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The Secret Knowledge

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Grames

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David Mamet, American playwright and screenwriter, has a book of essays coming out entitled The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture. I haven't read it yet (comes out June 2) but the preview/biography at the The Weekly Standard is interesting and well written in itself. So, this is a heads up about a conversion experience by an eloquent adult confronting serious political thought for the first time.

The Secret Knowledge begins with a parricide—a verbal throat-slitting of the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht, father to three generations of dramatists, especially those who, like Tony Kushner or Anna Deavere Smith or Christopher Durang, make agitprop the primary purpose of their art. For most of his career Mamet revered Brecht too: It was the thing to do. The reverence came to an end when he finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. .  .  . The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system .  .  . support and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.”

As the accelerating sequence of that last sentence suggests—from Brecht to Marx to the entire system of American higher education—one wispy aha! leads the convert to a larger revelation and then to one even broader and more comprehensive. That’s the way it is with conversion experiences: The scales fall in a cascade. One light bulb tends to set off another, until it’s pop-pop-pop like paparazzi on Oscar night.

And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror.

("pop-pop-pop like paparazzi" is lively, but I don't think it is taken from Mamet)

Another interesting reference in this piece is to Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. Published during WW1 by a British psychologist, this book has staying power and has been reissued even though the copyrights must be long expired. This is the book that coined the phrase "herd instinct". Kindle edition is just $2.99. I might grab this and combine it with Tipping Point in an attempt to write something optimistic.

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There’s a worthwhile Village Voice article about Mamet’s ideological evolution here:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

One of his best creations is the film The Edge, here’s a scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MewNn3VIpV4

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