The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment

by David Mamet

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.

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.

the news is essentially a drama. The curtain goes up, so we know we are going to hear a story. “And, now, from the nation’s capital,” uttered by a sad-faced talking head, functions exactly as “Once upon a time.”

Watching legacy media we know the tone the story will take. Should the outlets be forced to admit some atrocity on the part of their team, they cannot help but temper their presentation with at least a tagline “hoping” that Israel will behave with humanity and “obey the laws of war.” Should the disclaimer be omitted, the liberal audience would rightly feel that they had been misled, as if a presentation in AA ended with a commercial for beer.

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.”

Our existential challenge is not to change “their” minds, but to change our own, protect ourselves and our like, and demand our governments do the same, here and in Israel. The hand-wringing, saddened, liberal, passive Jew’s seventy-year run of safety was an interregnum between two eras of atrocity. To whom is this arcane knowledge? The terrified child hugs the teddy bear; the new Holocaust denier is the Jew who hugs the New York Times.

That is our adversarial system, which is the survival of trial by combat.

The old Texas verdict had it, “Not guilty, but don’t do it again.”

Where there is law there is injustice. Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue, but there are forms.

What of overt and unapologetic prosecutorial misconduct? The aim of the late Democratic legal thuggery was suppression of a politically threatening individual by a cabal usurping power.* Our democracy is no stranger to it.

How could the Biden administration explain (let alone defend) the government-mandated removal of our southern border? The act is not only absurd but a clear violation of the Constitution, an injury to all citizen-taxpayers, and a diminution of our rights, under the law, for enforcement of our laws. The action cannot possibly be explained, and so the administration and its tools in media collude to ensure that the question can never be asked. And if it somehow should be, the questioner must be defamed.

When the bad circus comes to town, they persisted in dedication to their lobotomy. The sole confession ever to come from their lips will be: “I didn’t know it was loaded.”

Politicians, like the hangman, get rich by selling magic. Unmonitored, the executioner’s rope is limitless—just like the services promised by the politician. He proclaims the money will be used for good works, as the inch of rope may be used for magic, and we must observe that the two are actually one. For what are the good works that politics has ever accomplished with our hard-earned money? They have dispensed some to keep themselves in office but money taken from wage-earners “to do good” must injure first the wage-earner and then the loser in the politician’s choice.

Money stripped from the Los Angeles Fire Department to fund DEI could not be used to refill the (empty) Pacific Palisades reservoir, or to replace inoperative or stolen hydrants. And so the city burned.

What in the world is a gender-neutral restroom? How does it differ from a restroom? Only in this: it exploits the human need for excretion in service of a political notion, all of which, like the Oscars, reduces to “Money for Votes, Votes for Money.”

The only folks who don’t enter politics solely to make money are those with money. These get into the game to make more money. Preelection, the candidates, lying before they get to stealing, present a field as well groomed and false as the horses approaching the starting gate. Yet we, assured of the worth of their blather, pick our favorite as if the race were fair—and then complain at our loss with the assurance that the thing was fixed.

One generation’s conventionalities will be derided by its heirs as transparent quatsch, its hypocrisies unworthy of the name, and their acceptance as the act of fools. Those cataloging the absurd gap between proclamation and practice in our simple forebears are known as historians, those making the observations of their contemporaries latterly as “domestic terrorists.”

In the 1950s, television destroyed radio.

At first, successful stage folk held the flicks in contempt. When the wind shifted, they shifted too.

In the fifties, television put a large dent in the movies. But the movie stars were contemptuous of the new form and hung back until the dam broke.

Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information—and so in determining content.

Writers of English-language films require the entry-level skill of speaking English. So Hollywood, in the age of mass streaming and tsunamis of “content,” needs writers and can’t outsource their work overseas. The writers work in Hollywood, rents here go up, but salaries go down.

These band into unions for the strength of collective bargaining, but the unions, like any organization that has evolved into success, develop their own hierarchies, and agendas, which more closely resemble those of management than those of the shop floor. The unions here take form from the struggles of shop stewards, delegates, and negotiators within the union.

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.

After President Biden’s farewell debate I had a problem. It was evident that Donald Trump would win. I fantasized that he would offer me the post of poet laureate, and I wondered if I would accept. Washington, D.C., is hot and muggy, and it is across the country from my home in Los Angeles. On the other hand, it would be a signal honor to be tapped, and more importantly a chance to partially fulfill a debt not only to my country, but to Mr. Trump and those others who have stood up in its defense.

How do government and entertainment collude? Just as government does with any power nexus, for what is government but brokers in power? (Mencken called them brokers in pillage, which is a coarser but more accurate description.) As government makes nothing, all it can do is coerce. This coercion, ideally limited to taxes, has always been expandable to collusion with power to extort or enforce additional monies from an unobservant, badgered, or strong-armed populace.

Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable. —Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream (1970)

Hollywood called Top Gun: Maverick the film that saved the industry. It grossed $1.493 billion. But did it save the industry? No, the industry is dead. Top Gun: Maverick was the death rattle.

Today, women’s sports have been turned from an objective test of ability into a trial of the strength of an absurd political prohibition. Male high school students proclaiming themselves women are defeating mature, professional women athletes. Something is certainly being adjudicated, but it is not the relative ability of the female contestants. What happened to women’s sports? They have been destroyed. How can a team, a school, an athletic organization, a news media overlook the obvious?

The United States has always considered itself the obvious hegemon (absentee landlord) of Latin America. In 1823, President James Monroe proclaimed that we would not tolerate further interference in our neighborhood to the south by the bad, bad Europeans. This was the genteel equivalent of all the movie scenes of the farmer-with-a-shotgun warning the revenooers, “Git off ma land.” We saw the exploitive Spaniards out of Cuba in 1895 and installed and supported benevolent despots well aware of who was picking up the check.

In 1958, the Springhill mine in Nova Scotia collapsed, burying 175 miners. Over the next month, seventy-five were rescued. Ewan MacColl wrote “Springhill Mine Disaster” in 1960. It concludes: Through all their lives they dug a grave. I am a child of the American midcentury and have prospered under the American right to freedom of expression. Throughout my life I’ve been writing my obituary. Or perhaps my autobiography. God Bless America.

The difficulty, Friedman observes, is that no individual can be aware (let alone keep track of) all the individual depredations our leaders have been bribed to fund. The Codfish Lobby, the Lightbulb Lobby, the Sierra Club, the Teachers Unions dispense fortunes to legislators to fund their individual boondoggles, and there is such constant horse-trading and obfuscation, so much money devoted to chicanery, that no individual can combat it. The only way the government can be kept to its sworn duty to serve the people according to the Constitution is to starve it.

On August 23, 2021, a woman driving home from a White Sox game was killed in crossfire shooting between two gangs. The killers were not indicted, as the judge ruled it was a case of “mutual combat.” The ruling acknowledges Chicago’s now-official status as an open city.

Repression, and the inevitable diminution of honesty, and so decency, is the cost of liberalism. It is accepted as an award of correct thinking. The benefit is excuse from thought. Repression is a terrible cost, but to the liberal, preferable to his horror of exclusion from the group that protects him from self-knowledge.

The liberal is as unlikely to question his inducements to rage as Pavlov’s salivating dog is to ask, “What’s for dinner?”