(By David Mamet, An election-season essay, March 11, 2008)
John Maynard
Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts
change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" My favorite example of a change of mind was
Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York
premiere of Waiting for Godot. Twentieth
century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of
garbage. When he did get around to
seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist,
however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the
play as the masterpiece it is. Every
playwright's dream.
I once won
one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The
task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the
World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood
the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When
you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody
in the theater ever wants to get.
My prize, in
a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag
(apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running
sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of
John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the
years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of
proactive mediocrity. But I digress.
I wrote a
play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still
available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's
called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as
jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing
to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it
sailed. But my play, it turned out, was
actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of
two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is
self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian,
utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play,
while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between
reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the
liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds
that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to
facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and
failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of
government intervention.
I took the
liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind. As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an
article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and
that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as
increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because
although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How
do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I
felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind:
Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation,
as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and
reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage
contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I
thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and
to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio." This is, to me, the synthesis of this
worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always
wrong.
But in my
life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was
nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country.
Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and
among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part. And, I wondered, how could I have spent
decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time
that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was
it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think
that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has
both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that
people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this,
indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed
that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run
for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to
day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather
wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the
villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but
that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt,
inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective
compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the
Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner,
recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any
opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to
be their proper interests. To that end,
the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches
which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12
years of schooling. The Constitution,
written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the
chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off
the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do
everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches.
So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve
stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent
one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather
brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of
perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people,
but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake
is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight
to firearms. I found not only that I
didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an
impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good
liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president
whom I revered.
Bush got us
into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole
his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in
the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy
accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed
with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
And I began
to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I
found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they
provide and without which we could not live.
And I began
to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth,
which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually
risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the
military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they
are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country
into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free
from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither
are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is
everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and
according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me
to be unfolding pretty well.
Do I speak
as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the
United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is:
Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become
rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and
ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the
other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony
of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the
Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once
within his lifetime.
What about
the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and
background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in
those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed
to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond
sorrow. But if the government is not to
intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out? I wondered and read, and it occurred to me
that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From
experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play
and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal
period, and a better production.
The
director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the
actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that
is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and
indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence
outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.
Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what
do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each,
instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in
fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to
achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so
they work it out.
See also
that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings
nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course
of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to
the community—a solution the community can live with. Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was
taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described
independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild.
Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality
of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it
is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I,
like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do
so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America
(politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where
everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost;
and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up
of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by
getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury
room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I
realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America
in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching
values, but a marketplace. "Aha,"
you will say, and you are right. 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.
At the same
time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and
vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this
fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead
liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they
have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of
the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I
may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen
White.
White was
for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent
and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt
and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's called Masks
in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I
recommend it unreservedly. White was a
pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain
wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people
need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one
or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and
let them get on with it.
But, he
added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these
saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . " The right is mooing about faith, the left is
mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other
side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water
cooler. Happy election season.
