The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

by David Mamet

It was absurd to believe 51 percent of the country would agree in bulk to the various enormities of: inflation, crime, abolishment of police, abandonment of Afghanistan and Israel, DEI, sexual indoctrination of children, censorship; and the candidacy first of an obviously senile crook; and, after him, an incoherent nullity. As all citizens were harmed by some of these, what organized power base or interest did the agglomeration benefit? I could not understand the insanity as elements of a Leftist coup, for each of the constituencies was acting in a way to forward its own agenda, but, in doing so, weakened a liberal unit.

One day I wearied of my incomprehension. As I could not change the incidents, “the givens,” I reanalyzed them to determine what I was looking at. And then I recognized the phenomenon. It is known as an Open City.

for all the cant about “intersectionality.” How did defunding Israel benefit trans-activists? Or banning fracking increase African-American economic status? How did abolishing the Southern border benefit anyone save Democrat vote-harvesters?

The Sicilians in the mafia (as with 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: organized crime was its harness-mate, and the crossbreeding gave birth to various American political dynasties.

Every family will have a no-good brother-in-law, a crazed aunt or grandfather, a drunk, a homosexual, a member with 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—endeavoring 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 operationally useful. When it is supplanted as unreasonable, blasphemous, or absurd, it creates the chaos allowing for new hegemony, and, thus, inevitably, new myth.*

The shill at the three-card-monte game is hired to pretend to win and then to “side” with the yokels and show them how to do the same. The politician presents himself as the friend of the voter, but, elected, can only vote at the direction of his owners. He is their employee and, absent their favor, has no other means of support. Once “on the inside,” he is free to wheel, deal, and connive with the folks any side of the aisle, for his personal benefit, as long as his choices do not harm his employer’s interests. Here he is like the crooked bartender, allowed a certain latitude in making change, or pouring the odd, unnoted drink, as long as he keeps his hands out of the till.

An organization proclaiming itself as the champion of good may legitimately believe in both its mission and its methods—but when the proclamation is essentially a request for funds, our skepticism must be excused. Jesus didn’t ask for money, he suggested each share with the needy. His infrastructure was limited to twelve self-supporting adherents, and 8.3 percent of them sold him out.

Back in the seventies, some wit (this author) brought a new treat to gatherings enjoying an after-dinner game. He realized that if two persons each took a poem from the New Yorker and read a line from his poem alternatively, the result—by usual acclaim—was superior to either of the two original compositions.

Nineteenth-century physicians held that he who understands syphilis understands medicine, for syphilis presented itself through a myriad of symptoms. This book is an attempt to identify a seemingly unconnected set of symptoms as a single disease.*

When sad, happy, angry, bored, or puzzled, we reached for a smoke. We probably experienced a trigger every ten minutes or so. But the trigger was in the same relation to the smoke as that of the old ladies to the Indian threat: the addiction demanded we address it and left us to explain our actions to ourselves as individual occurrences (excitement, boredom, loneliness, confusion), each of which we addressed, reasonably, by reaching for a smoke. Americans do not now universally smoke, but the seven-to-ten-minute period persists, hardwired in our preconscious. Now (when bored, anxious, excited, etc.) we reach for the iPhone or computer.

I will explain why few can write dramatic dialogue: they have forgotten that human beings never speak to say what we “mean,” but only to get what we want.

The tragedies and truths of life can be found in Shakespeare and the Bible. They’re on the inside, folks. The remainder of experience (large or small, depending on our mood) is like that of the rube on the midway: we have some excess cash, and time, and are willing to expend both for the promise of getting our backs scratched. Politics is, inescapably, pageantry, which is to say appeal to our egoism; entertainment, to our lusts. Religion and art, those correctives, are as liable as everything else on the midway to debasement.

A con game functions through exciting greed, the political-social con through assuaging fear. All fortune-tellers know that the mark doesn’t walk into the parlor save for questions of money, illness, or love. Psychiatrists (many actually good-willed, and some few actually wise) collude with the patient, holding out hope not of revealing a cure, but of identifying a cause.* This allows a perpetual elongation of the supposed treatment, which is handy for the patient, who is largely engaged in the same fantasy as the Victorian valetudinarian, running from one physician to another to cure elusive ills of a sophistication consonant with his status.

The liberal seeks relief from the daunting necessity of logical consideration, from choosing between two challenging alternatives. The wish for a third choice betrays the weak-minded into manipulation by the Left. For example, though your schools are an obscenity, teaching racism, sexual obsession, and anti-Semitism, and though your hard work is taxed and regulated for no describable purpose. and though political persecution has become normalized, if you refrain from rational considerations, you will need not fear excommunication.* The Nazis, at least, sweetened the bargain of barbarianism: those who betrayed hiding Jews to the Gestapo might inherit the now vacant apartment. The awards of the fire sale that is the Left today go, however, not to the co-opted voters, but to their new bosses, Black Lives Matter, DEI commissars, anti-Semitic thugs in Congress, the teachers’ unions.

King Lear was accomplished, old, and tired and resigned his power to those who flattered him. But flattery is theft. No less today than in Lear’s case, it is the extortion of service or license in exchange for a smile. Today’s liberals have been flattered into a competitive masochism, rewarding themselves and each other for soft self-flagellation. Their operations of political and social thuggery would have been obvious to anyone who’d ever looked for a job, met a payroll, got shaken down by the mob—in or out of office—been stiffed in a contract, and so on. Anyone, in short, who had ever participated in the business of self-support. But the well-to-do white liberal voters were into the second or third generation of exemption, and so manipulable into support of cultural suicide.

A wily teacher could devise an experience with enough variety to appeal to the uncaught. That could be a visit to the Library of Alexandria of our late day: the flea market. This teacher might bus the class there, set them free with five bucks apiece, and suggest they look around. Each kid would likely find some object fascinating. Imagine if the kid were asked to take it home, run it down, and bring it in tomorrow. The child stands up and tells what he or she knows, thinks, and wonders about the prize. The wise teacher, then, might ask the kid to write down exactly what he or she had said, and the kid just learned creative writing.

There is an added benefit to the protected pedant. He or she differs from his employers, the middle class: the small businessperson, professional, factory worker, truck driver, anyone, in short, whose livelihood depends upon production and spends some to all their leisure hours in some level of anxiety. “Can I fulfill my quota, am I underprepared for my presentation, have I sufficient resolution to refrain from making the same mistake with tomorrow’s client that I made today?” These questions are familiar to all of us whose living depends on pleasing someone else, which is to say in performing a service. The universal lifelong recurrent nightmare of the Western child is “Oh my god, I forgot to prepare for the test.” The self-supporting adult can internalize the trauma into rational resolution. It is clear to those with no recourse to a union or the government that the anxiety is not a curse but in fact a reminder: to think again, to prepare, to amend, to put to rest to the greatest extent possible, concerns about those factors affecting his livelihood that are in his control. This calls for a degree of honesty of which not all are capable.

To believe nothing and to dare all, was, in two words, the sum of this system, which annihilated every principle of religion and morality, and had no other object than to execute ambitious designs with suitable ministers, who, daring all and honouring nothing, since they consider everything a cheat and nothing forbidden, are the best tools of an infernal policy. A system, which, with no other aim than the gratification of an insatiable lust of dominion, instead of seeking the highest of human objects, precipitates itself into the abyss, and mangling itself, is buried amidst the ruins of thrones and altars, the horrors of anarchy, the wreck of national happiness, and the universal execration of mankind. —Joseph von Hammer, The History of Assassins (1835)

The Glendale, California,

Could add cf Fairfax Co Virginia how these suburbs are largely immigrant. Glendale majority Armenian Latino & Fairfax big Muslim & Middle East Christian %

Conservatives here are like the European Jews (1100–1945 CE). The Jews were periodically for the high jump and there was no act of acceptance, confession, or apostasy that would spare us. Jews who were descended from Jews, were defending Jews, converted to Judaism, or were married to Jews were slaughtered. “I’m Jewish but I’m not that Jewish.” The contemporary phrase meaning “Hate my brothers, but accept me” was no protection against the Inquisition, the Crusades, or the handy Luger.

Our two-party system has long been an example of intersectionality. Each moiety traditionally played to its constituency, exploiting their beliefs, prejudices, and occasionally their capacity for reason. Each, additionally, might “do some good,” according to its supposed charter, by accident or in homage to accountability. Good, for the conservatives, means “leave us alone” and to the liberals “fix everything of which anyone complains at whatever cost.” Each team vies to increase its market share in the manner encapsulated by a New Yorker cartoon: a board meeting at an advertising firm, a placard of a toothpaste tube on an easel, and the executive says, “Should we say ‘Broxodent contains anstrapazole’ or ‘Broxodent contains less anstrapazole than any other brand?’” But after the ball game, the opposing players take off their jerseys and go partying together.

“You vote for my bridge, I’ll vote for your dam” is intersectionality at its finest.

Pool hustlers made their living not through superior skills on the table but through the ability to craft a proposition (a “spot”) or handicap sufficient to lure the mark into a game which he could not win. Fashion and panic function similarly. Each is the nonverbal communication of a self-confected direction from and to the herd. Much like partisan politics.

The Soviets rediscovered the wisdom of Aristotle: that the drama must progress in exactly that way the human mind is fit to receive it. “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” is not only the invariable progression of thought (called reason); it is also the three-act structure.

Film was the new art—the first new art in human history.* But though the medium was new, human perception was unchanged. The necessary three-act structure required a stopping point between acts. The Russians called this the zero point. Here the hero has been thwarted and has run out of options and ideas. He, our representative, is baffled, and wonders, for us, what he can possibly do next to achieve his goal. He cannot, as Aristotle chides us, just “get the idea.” Something external must intercede (the magical helpers in fairy tales, Iago’s production of the handkerchief, the arrival in Miami of Bugs Moran and his thugs threatening Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot).

We each understand our life as a dramatic progression, and each generation sees its particular life span similarly. Our current progression toward “recognition” began on September 11. The second act was announced by the abandonment of the Minneapolis police station. The zero point, the point of rest prior to the final act, had as its epilogue Biden’s national security adviser’s announcement that “the Middle East is quieter today than it has been in decades.*

The liberal is raised to believe there are two sides to every story, that there is no absolute right and wrong, and that the truth must lie somewhere in between. He repeats these mantras until he is personally challenged, at which point he can either wise up or blame the victims, whose tragedy has unfortunately forced him to choose between good and evil. There are two sides to the jihadi-Jewish conflict until his synagogue is bombed, his relatives slain, or he’s terrified into either defending himself or indicting his brothers and sisters—in which case he determines that there is just one side, but to the liberal it is the side of his enemies.

A widely attributed bon mot of the fifties had one Jew saying to another, “They’ll never forgive us for Auschwitz.” And the world has not. Massacred Jews and non-Jewish Israelis are caught on film, and the left either is spared the spectacle or treated to its explication, as in: “Palestinian anguish and despair has, unfortunately but understandably, led to this.” The most famous dramatic depictions of Jewish suffering have been a form of Holocaust porn. Anne Frank closes her diary saying, “I still believe people are basically good at heart.” What? And the fiddler’s Jews of Annatevka are told at the play’s end, “They will have to leave.” Not, as would have been the case, that they should kneel since they are going to get shot.

The whimsical bumf about the shooter’s childhood, alcoholism, race, marital woes, and so on is perhaps an attempt to “humanize” atrocity. But it should not be humanized. One must turn away. The Talmud teaches that one should avert one’s eyes from two animals copulating.

As Golda Meir said, “We want peace. They want us dead. There’s little room for conversation.”

Torn jeans are not more or less stupid than bustles, “supplements” no less inert than garlic cloves hung on the doorpost to avoid typhoid; and we may find the various Covid vaccines no less harmful than the nineteenth-century opium nostrums sold as nerve tonics and children’s cough suppressants. There are a fiercely limited number of scenes we actors—onstage and off—can play.

What can it mean that we middle-class white kids of the sixties delighted to sing about freedom, the need to be free, self-discovery, lack of commitment, and so on? It all occurred on somebody else’s dime. Just like communism and the welfare state—ruinous expenses that no sane person would submit himself to toil for in order to pay.*

It was in the pilot episode, I believe: The Newbie Soldier is off on a mission, his Newbie Wife is preggers and disoriented. She is comforted by one of the older wives thus: “Here you are, brand-new place, man in combat, kid on your hip, and another on the way. You think this is your particular dilemma. You know what it is? It is the history of the world.”

Most children in history were raised by a mother and a grandmother. The men were out of the house fighting, hunting, or, in the absence of those activities, working up an excuse.

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 two thousand 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 nineteenth century embraced reform deaccesionism (divestiture of language, observance, and tradition) and assimilation, which included an indictment of the other: their poor coreligionaries in the East, whose arcane practices, they agreed, explained much of the hatred leaching over onto “civilized 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, Antony Blinken.)

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 also irreconcilable differences. Yet the differences must be reconciled, and however much effort is expended toward that goal, there will still be injustices, tragedy, crime, and error. The great poetry of America was born in the Middle Passage and persisted to become the music of our world. Our country was named for the cartographer Americus Vespucci. Amer in the Romance tongues means bitter. The word comes from the Hebrew Marah.

See also liberals’ infatuation with those who can’t control themselves: Antifa, Hamas, campus rioters, shoplifters. This, understood as sympathy, is actually envy: the vicarious enjoyment of infant license.

Uncle Harry might say, “Yes, that’s tough,” or “We’ve all been there,” or indeed, “You’ll live.” But he would not conclude, “That’s all we have time for today, see you next week.”

Q. Karl Marx never earned any money. How did he live? A. He knew “all the Engels.”

Young homeowners may be delighted with their new appliances, but when they sell the house their successors will likely be aghast at the ability of their precursors to abide such dilapidated, ancient trash.

A commitment to “diversity” is essentially a game of inverted charades—the white team is challenged to portray some rendition of apology, the Black team rage. The idea sought is preassigned but points are awarded to the most innovative portrayals. The game is irreducibly simple, but the stakes are enormous, as if one played Old Maid for the lives of one’s family. The Black team is allowed the most outlandish claims—like the wrong side in a lawsuit, or a guilty defendant; the White team must respond in a more limited fashion, points awarded for mincing and groveling, and allowed to exercise its imagination in elaboration of indictments against not only itself, but those who refuse to play the game. Like any after-dinner game, it concludes a party, which is to say, the celebration and consumption of excess, giving the revelers a bit of excitement and a chance to digest. The party here is Western abundance.

“We must come together in order to go forward” means park your intellect for a moment, you’ll find it enjoyable. “See the Forbidden Dance of the Seven Veils” means pay me to watch a tired woman get undressed.

Sinclair Lewis wrote that he heard American progress was a pendulum, but that in fact it was a piston. The piston moves back and forth at great speed; it turns chemical power (combustion) into mechanical power; the speed and heat of its operation ensures that, eventually, it must wear out—its destruction the inevitable end of its useful service. Power has been harnessed and used mechanically, and every mechanical tool or

Where did the $17.8 million go? From the department’s website, lafd.org: 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. Douglas Murray said that wokeism was the denial of the self-evident by maniacs who were then applauded by cowards. Mayor Karen Bass, just returned from vacation in Ghana during the fires, was interviewed by Sky News. 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, a notable display of reason.

fantasy casts them as champions of the Stone Age folks who once enjoyed the real estate we currently inhabit. But stone axes and buffalo hunting could have continued only as behaviors protected by a civilization not only technologically superior but of sufficient surplus of goods and Christianity to still the westward American migration in service of an ideal. The fantasy, in effect, of a historical reenactment or theme park. The fantasy was attempted in 1870 when the U.S. Department of the Interior put the Quakers in charge of various Indian reservations for the maintenance and order and the distribution of government welfare. The results were malfeasance and theft greater than the previous administration’s crony capitalism, since the peaceful Quakers were laissez-faire fools.

Will our millennial folly be considered more savage than the Aztecs’ yearly slaughter of twenty thousand 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 subincision of preliterate African tribes?

My work has generally been the construction and the solution of puzzles—largely to identify the retail and wholesale absurdities of our lives as one, all influenced both by our nature as humans and the intentions or nature of another force.

* Psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors don’t know more about our behavior than we do; they just get paid for being wrong. The transaction is transitive. We may believe that we pay them because we believe in them, but the inverse is the more true: we pay for the right to believe in them. As we do with the fortune-teller. We find the same mechanism in the theater. The audience suspends its rational judgment and will not do so unless they have made some sacrifice (the price of admission). The price convinces them of the worth of their sacrifice. Curiously, the ticket price is absolutely irrelevant: it could be $100 or $10, a dollar or a quarter, but they must put their offering into the box in order to suspend their judgment sufficiently to participate in the experience.

Why would he fear a group he has sacrificed to join? As it is organized around irrationality, which is to say unpredictability. If it asserts human beings can change sex, Jews are the Devil, Israel is a slave state, borders are criminal, and so on, there is no way to insure himself against new, personally threatening absurdities. Indeed, the co-opted here is a prisoner subject to the vagaries of his jailers, now involved in the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma: Two accomplices are arrested for their crime. If both keep silent, they will both go free, but each risks the penalty if the other speaks first and exculpates himself. The correct strategy, then, is to speak first, denouncing one’s partner.

My wife suggests we look on the bright side: five years ago no one knew what a pronoun was.