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| Mamet |
Recessional: The Death of FreeSpeech, and the Cost of a Free Lunch
by David Mamet
Broadside Books, Copyright 2022,
$28.99
Mamet was raised as a cultural Jew in Chicago and has embraced,
in a born-again conversion, his past, present and future. Most importantly, he has managed to live
vigorously with his eyes opened. The years have not swallowed Mamet.
Mamet has swallowed the years.
It was his open-eyed, persistent fox-chase after elusive,
shape-shifting truths that had made a playwright of him. The same may be said
of any great playwright. Modern commentators now feel free to indulge the
suspicion that Shakespeare, like his father, was a recusant Catholic at a time
when, in Elizabethan England, prominent Catholic priests, hounded by the Queen’s
theological spies, were hunted down and eliminated.
Mamet is an artist whose playwriting has changed the face of
21st century art.
Like Shakespeare and Jews throughout history, those
persecuted by false world-saviors have learned to adapt to sudden, fatal
changes in the temperaments of corrupt absolute rulers. Important and decisive
things, such as religious formation, undergo changes during periods of
persecution. Victims become both determined and subtle. And by becoming nearly
invisible, small things escape the wounding teeth and claws of larger things.
Those who live securely within a cultural box have no need
of metaphors and linguistic flourishes. They may remain safe and content in
their broad enclusures by echoing the surrounding platitudes. Persecution
drives life inward. To put it another way, suffering makes poets of the
persecuted, even when they are silent – most especially when they are silent
and subtle.
We’ve all had the experience, looking in a mirror, of seeing
the image looking back at the looker, perhaps aware, if one had graduated from
college before the destruction of education by pedagogical reformers, of Nietzsche’s
often quoted aphorism: "Whoever fights monsters should see to it
that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough
into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."
In producing artworks, one can never be too careful, as witness the ordeal of Oscar Wilde, in part, at least, self-inflicted. It was Wilde who first sued his lover’s father, the Marquis of Queensbury, only to find himself on trial by a jury of English fox hunters for having committed sins of the flesh. Wilde on fox hunting: “The intolerable in pursuit of the uneatable.” In the end, Wilde died in a shabby hotel, poor, abandoned by all. His last words were a curse on the hotel’s wallpaper: “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”
For those who step publically out of the box, life will always
be, as the postmoderns say, “challenging.”
In the introduction to Recessional:
the Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, Mamet writes, “Now
we are engaged in a prodromal civil war, and America’s constitutional democracy
is the contest’s prize. The universities and the media, always diseased, have
progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to
mandate that their schools teach critical race theory – that is, racism – and elected
leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin… My
question, watching my beloved American democracy dissolve, was, ‘What can I
do?’ I found no answer. But I realize, a year on, that a different question has
brought me closer to peace. That question is this: How might I achieve
clarity?” The essays that make up Recessional,
Mamet tells us, “are a record of that attempt.”
The attempt, largely successful, will almost certainly put
Mamet in bad odor with people who are responsible for the death of free speech
and the prohibitive cost of the free lunch offered us by aspiring leftist
politicians, utopianists who believe their new world order requires the
destruction that has sustained the New World throughout its struggles and
sufferings.
In the Brave New World of the postmoderns – those who have learned
nothing of the 20th century, full of blood-soaked terror – suffering itself will
in the future be abolished, along with Shakespeare, foundational cultural
institutions such as the family, the church, real education, all organs of
social oppression and, of course, fossil fuel.
Mamet has made it his business in Recessional to pop many of the fake and fragile thought-bubbles
addressed to the postmodern sons and daughters of the noisome Cultural Revolution dragons now breathing hotly on our
necks.
And – very good news indeed -- there is little in the book
that is not entertaining or instructive.
Nearly all the essays in Recessional
are frighteningly grounded in common sense. Listen: “I imagine an individual
taught it is unnecessary to work, to pray, to study, to marry. Expand the
notion to three generations, and we see the results in our civilization that we
would expect in the individual: terror.”
Indeed, for Jews throughout history, terror has been the
neighbor next door.
In all of Mamet, the mixing of high and low – or, if you
like, the melding of comedy and tragedy; for laughter is simply tragedy turned
on its ear – leads the reader, artfully, cleverly, to assuring truths, the
things we have always known in or blood and marrow.
All good writers are moralists. Don't be afeard now, for a moral is nothing more fearful that a summary truth stated boldly and fearlessly.
You think you know what a cowboy really is? Listen with the
ear of your heart -- read it aloud, as tragedies and comedies are meant to be
read:
“He was bowlegged and
hobbled. We were looking at an actual old cowboy: he’d spent his life on a
horse and had, most probably, fought in World War II. I loved the sight of him.”
His wife asks, “Who is
that guy?”
“That guy,” I said, “is
our last view of the American West. He worked all his life, in cattle or oil,
came up from nothing, and made a pile of money.
“He looks like a
derelict,” she said. “He’s wealthy?”
“He ain’t wealthy,” I
said. “He’s rich. He’s sitting here
waiting for his pilot to pick him up in a forty, fifty million-dollar airplane.”
“But why would he
dress like that?” she asked.
“Because those are his
clothes,” I said. “Ancient wisdom from the stockyards: the rich guys aren’t the
ones in the fancy hats; there the fellows with shit on their boots.”
Mamet appends a moral, in the form of a question, to this airport encounter: "How can a country survive whose electorate has never seen a man, except their gardener, with dirty hands? It cannot.
Now that you’ve rolled the words on your tongue, you will
know that Mamet has not only mastered the American idiom, for which he is most
justly praised. He has caught in his work precious moments in which words
become a looking glass enabling all of us to see the true face of America. To
be sure, Recessional, Mamet’s witness, will expose him to unjust criticism. But
he will survive.
He’s a Jew.
Read the book, and if you must skim – a shortcut always fatal
to enjoyment – do not miss “The Nazis Got Your Mom.”
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