The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

by David Mamet

Any one who has ever tried to rectify an injustice or set a record straight comes to feel that he is going mad. Mary McCarthy, My Confession (1953)

Since Obama the deep state of the American Left has been the enemy of Constitutional democracy. Their usurpation of power, destruction of the Constitutional protections, subvention of the media and the universities, obliteration of the border, and so on; their unwarranted prosecutions tormenting President Trump could only be understood as tactics in an ongoing coup. The Left’s strategic objective was the destruction of representative government, and all its contributory tactics made sense.

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 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. Obama was a Marxist and Islamist opportunist; all his acts are recognizable as attempts to increase his personal power in order to achieve his personal and ideological goals. He himself proclaimed that he had no interest in America as it existed, and he wanted it changed, and worked to do so.

America 2020–2024 had become an Open City. Like Naples in 1943 and Paris in 1944, like Moscow in 1812, the controlling hegemony had fled, and the attacking force had not yet established control. Individuals, then, in the absence of any government, were free to plunder, loot, betray, subvert, at will—they had no interest in the ongoing health or viability of the City (in our case the State), but only in the newfound license for their particular thuggery.

Exactly like marauding mobs in George Floyd Minneapolis, now looting as individuals, now forming groups to facilitate the depredations. The Biden-Harris administration had abdicated, no differently than the Tsar in 1917, leaving the underlings, as they thought good, to steal, subvert, or settle scores under the color of a now actually nonexistent administration, a fiction screened by the press.

America had become an Open City. President Trump’s re-election crystallized the issue, which led us to the brink of civil war. It was not transgenderism, pronouns, abortion, climate change, DEI, or white supremacy, but the common sense and the rule of law versus chaos.

Would the government exist to serve and protect the people according to those laws we had enacted, or would we have a junta and dictatorship destroying those who questioned their position? The issue was settled by plebiscite in November. Any who might decry the result are now witnessing a practical demonstration of their error. As I write, Los Angeles is still burning.

Was no one paying attention to the absurd and pointless destruction of our cities, our economy, our youth, medicine, and our national defense? Many were, and they were all on the right, on AM radio, in two or three newspapers, on several blogs, and among the supporters of Donald Trump. His imperviousness to savagery coalesced the disenfranchised, exactly as Churchill did in wartime England. This is neither hagiography nor hyperbole. Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment.

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.

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 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. I’ve been in the editing room for forty-five years, and I assure you, the film is faked.

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 subsumed by a larger and more powerful group (the Democratic Party), or were denatured by the times, as their constituency matriculated.

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.

The modern left works, consciously or not, to destroy the family as the basic unit of loyalty and 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.

The nuclear family has been eviscerated—by technology, contraception, penicillin, travel, and so on. Its decay has been ascribed to the champions of its demise: humanism, globalism, and atheism-as-reason. But these are only the beneficiaries of its decay. Membership in our various correct-thinking groups is actually an unconscious attempt to reconstitute the family—that group which might offer protection. Just like life in the urban gangs.

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 Twelve Tribes become the Twelve Caesars, the House of Atreus becomes the Kennedys, and Kaiserwetter becomes Kennedy Weather.

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 antics of the Great being hailed as their “accomplishments” has an analogue in the nineteenth-century display of spiritualism.

Many have asked, “What is love?” Inquiry has been redundant since the Playmates’s definitive answer in 1948: Q: What is love? A: Five feet of heaven in a ponytail.

historically, ex-presidents retired from politics. Barack Obama stayed in, expanding his fief past the inevitable doorstop book and into manipulation of the Democratic Party and those it manipulates.

A representative must regularly raise $50,000 to stay in office. Regularly means every day, and so a politician is a shill. He has no skill other than persuasion and has never practiced it other than in fibbing to his constituents and flattering his paymasters.

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.

Why would big money—individuals, or corporations (which, finally, can mean only the individuals who control them)—support politicians? To do good? What prohibits the money from doing good directly? Can any sane individual conceive that money will stretch further or be more effective for having been passed through a bureaucracy?

Ours is the first civilization obsessed with overeating rather than starvation.

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.

But to a man with a hammer everything is a nail, and if we are formed into a herd, to which we continually repair for consensus in guidance and protection, our ability to think independently is lessened. The polarity here is reversed. Just as ancient humans sought protection in the group from threats the individual could not face, so we moderns are formed into a group, and as we automatically check in with it every ten minutes, intuit that there must be a threat.

The Salemites chose witches over Indians; the Germans chose Jews over post–World War I starvation. Contemporary liberals elect global warming, racism, sexism, and so on, over consideration of the challenges of national prosperity.*

it is no longer sufficient to demand Blacks be treated equally with whites, the Left demands they be given preference; as we have culturally accepted that homosexuality is a normal human behavior, the evil of the now-superseded discrimination becomes the demand that society avow that children are somehow born into the wrong sex.

A twentieth-century concern with smog has become the political demand to stop digging for fossil fuel (though it is, curiously, acceptable to import it).

The contemporary challenge of the West is prosperity. Its pitfalls can be addressed, but not by...

We’re witnessing an anxiety worsened (as is so much in life) by the supposed cure—the cure here being “connectedness.” The addictive “connectedness” offered by the computer awakens our human instinct for constant connection to the group, which in turn activates a genetic survival mechanism, viz: If we are constantly seeking group protection, something must be wrong.

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.

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.

My great friend the director Mike Nichols (1931–2014) told me he’d spent an evening with Margaret Thatcher and found her very sexy. He cracked himself up relating a comment she’d made at dinner: “There are no coups in England.” There, of course, have been many such in Jolly Olde (see Cromwell). But since the Civil War, we’d had none here until the election of 2020.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new Guards for their Future security. The American electorate has done so, and no one is more astonished than I. For if we were not living through a coup, I am a monkey’s uncle.

Why would one-half of the country not only abide, but fervently support a codependent decline to poverty, gender insanity, crime, and all the horrors of a nascent police state? The Leftist politicians and their media pimps and designated beneficiaries profited from the perks of power, but why did the everyday American endorse them and their fearmongering? Since the actually operative threat was not global warming, Islamophobia, the Supreme Court, Donald Trump, the police, or the Border Patrol, but exclusion from the herd.

An existential secret is one whose revelation would mean the organism’s death.

The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, communists, and the media have colluded to suppress the true and suggest the false.

Why would rational people vote to destroy their borders, their cities, their jobs, and their children? For the same reason the sick family must tolerate pedophilia rather than its revelation: the co-opted liberal electorate was terrified that any deviationism would result in destruction of its protective unit. As it would.

Curiously, and though the Left has not noticed it, this is not a cult of personality but a group of citizen-workers, Americans, who adore our country. We understand ourselves not primarily as Republicans or conservatives but as “we the people,” and that it is not the job of government to “unite the people,” but to enforce those laws which will permit us to work out their individual destinies. This is the simple essence of conservatism.

Native Americans could go into the woods with nothing but one simple tool, a hatchet, and paddle out in a canoe. Our equivalent tool is the Constitution.

“The Republicans will destroy the planet.” “The Democrats will castrate your children.” The myth not only turns anxiety and outrage away from its perpetrators, but also saves the populace from the sorrow of a reasoned clarity.

Politicians are elected citizens (folks like you and me), who, on taking office, are enlightened by recognition of the power of myth. The new secret power is that, placed above their peers, they can announce they are there to do good and that any who oppose them are evil fools who must be destroyed.*

Representative government and its police are the operation of civilly sanctioned force.

The burgeoning of mass thought likewise is presented as some new accession of reason—of wisdom, somehow inexplicably hidden from all previous times. It is actually a creation of the century’s mechanisms: communication and travel. Because we are connected, some will see the possibility for exploitation of the mass for personal or party gain, and some for influence. In success the first group will supplant the second. Mass thought must be simplistic to be easily grasped, and attractive, offering the treat of a wisdom so novel it has been overlooked by all previous humans, awaiting the birth of the current wise generation, to bring about a Paradise of Reason.*

Acting is performing a play, as simply as possible, for the benefit of an audience. The Method gurus were failed or second-rate actors or directors who’d found shelter and glory in the backwash of the real thing—like today’s energy therapists, who didn’t care to go to medical school. The gurus certainly thought they were bringing wisdom and artistic health to their students (I studied with some of them and knew them all). But a survey of their charges’ careers would not support their belief.

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). The dramatic clock has run down at the zero point, and, after our immobility, we all are delighted and invigorated by the appearance of the unanticipated new thing, and thus the continuation of the story. In effect, “and then one day . . .” That’s how we appreciate stories, since that’s how we think.

Dramatically, the brilliance of a fool’s reassurance, followed immediately by foreseeable chaos identifies the presentation as tragedy. I’ve always known that words have power. As a playwright I studied to understand and employ that power to entertain and so make a living.

When actually engrossed by a play, we are not political adherents, but eavesdroppers; quite as if the marital squabble had progressed to the break point of the husband calling the wife a _____. Imagine if, after he had, there was a pause. Each of us, eavesdropping, would be leaning in, wondering, “Ohmigosh, what will she do/say now?” (In the political pseudodrama—Wokelahoma! if I may—she would respond, “That is an ugly word, are you ignorant of that?”

In the great drama the audience wonders what might happen next? (This is called suspense.) They prognosticate possible reactions and outcomes and can’t wait to see if these are correct. If their guesses are proved incorrect but reasonable, the competent dramatist has outthought them. If he continues to do so, not only in each interchange but in each scene, the play as a whole may terminate in a way unforeseen but retrospectively and reasonably inevitable. Now we have an actual, organic drama. If not, the audience has been tricked, bribed, or lured into watching that hackwork that is propaganda.