dealing with folks in the mass. It was not a social experiment for me, but a game: The Theatre. I learned very young that the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience. I understood that it was not my job to teach them anything, nor to induce a feeling in them, but to perform a sort of magic trick — to understand their behaviour in order to control their concentration. Why? In order to give them a treat. Just like a magician.

I sat with them night by night and year by year, and it was a joy to feel their conjoined attention, and to learn from it and its absence how to improve the play. As Billy Wilder said, “individually, they’re idiots, but together they’re a genius”.

The horror of the last year’s slide into despotism has showed me the reverse of the medal.

Suggested reading

Britain needs a cigarette

By David Hockney

Watching the good play, the audience suspends its reason in order to be entertained — at Hamlet, as much and identically with watching a woman be sawed in half. The audience enjoys the trick while knowing, and because they know she is not going to be harmed. Just as they know Hamlet’s Dad is not coming back from the dead.

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

The children in the car must immediately come to support the new regime or risk abandonment. The protection it offers is illusory (as who knows who will be next), but the illusion, to them, is preferable to knowledge of their powerlessness.

In the mass the alternative to submission is blacklisting, poverty, censure, et cetera. Finally, this is the same alternative offered to the children. They may court protection from fear only by remaining submissive. Just like the Electorate.

© David Mamet 2021