Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother Clara Mamet.

Hrubestow, Russian Poland, 1894

Chicago, Illinois, 1976

Epigraph

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)

Open City—an Introduction

Like a general, a dramatist must think strategically. Strategy is planning to achieve an ultimate objective. Tactics are the implementation of specific contributory steps. The success or failure of these steps can only be evaluated in relation to the overall strategic goal. A tactic, a raid, a battle, cannot be successful independent of its strategic worth, as manpower, supplies, and will are always limited. Just like an audience’s attention.

The dramatist can impose any amount of titillation on the audience and win its attention for the moment. But if the moment does not lead the audience to wonder what happens next, they have been tactically interested but strategically distracted.

The essential task of the dramatist, then, is to eliminate every superfluity in construction, so that all that remains is the hero’s quest (“the plot”). Like the chess player, then, he must embrace the absolute primacy of analysis. For both, there is no such thing as a “brilliant move” which does not advance his objective.

Characters in drama do not speak to express their feelings, but only to achieve their objectives. Just like politicians, whose utterances may be, coincidentally, true, but are spoken only strategically.

In this they are the electorate’s opponents, employing our attention to advance their goals. (Why would they, no less than the chess player, make a move not calculated to do so?) We may discount their utterances as we would the facial expressions of a player at the poker table. We determine his strategy by his actions (call, raise, pass, fold). If we want to know what he might do, we must base our guess on what he has done, and, like the playwright, determine, from tactical steps, an underlying strategy.

*  *  *

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.

Under Biden, however, and increasingly, in his accelerated decline, analysis of the Left’s strategy became more challenging for me. The scattershot assaults (tactically successful or not) did not conduce to the usurpation of power by any individual or group even remotely recognizable as the Democratic party.

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. The horrors of the last four years did not make sense as the logical continuation of an Obamist coup.

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.

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.

But, under Biden, the various identity groups, once coalesced under Obama, devolved into prosecution of each own’s particular objective or hobby horse, many of them unimportant or in fact objectionable to other groups, 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?

Kamala Harris attempted to solidify these various inspired constituencies by the incantation “Joy,” but that and several billion dollars could not hold the Democratic party together.

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. There was no rational, let alone beneficent, reason for our abandonment of the Bagram Airport. It was a decision made by some nameless bureaucrat happy with the bragging rights of momentary power, his success an inspiration to likeminded middle management and clerks unleashed.

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. Decade-long pleas of the fire department for increased funding were met by deep budget cuts, the money subverted to DEI. Warnings of various coastal and forest commissions about the danger of uncleared land went unanswered. A 117-million-gallon reservoir in the Palisades was allowed to empty. Urban gangs infest abandoned areas, protected by underfunded police; the long-outdated power grid is insufficient to supply electricity.

The formerly in power elected swore to defend the Constitution and the citizens. Their betrayals, crimes, and usurpations unquestionably dramatize the actual and sole legitimate operations of government: to preserve, protect, and defend the American people, according to the Constitution; that it is government’s job to do those things and only those things, which everyone needs but which no one can do for himself; the fire department, the police, the roads, and the sewers, the army, and emergency management.

The rock has come through the window, and the country is, once again, at a crossroads.

We will not be united regarding abortion, climate change, tariffs, vaccination. And we need not be.

In order to thrive—and why shouldn’t we?—we need to unite to respect and defend the rule of law—the Constitution—which restricts the government, so allowing individual freedom, and prescribes rules for the orderly settlement of those things which divide us.

Here are some of my thoughts on the issue.

David Mamet

Santa Monica, January 2025

Box Jumper

Edward R. Murrow (1908–65) came to fame as CBS Radio’s Voice of the Blitz. He reported from London during the worst of the bombings, from the roof of his hotel, giving a play-by-play of the savagery in his magnificent voice. “This is London . . .” In one broadcast, we hear the far-off bombs falling closer; then the sound recedes and Murrow reports the diminution with a slight but discernable regret. His is the ancient bloodlust of the reporter-as-hunter. He must have the story and will, quite literally, die to get it.

Many of the postwar television anchors and newsmen came to prominence in the war, reporting from the front lines. Walter Cronkite flew missions over Germany in a B-17, as did Eric Sevareid, and so on.* They, like Daniel Pearl, Charles Kuralt, Scott Simon, Ernest Hemingway, and W. C. Heinz (the creator of M*A*S*H), risked their lives to get close enough to know the truth. Heinz wrote that the GI went out every day, fighting in order to live, and the correspondents, who had a choice, in order to live with themselves.

What of this reporter? I will place myself in the coterie of Marcellus and Bernardo, the sentries on the battlements of Hamlet’s castle. They are usually portrayed as gibbering about the Ghost. But their scene can be played differently: they are soldiers, and their duty is to stand their post and report danger. The scene becomes dramatic (rather than simply narrative) if its high point is the ratification of their report by their commander, Horatio. His vision of the ghost proved (to all) that not only were they not insane, but that they had fulfilled their responsibilities by not losing their minds in the face of horror.

Achievement of Horatio’s “attaboy,” in my case, as in that of many conservatives, was the debate of June 28, 2024, which revealed to all but the deluded that Joe Biden was incompetent.

The debate proved that the die-hard deniers had permitted themselves to be suborned into psychosis, and that we, who’d witnessed it for years, were, in fact, simply correct and free to enjoy our vindication. I suggest a comparison to Mark Fuhrman, a hardworking detective made the sacrificial goat in O. J. Simpson’s murders of two innocents. And I fantasize his reaction on hearing an imagined Simpson’s deathbed confession to his crimes: “Fine, now may I have my life back?”

How much energy we spend in justifying a lie.

The legacy press, after the Biden debate revelation, were unashamed in reversing their narrative overnight. The same outlets that had proclaimed questions about the president’s mental health “disinformation” were now calling for his removal as senile. What could possibly induce them to hope their dolt chicanery would be accepted?

The liberal’s bovine consumption of years of the same.

The old South Side phrase was “I don’t need somebody to piss on my back and tell me it’s raining.” How much less necessary, to the even marginally observant, to add, “And that the Earth is burning; your child was born into the wrong sex, and President Trump is a Russian spy”?

The cat had left the bag, but many chose to repeat the old mantra.

At a postdebate dinner with an acquaintance, a vastly successful liberal financier:

Me: You saw the debate. How can you deny it, Biden is demented.

He: He had a cold.

The behavior of this person (for all his ability to shift bags of money around) has a name: he is a fool.

*  *  *

My political writing, over the last twenty years, has been of the genre “Hold on a second . . .”

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.

*  *  *

From T. S. Eliot:

No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.

Am an attendant Lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two.

I am neither hero, like President Trump or the war correspondents, nor, finally, a sentry, like Marcellus and Bernardo. I will compare myself to Vanna White.

For forty-two years she has been the box jumper* on Wheel of Fortune.

For the first fourteen years, she was beckoned onto the stage to gesture toward the participants’ potential prizes. In 1996, she was given the task of describing them.

Her career echoes my own. I’ve been writing plays and films for fifty years, a notably long run in a young person’s game.

Changes in the American theater and the studio system induced me to slow my operations, much as a Sioux arrow might have done a cavalry trooper.

The world could only, and understandably, stand so much work, which, whatever its excellence, had ceased to be a novelty.

Charles the Something of France was reproved by his confessor for his randy ways. The King asked the cleric to name his favorite dish, and the priest said “partridge.” That night the King served him partridge. And he served it him every night for a month. The priest said, “Always partridge?” And the King replied, “Ah . . .”

So I, the partridge in this case, took to writing novels, and essays to piece out my spare time.

The writing of the best essays (Rebecca West, George Orwell, Dr. Johnson) is drawing the attention to that which, though obvious to the writer, has been invisible to a world whose obtuseness he finds curious in itself.

The sentries on the battlements call their Commander to witness the bizarre events. He does so, thanks them, and reports to Hamlet, “Lemme tell you what we got here . . .”

The Kennedys

Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

Having asserted my claim to literacy, I will now tell you what I’ve been reading, and why. I read for pleasure and find as much pleasing in browsing as I find drudgery in study. But I am preparing a film about the assassination of John F. Kennedy—and so I have returned to books I originally cherished “just because.”

Here is Jack Ruby’s Girls, a 1970 fiction supposedly written by two of his strippers as a factual account. By their account, they are not B-girls and whores, but funny, quirky dancers; and Jack is not a thug, but a warm-hearted, civic-minded old bear. All criminal memoirs are selective at best; this one’s a mere cartoon, interesting for what it suppresses. What might that be?

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. What’s wrong with the film? 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.

The alteration of the film in two instances proves its worthlessness as a document of anything other than deceit. For the film did not alter itself, and the various cameras confiscated in Dealey Plaza did not dispose of themselves. What did happen? Well, JFK was sharing a girlfriend with Sam Giancana of the Chicago mob; Jack Ruby and Oswald knew each other well; Oswald’s mother had been the girlfriend of a henchman of Carlos Marcello, head of the New Orleans mafia, and so on. But the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted entirely alone.

We may handily overlay the popular notion of mafia organizational structure onto that of the British nobility. The monarch appointed dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons, each awarded both a domain and a responsibility. Some were charged with allegiance in their area; some, additionally, for its defense against insurrection; some, their lands lying on the border, for defense of the realm. The nobles constituted themselves, as a whole, against the commoners and peons. They banded together to pass laws criminal, civil, and religious, to ensure their hegemony and the integrity of the realm that preserved their position. Periodically, they warred with each other for supremacy under the ruler, or against him for the crown itself. (See the Wars of the Roses, Cromwell, the Five Families of New York.)

Over time, however, successful associations, born in brigandage, go straight. 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.

Repeal forced urban bootlegging mobs to branch out into drugs; two world wars impoverished Britain and its nobility; and British entrance into the European Union (in 1973, it still called itself a “community”) after nine hundred years of power was in effect that act of “going legit,” which to any liberal looks like advanced reason, but which his enemies interpret correctly as inviting attack.

It seems that the sole political entities that didn’t begin as crime families have been the democracies. These emerge not from powerful scheming to create that order which will support them at the cost of their opponents, but from a consensus of the wise or concerned, legislating peace through understanding of human weakness, and the attendant need for justice and order.*

Democracies, then, like monarchies, must eventually fall when prosperity weakens resolve—that is, when the fat cats rule only because their progenitors were strong. Those capi di tutti capi who have merely inherited their place must be inferior in strength, reason, and viciousness to their forebears for they did not win but were gifted with their position.* Anyone might inherit good looks or physical strength, but not perspicacity and resolve, and never to a degree equal to that matured through existential struggle.

*  *  *

Ancient Israel was the nexus of the Asian Silk Road and African and Mediterranean commerce. Merchandise, culture, and fashion spread from the East over land, and over the sea to Greece, to Sicily, and then to Italy and Spain.

The Sicilians inherited, adopted, or had forced upon them many cultures, and, like any border people periodically at risk, sought safety in the clan. For it was not only that any current rulers and customs of the state might be supplanted, but that they would be. What could be trusted then but blood ties? Nothing.

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.

Like monarchy, these attempt to accentuate their control not only through intimidation and assault, but through myth.* The myth of the royals is the Divine Right of Kings, and their wisdom, benignity, and devotion to public service. This last—a low-cost, though fragile assertion—is theoretically susceptible to public scrutiny through a free press. Absent this scrutiny, the myth of hereditary public service reveals its essential nature as the screen for depredation to the dissenting. We see this operation in religious wars, supposedly about doctrine, but in essence over hegemony.

*  *  *

Today, the Left’s protestation of benevolence is everywhere unsaid by its real threat of immediate ruin. The various territorial claims of the Left’s clans—#MeToo, Marxism, LGBTQ, DEI, environmentalism, feminism, Occupy, anarchism, and so on—spawn new collusions (intersectionality) and then intermural aggression (gay rights versus transgender rights) as one group tries to break to the rail. Life may be “the war of all against all” but each prosecutes it with as much aid as he can muster, and that aid was, originally, the family.

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.

What of the family? For the last fifty years, it has been denounced as “the nuclear family,” an adjective that, since 1945, has always meant “horrific.” 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.

*  *  *

The Hebrew Bible is the record of the growth of the state from the family. The family is the Jewish, religious polity. Judaism is a home-based religion. Chapter by chapter, mankind’s development is shown in the Torah through the family dynamic. Cain slays Abel out of jealousy; Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac; Jacob steals Esau’s birthright; his sons kidnap and abandon Joseph.

The Bible’s last purely familial exchange is that between Moses and his stepgrandfather, Pharaoh. This will be familiar to anyone who has grown up in a broken family. Pharaoh has raised the adopted Moses, effectively, to be his successor, but Moses displeases Pharaoh—not because he slew the taskmaster (after all, he was a prince of Egypt), but because he did so to protect a Jewish slave. Moses publicly demonstrated allegiance to that despised group from which he had been graciously rescued. He insulted the benevolence of his stepgrandfather, who asked nothing of him but expected simple loyalty.*

Moses led the Jews out of Egypt, and in the desert the storied struggles of the biblical family were supplanted by the horrors of creating and maintaining a unified state. In the Exodus, clans, tribes, and individuals plot mutiny, challenge, disobey, and infuriate Moses, and the story changes from interfamilial dynamics to the birth of democracy—with individual freedom and equality constrained by obedience to law and threatened not by the disaffected individual but by faction. Moses’s power is depleted by age, and death spares him from the horror of his people’s behavior in the Promised Land.

The eternal struggle for power, absent operative myth and its defense, devolves into decay and the reversion of the state into the family or clan. The Godfather, our American myth, is the contemporary rendition of Greek drama. They portray the family members as gods and demigods, each embodying a recognizable human ambition and its inevitable attendant flaw. Greek wisdom and drama cross-decked to Sicily, and, thence to Hollywood, and the Corleone family is our House of Atreus.

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 new, “rational” content can only be derived from our human consciousness, which requires the comfort or control of myth—and, though it may change its content, it is psychologically bound to its form. The Twelve Tribes become the Twelve Caesars, the House of Atreus becomes the Kennedys, and Kaiserwetter becomes Kennedy Weather.

Neither I nor you know much about that actual family, and much that we know may be false, exaggerated, or hagiographic, but 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. Here the medium demonstrated his supernatural powers, loosening himself from manacles or producing displays of “ectoplasm,” requiring only that they be done in the dark. The Kennedys are prominent, and we are all addicted to gossip, which is not only more exciting but less taxing than reason. Under its sway we are enthused with licensed salaciousness—and so a momentary sense of conjunction to those we envy and fear.

*  *  *

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.

Those looking for a pleasant conundrum, though, may wonder how to define Fame. Today’s young fairly universally declare their ambition for it, but interpret the world largely through the filter of a machine. Fame to them, then, equals a number on a screen.

But what does the figure represent? It may appear to record the number of those who’ve punched a button called “likes.” But what if the number is false, confected, or erroneous? Further, given the addiction to it, what number would be sufficient and would an addict not want to increase any number? What is the number at which the snakebit would be happy?

It does not exist.

In the real world, fame might of course be measured by money, but at what figure would even the most famous be content? The rich and famous, actually, devote a large amount of money and time to insulating themselves against those who have presumably supplied their fame.

The celebrated in showbiz employ hacks to script their blogs, just as, in the old studio days, stoop workers were hired to autograph the stars’ photos. The great successes in show business have books written for them, recounting confected stories of an unusual, difficult childhood, and allow their name and image (but not their cash) to be used to promote various causes they presume would increase their Fame.

But where is this Fame they pursue and protect?

The superstars can never leave the house. If they are, in some unguarded moment, actually approached by a fan, who has slipped by the security and minders, the celebrity is incommoded by the sycophancy from which he’s paid to be shielded. In the confection of a false image, the book, the blog, the diseases, and “issues,” he is now neither the cart nor the horse, but a bystander.

His fame may have supplied various houses, planes, agreeable bedmates, and tame physicians, but actual ebullitions of fans (should he encounter them), the undeniable molecules of Fame, make him sick. The case of the politician may afford us, their victims, some pleasure. They too move among and fatten upon the endorsement of those who, to them, are rubes.

But, till lately, go among us they must: campaigning, pressing the flesh, kissing piss-laden babies, opening supermarkets, and so on—pitchmen selling the set smile or the concerned brow, day after day. Serves ’em right.

Currently, however, campaigning has become one with that which once was showbiz, and is, in the computer age, the Information Highway, the Mother of Lies.

There is no book or film so bad that it is issued without the enthusiastic quotes of some whore or dolt. And a candidate without endorsements is an ex-politician.

But the books, records, and films bore quotes (deserved or not), for an actual production (of whatever worth), while politicians are endorsed either for their promises, or in spite of their past performance.

Fame, to these, is Air Force One, the Secret Service, and an unrestricted license to steal for themselves and their friends. The thrills here might wane over time; 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. I might have too, for it obviously is a lot of fun.

*  *  *

The hardest part of directing a film is stopping. For the very next morning, the captain of three hundred folks and $12 million is, once again, Old Dad, the clueless husband, thoughtlessly returned to clutter up the house during the day.

But during the ten weeks of filming one had but to raise an eyebrow for the cappuccino to arrive or the intemperate interviewer be magicked away. How did the ex-presidents, of old, stand retirement?

Some were given sinecure professorships or university presidencies, some actually had to make a living,* and some thought it good form to shuffle off to Buffalo and die while the dying was good.*

Where is this fame of which we speak?

The girls fall in love with the fellows up there in the band. Call it evil or good, it is inevitable: we imbue the notable and visible with qualities beyond those of mortal man. (See the vitriol of Trump Derangement Syndrome, as if an actual human being had committed every crime in the calendar, and those yet without a name—as if he were, actually the Devil. Or a Jew.)

The computer-generated response of the young:

Q: What do you want to be when you grow up, Johnny?

A: I want to be famous.

This is a sad remove from not only “I want to be an astronaut” but “I want to be a famous astronaut”; it elides the notion of accomplishment.

What is Fame?

The magic numbers of “likes” must, on attainment, prove as insufficient as did the favors of Marilyn Monroe.

The Shill

Ma and Pa Kettle who’d suffered an injustice might possibly get an appointment with their congressman. Showing up, they would probably be told he’d been called away but his personal assistant would give their case all his attention. But a fellow whose dad was the congressman’s principal donor wasn’t going to no Vietnam.

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 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.

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?

The government here is like the horse. A philanthropic individual might distribute oats to the poor, or pass them through the horse and then pick out the undigested oats. Those employed to paw through the manure and distribute the residue are the bureaucrats. Elected officials are the horse.

Government is good for those things, and those things only, that the individual cannot do for himself. The horse can haul burdens. It cannot make a fourth at whist, nor improve the quality of the oats it eats, nor having eaten them distribute them more fairly or effectively than one could have in their undigested state.

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.

Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t ask for money, and doesn’t advertise that they “do good.” They just do so, and the interested are free to observe.

Contemporary art museums operate as a tripartite mutual admiration society:* the artists needn’t wonder if their random offerings are trash, as they are exhibited by museums, chosen by curators who are both paid by the museum board and rewarded with artwork by the grateful artists. The third party to the happiness is the public, content to pay for the privilege of being cultured.

We may overlay the organization of the three-card-monte mob onto that of the museum and try for a fit. But who are the shills? Or do each of the three parties share out the duties, like the household when Mom is away?

Prior to Alan Turing’s invention of the computer, the German Enigma machine’s code was unbreakable. The British codebreakers tried to muscle their way in with various ancient tools, sliding test alphabets against each other and looking for a match.

They discovered that the human mind is incapable of creating a string of random numbers, and so, with enough samples, a pattern must reveal itself. Contemporary cryptographers therefore use computers to create random numbers. We accidentally reiterated the experiment at home with the poetry game.

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.

Good clean fun, as the individual lines are not only the result of our sick human consciousness* also but double-tainted, since our attempt to indict as corrupt a pretension (awful “poetry”) is already corrupted (by the poet’s fraudulent assurance that he can write and has something to say).

The individual New Yorker poems, all school of: “rain at my windowpane,” or something about a cat, loneliness, the heart, and a list of various objects or states suggesting dejection, scream their identity as trash. The resulting pastiche is easily more interesting.

Why? Because the game has had muscled into it an order past that capable of human degradation. That order is randomness, which actually has the power to arrest by the suggestion that it contains some previously unnoticed meaning.

The supposed randomness of the actual New Yorker poem is understood by the reader as the bargain: “I, the writer, have feelings too deep to be expressed in a traditionally justified line. Perhaps you, Reader, do too . . . ?”

There’s nothing in that poem to provoke—the test: ask anyone praising such a composition, one half hour after having read it, to quote a line. They will say it was not the line, but the composition as a whole which inspired them, but they’ll be unable to describe or explain the composition and will revert, then, to talking about the feelings it engendered, which will curiously always be a feeling (in the poet and the self-congratulatory reader) of loss, sorrow, dissatisfaction, hurt, anger, and the ineffable wistfulness of longing.

In short, the reader and the writer are unconsciously in cahoots to approximate some of the feelings supposedly associated with reading and writing in verse, without the actual drudgery of composition—the reader here effectively endorsing the lack, and thus his own potential capacity for creativity.

Should we transcribe our group composition (the randomized poem), we will announce it better than anything we read in the original forum. Of course we will, for just like the rain at the windowpane, writer and reader, we are praising our own artistic soul—never previously understood as such—but always suspected or felt. (This is as inevitable as the fortune-teller informing us, offhand, that she detects in us a certain extrasensory ability. Which of us, hearing the comment, ever doubted it? Had we not suspected it all the time?)

Her comment and the offering of garbage as poetry are the actions of a shill. And any shill—a supposedly disinterested individual offering something for nothing—is easily recognized: they are offering us something for nothing. How do they bypass our human wariness? By flattering our intelligence. The shill, the faux Scandinavian tourist of The Monte Mob, says, “I see that you, like me, are wary. I’ve been watching this fellow for a half hour, tell me if you see the same things I see . . .” And so on.

The bad, stinks-of-the-lamp trash poem makes us the same offer. Our randomized poem, however, breaks free of our human capacity for self-deception. What, then, do we merrymakers do? After praising its freedom-from-taint, we might suggest neatening it up. This is the equivalent of Sam Goldwyn’s direction to his office staff. He came to work to see them loading boxes with files. He asked what they were up to and was told they were discarding outdated material. “That’s fine,” he said. “Just make sure you keep a copy of everything.”

Our perception that the communal poem might be bettered by the wee-est imposition of human order is error. For the randomness of our party-game composition is the only thing differentiating it from the human-generated trash. Actual randomness, that is, in surpassing the conscious mind, operates something like talent, which both of are the connection to something unlike consciousness.

*  *  *

The lights go down on stage or screen and we are involved in a complicity. We will suspend our disbelief in return for being told a story.

The mafia, busting out a business, offers a somewhat different bargain: we, who may be in their debt, can go along with whatever terms they offer, preferring them to bankruptcy or death; and, having agreed, will then face each escalation of demands habituated to our complicity, unmanned by our cowardice, and financially weakened.

The bust-out indebted gambler may accept a ruinous short-term gangster loan, incapable of repayment, and then sell at an absurd valuation, or be forced to give the concern to his creditors.

Since effectively they’ve paid nothing for it, and have no thought for their credit rating, they will sell off the fixtures and the stock, order anew materials for which they have no intention of paying, and, having sold every part of the pig but the squeal, walk away.

What of the business? The mafia’s only business was making money. What is the business of government?

And there is a difference in degree but not in essence in asking, “Wait, where did the tax money go?” and “Why am I paying you a premium to buy your second-rate beer?” Each is the plaint of a chump who has not quite put himself wise.

The Springbok

“Never odd or even” is a palindrome. It reads the same in either direction. As does “able was I ere I saw Elba.” The palindrome charms as it suggests the additional merit of comprehensibility. “Dog a Toyota God” is technically a palindrome, but dismissible as contrary to the figure’s spirit.

The last few years have been a sort of Phony War in our civilization. The Left’s universal anxiety fixes upon retail horrors portending annihilation: global warming, the flu, law enforcement, social injustice, and so on. The Right’s is fixed on the one existential threat: the Left. But the anxiety, the Left’s manifesting as panic and the Right’s as horror, is universal, as both sides are reacting to the same phenomenon: an organism that has prospered to the point of self-destruction.

The growing tree devotes its energies to putting down roots for water and stability, and producing trunk, branches, and leaves to beat its competitors to the sun’s energy. It can’t live forever. And a civilization, the movie business, the federal government, like the tree, must eventually die. Its demise, like that of the tree, will be accelerated by persistence in the same operations that once made it strong.

The tree uses its height to sprout branches, the better to capture solar power. The burgeoning branch structure saps energy from the roots, eventually weakening them. The tree cannot prune itself, nor logically allocate resources between branches, leaves, and roots.

A culture is a living organism, and so must eventually die—like a family, a business, or a country—but the human cultural mechanism has some potential to self-regulate.

The rules, laws, constitutions, religions, and the behaviors that evolve from them exist—though they may be presented as a guide to the organism’s immortality—for the healthy (but not interminable) extension of life.

Ours is the first civilization obsessed with overeating rather than starvation. A simply observant Man from Mars would easily explain our cultural debility—we no longer need, laud, or cultivate strength in order to survive, but instead squander it in a frenzy to allay fear and confusion over a terrifying overabundance.

Putting ourselves in that space visitor’s place, we might examine the phenomenon for means of its palliation, for a possible return to communal wisdom, and so for the extension of a matured life.

The life of the overgrown tree might be lengthened by pruning, or by manuring the soil; or one might fashion crutches for the weak, overburdened limbs; these and other operations could retard a natural degeneration. It will not help, however, to blame the neighbors.

One cannot confront a danger, or indeed an inconvenience, without an understanding of its operations. The touch of the King could not cure scrofula; however, the notion that it could allayed anxiety.

The seventeenth-century terror of Indian attack against which there was no defense was addressed in Salem, Massachusetts, by drowning old women; the West’s of its contemporary confusion about prosperity, by pleading with the sun for pardon and castrating children.

The witch-hunters’ natural anxiety about starvation in a New Land was heightened into cognitive dissonance by the added fear of attack; our Judeo-Christian West, confused and overelaborated by prosperity, has also been burdened with a terrifying accelerant. It is the internet.

*  *  *

The springbok is an African antelopine. It lives on the veldt. It must protect itself from predators. The veldt is flat and featureless, but the springbok’s vision is not that good. Additionally, the very tropism that causes it to move in herds prohibits those in the middle from seeing past their friends to assess danger.

Those on the herd’s outside may serve as sentinels, but the inner-circle beasts, apparently, are evolved to draw their own conclusions. To do so they periodically spring up into the air, just as if they had sat on a tack. Up they go and look around. All to the good. It looks silly but apparently it works, or else they would have long ago been lunch for the lions.

We know why they spring up. And a zoologist might be interested in the physical mechanism, but a cultural anthropologist, like this writer, has a different question. Not why, or how, but when.

We must assume that the animals that jumped too seldom became prey, and those who jumped too often became weak, and thus prey also. What, then, is the genetically evolved interval ensuring the greatest chance of survival? For certainly such exists. It is not that the springboks figured it out, but that those who hit the right number survived longer, and thus gave birth to young who both possessed the same genetic proclivity and were raised to emulate the operations of their successful parents.

*  *  *

Theatrical events—plays, concerts, and dances—are scheduled to begin on the hour. Traditionally, however, they begin at six or seven minutes past. The custom might appear to exist for the seating of latecomers, and indeed it does, but it has evolved autonomically, for a quite different reason. At six or seven minutes past the time of convocation, a group quiets down. You can observe it the next time you’re in a theater. A hush spreads over the audience.

Like the springbok, the group is assessing threat. The audience does not sense danger, but they, you and I, still exhibit the survival mechanism formed on the savanna. They, like the springbok, have timed out on inattention.

A theatrical scene, onstage or in the movies, is usually seven to ten minutes long. That is about the length of time we viewers will concentrate without pausing to reconsider our surroundings. (The scene, at this point, may continue with the introduction of a new element, but this introduction, though the curtain hasn’t fallen, is effectively a new scene. It is not the case, then, that the audience will be unfortunately balked of its reconnaissance, but that as it has been balked, its attention must be reengaged by a sex scene, murder, or car crash—the introduction of a new element, which is, mechanically, a change of scene.)

The French note that a dinner party quiets down at twenty minutes past and twenty minutes to the hour. They say “un Ange Passe.” The party was scheduled for the hour, and after three chat periods of seven minutes (intervals or scenes), we have a pause that is, in fact, an act break. (The “scenes” here are three stories, or gossips. Watch for it.)

The seven-minute interval is that of a vaudeville skit, an after-dinner speech, or, in the early days of broadcast TV, the time between commercials—the commercials occurring at the best time to impinge upon the viewer’s attention.

This is the interval, we might guess, at which the springbok becomes anxious and looks around. In the television commercial, we, his like, were informed that danger might be avoided by the purchase of the protective deodorant, cereal, or auto insurance.

The storyteller at the cocktail or dinner party delights us with his seven- or ten-minute turn—any longer performance would be considered monopolizing the evening. Then there is a pause, after which someone else might bear the burden.

There is a longer pause between one section of the dinner party and the next: the move from the cocktails to the dining room, from the table back to the living room. These periods, each about an hour, are found in the act breaks at the play or the concert hall. After two or three of these acts we’ve had enough, and quit both the ballet, the waterhole, Hamlet, or the Super Bowl. Our behavior is observable, and universal. We now know why and when the curtain is delayed.

*  *  *

The Salem judges could not drown enough witches to eliminate the Indian threat, but the trials gave the residents a modicum of a delusory self-control, substituting, in psychiatric terms, a phobia for a free-floating anxiety.

They chose as their preferred threat the most defenseless of their group, ascribed to them magical powers, and proved themselves, by killing them, possessed of supernormal abilities, indeed, omnipotent. For had they not just defeated the Devil? However, if the women had actually been Of the Devil, why would they have allowed their neighbors to destroy them? Anyone who asked that question in 1692 Salem would have been killed as a witch—a mechanism that some readers may find familiar in our current world.

*  *  *

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.*

In my youth everyone smoked cigarettes. 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.

We observe ourselves explaining, “I just have to do this . . .” “This” being ordering mukluks at midnight, checking on our stocks at 3 a.m., returning a weekend business text that won’t be received till Monday, and so on.

If each new address to the device is rational, why is the universal phrase “just have to do this”? Do we say it when taking a fresh bite of lunch? We say it of nothing but our resort to the computer.

This addiction differs from that to tobacco, as the computer connects us to the herd. The herd, here, though virtual, is universal. It offers information, entertainment, gossip, instruction, connection, and so on, ad infinitum. But why would one have to reconnect every ten minutes? We do so for the same reason that prompts the springbok: because we have been formed into a herd.

The computer, a useful tool, did it. 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.

With the computer we have accidentally triggered a genetic defense mechanism*—and so our simple human concerns about life—sustenance, security, procreation, sex, government—become electronically processed into anxiety.

As anxiety progresses into terror (as it can in the individual or in a group), we seek to identify a threat to which (to keep the anxiety within bounds) we know ourselves superior.

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.*

As actual evidence of supposed existential threats is moot, the necessity to explain anxiety as reason is elaborated: as 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 indictment of its benefits. Those questioning the accuracy of my observations might reflect that a majority of our population concerns itself with being “liked” on the internet.

What can this mean? We know they (and we) aren’t actually “liked,” and we know that there is no number of those who “like” us which would allay our anxiety. There is no number at which we might be content. Further, who the deuce knows whether the little numbers on a screen actually represent any actual human responses (of whatever worth)?*

What would we say of a family member or friend who announced he was going out in order to get people to like him? We would say he was insane.

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. The anxiety is exploited for financial and political gain, but in truth we have simply mistaken form for content, this content tantalizingly elusive, as with the palindrome.

But what of a positive note?

I will conclude with such, which has the added merit of reference to the essay’s title.

The springbok is a gazelle, a member of the goat family.

A poor Jewish farmer in Eastern Europe came to his rabbi.

“Rabbi,” he said, “we don’t have enough to eat, my wife and I fight constantly, the children won’t work, the cow died, and the roof leaks.”

“Do you own a goat?” the rabbi asked. The farmer answered that he did.

“Take the goat into the house,” the rabbi said, “and come back next week.”

The next week the farmer returned. “Rabbi,” he said, “my wife and I are still screaming at each other, the children won’t work, we’re starving, the roof leaks, and the goat has fouled the house.”

“Take the goat out,” the rabbi said.

The Bally and the Tip

I am a snakebit lover of language, the more obscure the better. The cutout between a knife’s blade and its ricasso is called the choil. The ricasso is that space between the choil and the tang, that metal which extends into the haft.

The carnival barkers, those who exhorted the crowd to pursue the delights of the midway into the tent, were actually known as “talkers.” They were paid to draw and immobilize a crowd (known as the “tip”) and induce them to pay up and move on in. The carnival pitch (the “bally”) traditionally concluded, “They’re on the inside, folks, they’re on the inside.”

Language, especially the arcane, evolves as the uninitiated (the “Bates”) get wise. “Hey, rube” was a nineteenth-century entre-nous signal that the carny was in trouble, and its members must join up and stand together against the citizens. As the phrase became known it was replaced in the twentieth century by “Signal 25.” But as this is, if not widely known, available public knowledge, it has, I am sure, been surpassed in any locale where the carnival may continue to operate.

We old-timers delight in claiming descent by utilizing the cant current when we first arrived. My old friend Howard, retired from the cops in the 1970s, told me that a handgun in his time was a “mohaska” (solutions accepted), while when his dad was on the force it was a “roscoe.” Contemporary law enforcement youngsters now refer them, I believe, as “firearms.” Oh well. Further, in Howard’s time on the (then all-male) NYPD, the wife was “The Cook,” as in “I got to check with the Cook.” My friend Maureen, retired career FBI, said that in her day the spouse (of whichever sex) was the Tower. Language will always reveal information about intention—even if its primary purpose is to obfuscate, repress, or defraud. “The Cook” and “The Tower” are in-group expressions of affection,* “Signal 25” of the need for security.

One may also infer from euphemism the desire for repression: “Gender” reveals the suppression of a concept incapable of exact definition, suggesting its imaginary nature. It is a box containing nothing, whose unwrapping, therefore, must be disincentivized.

See also, for those of an age, the 1960s feminist interchange:

F: You just don’t get it.

M: Get what?

F: SEE?????

*  *  *

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.

Language also develops in response to novelty in fashion, behavior, or new technology. One dealing with a complex problem, to which a partial solution causes the resurgence of a previous one, explains he is playing Whac-A-Mole (I always imagined that some game designer’s kid mispronounced “guacamole,” and the rest is history). And someone discovered that which may be a new or forgotten solution to the tendency of the hand to slip forward over the blade of a guardless knife: serrating the top of the blade nearest the grip transversely. The solution may have existed for years, but its description as “jimping” does not seem to predate the last midcentury.*

Pilots on final descent describe crossing the runway threshold as coming “over the fence,” a phrase surely dating to the earliest days of “the landing field,” where the fence existed to keep out the cows.

“They’re on the inside, folks, they’re on the inside”—the magician’s female assistant was known as the box jumper, perhaps because he placed her in the box from which he produced some person or thing altogether different for the audience’s delight. Or perhaps the term came from the old girly shows. These—sometimes a feature of the carny, and sometimes traveling independently—sold the promise (sometimes fulfilled) of female nudity. A widespread gag had the female object of desire, clad in a two-piece bathing suit, descend from the stage, enter a box, and pass the suit out through “viewing slits.” The talker then charged the rubes to peer through the slot, saying, “She makes all her living from the box.”

If the law hadn’t been sweetened, or the young woman was demure, the salivating customers paid up and peering through the slits, saw the attraction clothed in the bathing suit she wore beneath its mate. Speaking of “on the inside,” A. W. Stencell reports in his Girlshow that, when the girls got in the altogether, inside the tent, their male colleagues protected their modesty by staying outside. That the girls stripped for the yokels was, to their friends, just business, but for an actual person to ogle them, indecency.

Contemporary films flog the (historically withheld or merely promised) sex in movie trailers, confusing the incitement of eros (the desire for union) with the advertisement of pornography, here become one with the historic street corner entrepreneur’s “Wanna see some French postcards . . . ?”

Hamlet says, “I have been heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play, / Have by the very cunning of the scene, / Been struck so to the soul that presently / They have proclaimed their malefactions.”

I saw it at the Orpheum Theatre, off-Broadway, in 1992, when audiences at my play Oleanna regularly near-rioted, screaming at the actors, and fighting with each other after the performance. Merrymakers, come to a late-appearing tragedy to see a story about Others, were shocked, it seems, to discover it was a play about themselves. And they didn’t like it one small bit. Marvelous.

So much for guilty creatures (human beings, you and me) at a play, but when we stroll the carnival midway, what then? The midway offers the illusion of autonomy: we are free to peer here or there, and partake of or pass by the various amusements, risking no jot of our self-possession. Save that we’ve surrendered it when we walked on the midway. Like the person on the car lot: no one shows up other than those prepared to buy, and the salesman’s job is to flatter their wise reserve into nothingness.

The midway’s attractions, one and all, exist to get our money; the delights are offered as if the exchange were cash for promised delight, but the delights exist “in the box,” and the box don’t hold no naked lady.

Randy Newman, our great American poet, proclaimed, “We don’t want no short people ’round here.” Nor do we want no cynics, and God forbid I should admit (correctly) to the label; I who, to the contrary, am merely possessed of that removed wisdom available only to those of us who have lived too long, and survived our mistreatment by the Fates (whatever superficial evidence might erroneously suggest itself to the impartial observer).

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.

It was said in the fifties that there was a new dramatic form: theater of the absurd, its prime exponent Samuel Beckett. But what is less absurd than the creation of a play? This creator of which, a lover of language, might be excused for some healthy skepticism, in addition to being self-indicted as a cynic.

No Coups in England

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.

We’ve seen (the reader may supply his favorites) examples of corruption and decay, and a miraculous riposte to national dissolution in MAGA. Our government, elected to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, has decayed to that point of warning in the Preamble, which is the Declaration on one foot:

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.

What happened to America the Beautiful and Columbia the Gem of the Ocean, the Leader of the Free World?

For the last four years Israel has been the Leader of the Free World.

They have been the West’s sole protection against Islamic terror, fighting while reviled by the very people and countries they were protecting. Their position was similar to that of Donald Trump, devilled, shot, and persecuted as no other figure in American political history, for standing up for his country.

Now Israel and the United States will again be allies, Iran may be returned to the Iranian people, Gaza may become a wealthy city-state (Why not? Isn’t that what we did for Germany and Japan?), and there may be that biblical peace in which each may sit under his fig tree and not be afraid.

Moses sent out twelve spies to scout out the Land of Canaan—the Promised Land. They returned and reported that it was a good land, filled with milk and honey, but that it was peopled by giants so large “we must have looked to them like grasshoppers, and that is how we seemed to ourselves in our own eyes.”

Moses admonished them that they had been asked for their report, which gave their people information, rather than for their opinion, which made everyone afraid. And it was the cowardice of the spies that caused the forty years of wandering as Moses kept the Jews in the desert until that generation had died off.

God’s promise to the Jews, their fear, and His rejection is a universal human myth. The hero is given a task he rejects. In the first instance he must confront himself and choose bravery over cowardice.

The mythic hero is aided by the Word of God, contemporary Westerners by heroic example. Churchill not only instilled but could be said to have created in the populace an awareness of their own greatness. As does President Trump.

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. If Dad is a practicing pedophile, its acknowledgment means the end of the family as it exists. The protection of the secret is the family’s unifying endeavor, its repression alone allowing the family to continue.

One must not mention a rope in the house of a hanged man, and neither can the codependent family say anything, which, even at one or two removes, might reveal that everyone was in on the secret. The sick family devotes all necessary energies to collusion, which is to say mutual and self-censorship.

The censorship here is not directed, as in the political sphere, against antagonists, but only practiced among family members to protect the dread secret of the group.

During the last four years, America has undergone a political insurgency, practiced by a coalition, each like family members, with its own investment in group integrity and the power derivative therefrom. The superrich, academia, Islamists, Marxists, communists, and the media have colluded to suppress the true and suggest the false.

We know that their perfidies, lawfare, slander, blacklisting, civil persecution, and assassination were practiced on the conservatives and the conservative movement, and particularly, and monstrously, on President Trump as the movement’s leader. But the suppression was targeted primarily at a different group: their own voters.

To remain unthreatened (by reason), the liberal populace had to be convinced to endorse various lies and fantasies: Black Lives Matter, Israel’s perfidy, sexual mutilation of minors, abortion-till-birth as a woman’s right, men’s right to compete in women’s sports, the abolition of the police, Trump’s demonic power, and so on.

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.

The Germans could not live each day reminding themselves the Nazis were savage murderers. Not only was the energy required prohibitive, but any reserve of performance, or even thought, might, in discovery, lead to their death. Much easier, then, to consign the question to those things or the category “better not thought about.” (For example, “Did my husband have an affair that time in Hamburg?”)

In the energy devoted to accommodating monstrous lies, the mind awards them the preferred status of truth, as the codependent has paid a huge price from them: his self-respect. The truth of a proposition can be debated by adducing facts and arguing from them, or debate of an indefensible position can be avoided preemptively, such as “It’s unquestionable,” “You can’t be serious,” “I won’t even stoop to consider your supposed argument,” “What are you, a Trumper?”

Joe Biden, our country’s former chief executive, had for a long while been senile; the administration and the legacy media hid the fact and suppressed its discussion—as they did of the border, dissolved by their own machinations; the destruction of the cities by mobs, inflation, and then the putsch of their candidate and his illegal replacement through fiat.

Why would supposedly sentient individuals vote away the freedoms of thought, conscience, assembly, and repression guaranteed by our Constitution?

It makes sense, as does any suicide, as an act of survival. The suicide takes his own life in order to stop unbearable anguish. It is the most desperate act of self-preservation.

The last four years have seen the attempted suicide of the West.

Prosperity, interconnectivity, and their attendant confusions have led to chaos, the denigration of religion, of the family, of law, and of the nation-states, our own in particular, whose identity was created out of dedication to their respect, which is to say, from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The United Kingdom now is prosecuting those standing across the street from abortion clinics silently. Should they testify that they were praying, they are guilty of a crime.

The totalitarian suppression and brutality of the fascists and communists—everything for the state, nothing except the state, nothing outside the state (Mussolini)—describes today’s Democratic Party. Its enforcers in media and education conspire to ensure there will be no deviation from the party line, and that when the line changes, its recipients will change or suffer. On July 10, 2024, Nancy Pelosi and liberal outlets praised Biden as sharp and focused. Pelosi suggested they should put him on Mount Rushmore. On July 21 he was ousted from office. The Machine began its hagiography of Kamala Harris, a nonentity named “border czar,” her responsibilities limited to implementing the border’s destruction. Conservative requests for clarifications were labeled “misogynistic.” Her platform’s ad lines were “Joy,” a reference, perhaps, to her signature rictus, and “Turn the Page.” Why would she have wanted to turn the page on four years of the Biden administration, of which she said she would do nothing differently?

But to the Left, a request for information—“Why were you voting for her?”—is answered, “She’s not Trump.”

The liberals were hard-pressed to explain their loathing of Trump, beyond slandering him as Hitler or the Devil.

But he is no more the devil than was Lincoln, who pointed out the unfortunate truth that a country half-slave and half-free cannot long survive; or Malcolm X, or Winston Churchill, who so embodied courage that Obama’s first act on achieving the White House was to remove his bust.

Trump is not the Devil, but a rational consideration of him and his achievements was beyond the liberal’s ability—so in this, Trump actually was the enemy. He represented a challenge they could not accept.

The transition from party-line liberal to reasonable citizen—one dedicated to individual rights, rather than party control in the hope of beneficence—generally involves some degree of shame.

The genius of the twelve-step programs is that shame in them can be aired, and diffused, in a company each of which has undergone a similar upheaval—where confessions of complicity and shame are greeted and diffused with recognition, laughter, and welcome.

As among new conservatives, and new, welcome devotees to citizenship.

*  *  *

Since the 2020 election I feared a new American Revolution, the Leftist government proclaiming its intent to destroy parents called terrorists and citizens deemed insurrectionists.

During the four years of the Obama/Biden/Harris coup, Trump, who had been raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered, and shot, continued to grow in popularity and attracted the like-minded into a coalition stronger than that of the Left.

In order to command, one must have lieutenants themselves capable of assuming command, and themselves capable of inspiring subordinates. Their absence in 2020 led to that bump in the road, but their emergence and amalgamation, in the last four years, is now the Republican Party.

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 horror of the last four years, our appeasement of terror, our slavish support of our enemies, our abandonment of the State of Israel, the assaults on free speech, seemed to me the descent into chaos which has been the end of every world power.

Rome, Greece, Nineveh and Tyre, Babylon, Nazi Germany: all were eventually returned to dust. I saw the irreversible decline of the United States, and took comfort in Scripture. The Jewish Bible, the Torah, is a record of decline of those civilizations that fall away from God, and promises that a return to His precepts will restore His grace. We know that one day America, as in all things, will go on with Nineveh and Tyre. But not today.

“A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes”

Preadolescents perennially discover that adults lie, and they, of course, know that they themselves lie unreservedly to adults. But set upon by a nascent suspicion of the social contract, they suggest to each other the possibility of a world in which every person tells the truth always.

Their minds are unformed, but forming, and this early instance of utopianism is the child’s vision of his particular aperçu elaborated into his salvation of the world (the essence of liberalism). Leftism, as progressed liberalism, elects the Messiah not as oneself, but as the group, empowered not to Do Good, but to eradicate Evil after which, obviously, Good must emerge. This heroic task, as it is in opposition to the Forces of Darkness, can be attempted only through the Power of Unity.

The physician’s untruths may be told to reassure the patient or his relatives, either through giving hope or concealing that ignorance which might lead to their despair. The laity collude in assigning to the doctor wisdom or skill beyond human capability. This is the thingamabob that does the job, the job being a legitimate placebo effect and an affirmation of the individual’s right to the same.

There is a downstream aspect of the doctor’s apotheosis. As we descend the scale of status, through psychologists, to therapists, counselors, life coaches, energy manipulators, “channelers,” and so on, we see today pseudomedical status arrogated by grade-school teachers of arithmetic. Associated, we find parents reacting to this proclamation as if to “Unquestionable Medical Science” in an unconscious surrender of reason and faith to those extorting it.* This is in effect a confidence game, which is always an exercise in codependency.

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.

We find another instance of the luxury complaint in modern politics. Here the politician presents himself as uniquely qualified as the electorate’s doppelgänger, a champion against Evil—Batman, in effect. Politicians learn to incite rage, since voters, being human, may prefer it to the fear to which they have been incited as a preliminary—or which they have intuited in response to accelerating social change.

The frightened individual, reduced by a knowledge of his own powerlessness, can be offered the upgrade to rage only as a member of the group. This is the introductory gift of his membership in the party: he is no longer powerless, as he has recognized what he has misidentified as anxiety, or apprehension, as indignation.

The assigned cause of such, whether Trump, or global warming, racism, capitalism, or trans rights, functions here like the psychiatrist’s inverse-oracular withholding of cause: it allows the politician, having hit the right note, an endless exploitation, since the cause being imaginary, there is no danger of a cure.*

Barack Obama’s genius come-on, “Hope and Change,” specified neither a cause nor a cure. Were the words verbs, nouns? His campaign exploited the mechanism of assertion-belief with no specificity whatever. Previous and subsequent political semantics seem puerile: “We Must Go Forward,” “We Are the Change,” “A Better Tomorrow.” These and their interminable like present a truism, vacuuism, or tautology, playing upon our human hardwired willingness to suspend our disbelief.*

In the theater, we do so for entertainment, in politics for reassurance or entitlement. “Segregation Forever,” “Black Lives Matter,” “From the River to the Sea,” “Fight Systemic Racism,” “Save the Planet” are all a treat, suggesting to the individual entire classes of neighbors to which he is superior.*

“The Future,” “A Better Tomorrow,” and so on present the most basic truth (“we would like things to go well”) as the invitation to a heroic quest. They play upon a simple truth, and the most human of conundrums. The truth is that things change. And time passes. The conundrum is where did it go, and the associated regrets: How did I squander it, and what have I done?

No, the politicians suggest: time starts now,* and you, voter, are, as we know, going to use it for the noblest of purposes: saving the world. Here, as in the confidence game, the mark, suggested into “realizing his power,” can now be manipulated to the huckster’s ends. He has quite literally been flattered out of his mind.

Different from the psychiatrist, or indeed the pedophile science teacher, the politician is hep to the jive. He no more believes in his assertions than does the Ponzi scheme promoter, or the carny shill who is his progenitor.

The politicians among us are always either smiling or impersonating concern. Of course, when offstage they must let their hair down, just like movie stars. And how could they discharge their so-concealed contempt for their dupes (the “regular folks” they portray) than through pleasures deprived to those idiot rubes?

Epstein Island, sexually immorality, official immunities from prosecution (and Obamacare), exemption from insider trading laws, freedom to destroy incriminating documents, or to sell influence, various addictions—these are the perks of the office only less inherent in the job than the license to steal.

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin said a magician is an actor impersonating a magician. The politician, like the magician, is also playing a part, and, like the movie star, it is a performance from which he can desist only in protected congress with his like. There is no politician who does not get the joke.

A physician may perhaps occasionally feel queasy for approaching the line where a legitimate placebo explanation is an apology or excuse for ignorance, but no politician (even the most starry-eyed, after a week in office) is confused about his necessary relation to the truth.

Politicians exploit our inbred fear and confusion about time and change. The liberals: that things must get better in the future. The conservatives: that they were better in the past.

“We Must Go Forward” and “We Must Go Backward” are equally meaningless but play upon fears once addressed by Judeo-Christian religion.

Christianity reassured its adherents that, yes, they were not wrong, this world is a narrow path with sin and damnation to either side, but successful navigation will result in eternal life. The prior Jewish tradition of this hellhole reassured the human that adherence to God’s law was as close as one could get to peace, and, the wise would behave accordingly.

What of entertainment?

To understand its contemporary function, we must revert to its birth, in separation from religion.

Contemporary enlightened agnostics have long congratulated themselves on their devotion to a deity superior to the masses’ “God.” It is “the sunset.”

Who has not heard “the sunset is my god”? No one. This is, of course, a regression to paganism, its adherent spared the corollary by central heating. The corollary of the God of nature’s beauty is He of its destructive fury.

The pagan may have appreciated the divinity of the odd sunset but, I suspect, only as a momentary lapse in God’s (or, say, nature’s) wrath.

Holidays of thanksgiving, from the beginning, were essentially sacrifices, lest human enjoyment of surplus attract the attention of the Fates. As we, reasonable though we are, all feel it must.

The opposite of a frightened or conscious understanding of life’s vagaries is hubris. To the pagan mind—which is to say, to our vestigial consciousness of our vulnerability—hubris is the greatest sin. Those unaware are, we see, punished, their punishment bringing them to consciousness.

The offender may be Oedipus, Macbeth, Narcissus, or Harvey Weinstein. However agnostic we feel ourselves to be, we understand that all of them have gone beyond what is permitted.

Our knowing gossip about the great fallen from grace is an acknowledgment of power beyond human comprehension. Some call it God and enjoy the understanding not of the power itself, but of its incomprehensibility. This avowal of one’s place in the scheme of things may lead to practices designed to keep the order in one’s mind, and so bring one peace. I name prayer, meditation, and service.

The Yom Kippur liturgy calls the individual to confess a distressingly large list of his sins. Following this the congregation chants: “But prayer, and repentance and charitable actions lessen the severity of the decree.”

This is the palliative contained in tragedy. At its conclusion we are refreshed through immersion in a contagion like that of panic or fashion: we have participated in a group avowal of our powerlessness, an avowal progressed from the pagan’s propitiation of a vengeful God to a confession of our imperfection. The pagan sacrifice of an animal or an infant has been refined through self-consciousness into a sacrifice of ego. The former, aboriginal pagan sacrifices, however, seem to be more acceptable to the affronted (human) mind than self-abnegation and reflection, and so we find, in reversion, the fear of global warming (the worship of the sun, and the terror lest we have offended), and immolation of the firstborn replaced by recycling.

As these sacrifices are insufficient to allay anxiety, the mechanism of reversion to a fear of nature, unchecked, will grow like any other panic: vide, the notion that humans are born into the wrong sex, and God’s error may, thank God, be finally corrected through man’s surgical abilities.

The computer age, that Pandora’s box, has separated us from physical communion with our fellows. For sitting in a playhouse or movie theater laughing or weeping with unknown others is an exercise in humanity—that is, the experience (rather than the understanding) that, gender, race, and politics aside, we tend to laugh and cry at the same things. The new woke totalitarianism is an outgrowth of our separation, ensuring that only those stories that separate us can be told, and can be appreciated not in communion, but in isolation with a machine.

Entertainment, information, and pornography have become one, not through the operations of Lex Luthor or some evil monster but through the genius of human invention (the electronic age)—turned to evil by that worse-than-satanic-demon, the human mind.

Tentpole films (that is, cartoons) depict the threat of destruction of civilization as we know it, by some satanic force. What does the satanic force get out of it? What does your aunt Grace get out of it, as she smilingly and deniably reduces every family gathering to teeth-grinding anguish?

The bookstores, the media, the schools, and the politicians are screeching that there is evil in the world, and that we may be the superhero we see in the movies if we continually hate it (our neighbors), which proclamation we may make good if we buy their product: vote for them, teach diversity, read only the books of their side, abandon our children to the teachers union, tear down the other side’s political signs, and so on.*

As Boy Scouts, we were commanded to do a good deed daily, an admonition we found a bit twee even then; but today the citizen made ignorant not through connection but through subservience to the mass is not only admonished but in fact is required to do his good deeds incessantly. They are reducible to performing or lauding compliance.

The mass, to him, is presented as the right-thinking world, but this is only a political opinion that, in a healthily operative democracy, he is free to accept or reject. The definition of democracy.

Road Trip

Any family road trip will eventually produce irritations maturing into acrimony. The discomfort is unavoidable, but the squabbling may be diffused by a simple trick. Each day, in rotation, designate one family member as its cause. Another handy hint: when baffled into immobility by a problem, try considering it as a solution.

An advanced application of the above, stunned by the absurdity of government depredations: think of them as the mafia. Consider: ignore their posturings and protestations and simply note their actions. They want to “be a partner” in your candy store (your life); they make you buy from their suppliers (environmentally sanctioned and otherwise preferred producers); charge you protection (taxes); put their people in charge (affirmative action); ruin your credit (inflation); sell off the fixtures (to China); and destroy your business if you don’t comply (put you in jail). The aperçu is not new. It is a contemporary application of Tom Paine, and of the Preamble to the Constitution.

King George and his like stayed in power through the threat and exercise of force, attended by their insistence on myth. Force is expensive, but myth is free, and even when it can’t assuage the coerced it may confuse them.

Royalty’s myth was the divine right of kings; the mafia’s is tribal unity. This, their myth explains, however challenging, is preferable to universal defenselessness. Viz: yes, you might say we are strong-arming you, but better our mob (Capone), made of our people (Italians), than that of our enemies (Bugs Moran, those damned Irish). Further, when you’re jammed up with those other crooks (the government), come to us. You’re one of our clients, and p.s., we control them.

This is the foundation myth of the two-party system: “Yes, we’re bad, but we’re not our evil opponents.” “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.

Government, like Circe, turns men into swine. All elected officials soon realize it. Some seek office to exploit the knowledge; some obtain office only semi-aware and are dominated in turn by those privy to the joke.

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.* They exploit our human craving for direction. Where is the leader moral enough to employ this wisdom according to the rules he was elected to uphold?

Ulysses was returning home to Ithaca. Circe had warned him about the Sirens. These, half-women and half-bird, sang a honeyed song to lure passing sailors to their death upon the rocks.

Ulysses was told that he alone must hear their song, but that he, like his charges, would be unable to resist it. So he had his sailors stuff their ears with beeswax and bind him tightly to the mast. Why could he not deafen himself? Because he was the captain, and so must remain aware.

The Sirens caused men to lose their minds. Ulysses stopped his sailors’ ears so that they would not succumb and, as importantly, so that they would not hear the shrieks of their commander who had gone insane.

Representative government and its police are the operation of civilly sanctioned force. From the first, gangster films have suggested the similarities at all levels of the cops and the crooks. Government can be compared to Hollywood, and both to myth, which is perhaps the subject of this book.

“Believe little you see and nothing you hear” is a grand rule. We know ourselves discriminating and wise, and tend to credit others’ speech. Though we know ourselves to be dissemblers.

Orthodox Judaism interdicts the mention (good or bad) of others and their behavior, classing it as gossip. This not only restricts the individual’s capacity to sin (the sin is Leshon HaRa, the Evil Tongue), but his susceptibility to gossip. That which he cannot restrict (for example in his family) he may turn away from or discount.

But we moderns believe the news—which is basically gossip—not evaluating it as a commodity (which it is), its offer intended to raise money or support some group, project, or idea.

The Los Angeles Times, last December, under new ownership, decided to go straightish, to turn from the path to Avernus and begin publishing news instead of infomercials.

The owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, stated that in the future, the coverage would be “more balanced.” But good-willed and laudable as his act was, he missed the point. It is not the best use of a community’s press to seek balance, but rather to report the truth.

The wisdom of the rabbis: If you were limited to one rule for correct conduct, what would you advise? Don’t lie. We all lie, and politicians do it for a living. As do lawyers and doctors. (That’s how not only the learned professionals but the plumbers buy their boats.) So be it.

Kipling wrote, “The men of my own kind, they may do ill or well but I am wonted to their lies, they are used to the lies I tell, and we do not need interpreters when we go to buy and sell.” So it is with the politicians.

The best use rhetoric to inspire, the worst to subvert. This is known as propaganda. It may contain exaggeration, certainly, and, as we’ve seen under the Biden years, lies outright.

Lies, that is, intended to harm their recipients, which is the definition of a lie, differentiating it from a fib. (“You look nice today.”) The lies of the Biden era were intended to deprive the citizenry of a legitimate electoral choice. They persisted through four years of enormity, collusion, dereliction, and theft until Biden was deposed and the machinations of his government exposed, and he was transposed from leader of the free world to senile old hack. Just as in tragedy.

There are only so many ways in which our endeavors go so aft aglee.

The preeminent author of our follies, on stage and off, is Hubris. We know we have recognized the price of hubris when, looking on and knowing our deepest selves, we feel fear.

Hypothermia

When the body loses the ability to maintain a core temperature, heat is taken from the extremities and redirected to the heart. One of the extremities beggared is the brain. The victim of hypothermia quite literally loses the ability to reason, and returns to what may be seen as an infant state. HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is reduced to imbecility by removal of his power sources. His behavior is a replication of hypothermia.

As is that of the liberal West.

California flushes away oceans of fresh water to protect the snail darter, blue states denature the police as an act of “social justice,” dooming inner-city populations to crime; legislatures and judiciaries ignore the letter and the spirit of Western law to persecute political opponents; and naturally occurring and abundant sources of energy are banned as being “bad for the environment.”

In all, the Left works (however it is self-described) to dismantle an operative and prosperous social structure. If these were the acts of an individual we would observe that he had lost his mind. As they are the operations of a culture, devotees and beneficiaries may assure individuals that all is proceeding toward some legitimate and worthy goal—that the afflicted not only need not worry, but must not, as it would mean expulsion from the group, whose existence alone spares him the trauma of that self-assessment that must lead to horror.

What has brought about this mania?

It is that same prosperity that gave rise to the Haidan potlatch. Instead of the immolation of our stored winter’s food, the afflicted dismantles the structure, capitalism, which produced it, and to insure against its regeneration, destroys the young who might resurrect it: through indoctrination in schools and, more blatantly, in unsexing them chemically and surgically.

In the logger, lost in the woods and freezing, the body heat is drawn to the last protector of life: the heart. In the dying Leftist West, the power of the sovereign country, the sovereign state, of local control of local matters, receded into the cities, the historical nexus of money, influence, and power. But the cities have died, the last act of the power nexus to silence and criminalize the cries and the objections of the culture’s dissentient members. Exactly as the dying logger’s brain has no strength left to question the reasonability of gashing his flesh.

When I was young, wags said optimists were teaching their children Russian while the pessimists were teaching theirs Chinese. Since September 11, the more present threat to the West has been militant Islam.

Opportunists in government and media have certified the threat through anti-Semitism, and have inevitably described it as a solution: the destruction of the state of Israel as the obvious step to world peace.

The peace sought by the liberals would manifest itself not in the world but in their minds. Rational observation and thought would reveal that the jihadist desire for a world caliphate would not end with the annihilation of several million free people hanging on to a Mediterranean beach. This would no more quell Iranian desire for dominance than the “award” of Czechoslovakia satisfied Hitler in 1939.

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.

In our confusion we long for a hero, someone who will “unite us.” But we already are united, in the commerce and culture—the give-and-take—in which we are involved. The only society in which all are of the same opinion is slavery, which is what “bring us together” advertises.

To the co-opted, those submitting to “pronouns” newspeak, racial preferences, and so on, the suggestion to “come together” is a profound irony, for these proclaimants want to come together only with those who will agree with them—they want everyone else dead. (What else are the Antifa rallies?) A simultaneous meaning of “bring us together” is the wish for someone to “kiss it and make it all well”—an infantilism as blatant as the baby talk of “pronouns.”

The century-old supremacy of American and thus Western capitalism has eroded, as all societies do at some point. Changes in communication, travel, climate, and technology have upended a stable social structure—that is to say, one with a cultural myth of aspiration, achievement, and so peace.

Was the myth false? All myth is a simplification and so may be questioned piecemeal. That does not mean it is useless.

The American Myth operated to produce prosperity and peace for increasing numbers of citizens. Is there a social system in which all are treated equally? Yes. It is slavery. All others prefer individuals and classes on the various bases that support the current myth, and its current exploitations not only through politics, but, through advertising and entertainment.

As a society becomes more diverse, differing forces strive to profit either from exploitation of or opposition to the prevailing myth.*

Irish immigration in the mid-nineteenth century led to the big-city Democratic machines, the Tongs that ruled big-city politics for one hundred years. The mechanism persists in the hegemony of urban machine politics by African Americans.

Jews in Harlem left in the 1940s to be followed by Black immigrants from the South, who warred with the Puerto Ricans and the Italians for control.

Pro-Islamic forces in the Democratic Party, on the contrary, fight to gain control by the imposition of forces foreign in both senses. They do not want to ape the Irish, the Italians, or the Blacks in political aspiration, but to proclaim the entire system “unjust”—that is, troublesome—and hound and indict any who oppose their claim.

They would get no hearing in a strong, healthy society, but ours prior to 2025 was weakening, and an aged and disheartened electorate was like a senile or demented person incapable of making logical decisions, since the steps necessary for return to health seem beyond its strength.

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.

That you or I could not, perhaps, imagine the operation or makeup of a return to constitutional American democracy is understandable. That Trump and his supporters did is an instance of extraordinary intellectual courage.

Decision Height

Aircraft flying under instrument rules land according to what’s called a published approach. The approach plates list waypoints, courses, and the heights at which they must be flown. The final segment of each approach is a descent along the final approach course to the touchdown point.

Each final approach has a decision height, minimum, or missed-approach point, at which the pilot must decide either to land or arrest the descent and climb according to a missed procedure, to a published hold. The missed-approach point, whether described in distance (from the runway) or in altitude, is generally two hundred feet above the runway. If the pilot is still in the soup at that point—if he cannot see the runway, the runway lights, or other specified features—he must “go missed.”

But what if the pilot feels he will break out of the soup “just” below the missed point? It is of course precisely for this situation that the height of the missed point has been designated. For he may be right or he may be wrong about the overcast clearing, but descending below it, he now has no “missed point.” He just has his feelings. Should they prove correct this time, his success has just inaugurated a habit, which will, likely, get him killed.

Pilots are generally conservative, as they know abiding by rules keeps them alive. They learn not to trust their feelings, as the human brain is not created to fly. In the clouds a turn to the right may feel like a turn to the left; a reduction in speed may feel like a descent. And so one must rely on the instruments.

“I think I can get there” has caused many pilots to die due to fuel exhaustion, as has “It’s only a short trip.” (Neither the plane, the terrain, nor gravity knows nor cares about the flight’s duration.)

Flight regulations are the accumulated and distilled wisdom of pilots. Their lingo and symbology exist as the simplest method of conveying safety information. Having mastered them, the information jumps off the page in simplicity.

This is the case with the Constitution. It is the practical wisdom of men of the world, distilled from the combined experiences of self-supporting farmers, merchants, professional men, and soldiers. Its rules exist not to coerce citizens, but to restrict government. They are, in their original form, bright, definite lines, which the government must not cross.

These rules, inevitably, will be violated by both the corrupt and the good-willed who have been gifted with the ability to see a better way. The Constitution also prescribes the remedy for these malfeasances, in rules for election and impeachment. Both the corrupt and the enlightened will, of course, work to subvert even these rules; this possible subversion the good-willed may not recognize, but their corrupt eventual masters do, as the most efficient wholesale way to subjugation of the citizenry.

The purse-snatcher targets the little old lady and avoids the bodybuilder. All rapacity lives by sensing and exploiting weakness, and there is no new thing under the sun. Successful martial strategy is based upon duplicity, allowing one to conserve his resources while forcing his opponent to expend his pointlessly.

The exploitation of Western liberals by Leftists began with the Bolshevik takeover of tsarist Russia and has continued through the communist infiltration of the U.S. government between the wars, the theft of our nuclear technology, the Russian creation and funding of the antiwar movement, its persistence today in wokeism, and its various anti-American and anti-Semitic thuggeries.

The Russian and Chinese charmed and flattered the American Left into hamstringing our military in Vietnam, playing upon a human impulse “to do good,” and be lauded for the courage to “transcend” the laws. See Bill Ayers, a self-confessed terrorist, on being acquitted: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country.”

What might those legitimately opposed to the Vietnam War have done? They might have organized to pass laws demanding that any member of Congress with a draft-age child not serving in the military be impeached. (for example, using the laws written to protect the Constitution). Might that have stopped the war the Left opposed? Probably not, but perhaps. And perhaps a courageous, insistent opposition might have eventually resulted in a successful strategy. At the least such a legal strategy would have honored the Constitution, which is to say the rules that allow us to get along and to accept political disappointment with the analgesic that the fight was fair, and the rules that protect us, have stood.

Politicians were once theoretically required to obey the laws they have sworn to uphold. A contemporary liberal electorate seems to support their own in any case, self-convinced that the laws themselves are insufficient for the doing of good, and if someone or group somewhere is advertised (whether supportably or not) as suffering, the elected must, in conscience, violate any law or custom to correct the situation. (See JFK: “Pay any price, go anywhere, oppose any foe . . .” known as the world’s largest blank check.)

How far has law and custom been shredded? In the assaults on the Constitution (notably the First Amendment), we have transgressed past the restrictions of the Constitution, to an assault on that to which it was a firewall: the Bible.

We all know “male and female created He them,” but the woke insanity allows men to compete in women’s sports. Perhaps many are uninvolved, unconcerned, or in fact in approval. The crossing of the biblical line, however, will harm even those who endorse it, as it weakens the individual’s capacity to reason in opposition to the dictates of the mob. To hold that people are continually born into the wrong sex is debatable as both an abstract or a scientific proposition—to refrain from noting “that’s a man up there on the woman’s swim team” is an act of mob-induced lunacy.

Fair trade and sustainability are come-ons, inducing a buyer to pay more for a product because of its offer of self-righteousness. One is free to pay the freight or not.

Gender neutrality functions similarly, differing only in the offer of nothing at all save self-righteousness, but the request for one’s “pronouns” is a threat. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is just thuggery, allowing the coerced the option of a codependent factitious agreement instead of outrage or shame at compliance. Its beneficiaries receive not only preferment but that self-righteousness without which their enjoyment might be diminished. No one is unaware that he is participating in a farce.

*  *  *

Do you believe in cancer?

The question seems absurd. We all know cancer exists, so what can the question mean?

Do you believe in global warming?

The question is equally absurd if global warming is an irrefutable threat. If so, what difference what the accused believes? He is not asked, “What are you doing to combat global warming?” but rather whether he “believes” in it. For it is not the rising seas that threaten the liberal, but his consciousness, so burdensome that he, like the complicit German, must understand his rage and shame as caused by the false threat and redouble his efforts in its eradication. One might be shocked out of the delusion of another’s benevolence, but no benevolence will shock the convinced from the delusion of another’s depravity.

The Left requires acts—if not of atrocity, then certainly of arrogance, unreason, and imbecility, after commission of which the acolyte is bound as is the mafia’s made man—he has committed a shameful act in order to be trusted. Once in, never out.

To return to the cockpit: Women were late entering the pilot workforce. The first female pilot was hired by a U.S. airline in 1973. It was known early on that women not only could fly but made better pilots than men—that they were easier to train and worked more efficiently as part of a flight crew. The finest noncombat pilots of the Second World War were the WASPs (Women Airforce Service Pilots); American women ferry pilots, who flew everything, everywhere, in any weather; and Russia’s successful battalion of female fighter pilots.

But the American airlines didn’t let women in the cockpit till 1973. Sentient passengers soon recognized that a woman pilot was not only likely as skilled as a male, but possibly more skilled and certainly more determined since she had to fight harder to get there. Now some airlines are mandating a 50 percent intake of female and minority pilot trainees. Supposedly an example of aggressive fairness, this will put passengers in danger. It’s not that women won’t be as good or better than men, or Blacks as good as whites, but that there aren’t at present enough female and minority applicants to fill the airlines’ quotas.

First women had to fight harder, study harder, train harder, and fly better than men to gain a place. Then their positions in the cockpit secured, the playing field was level. Now it’s not that the minorities and women won’t work, study, or train as hard, but that airline personnel will have to give a woman (or others on the preferred list) the benefit of the doubt in a close call dealing with competence.

The situation is not unique; the student-son of an air force general will likely receive a bit more “understanding” at the academy than his nonconnected colleagues. But it is an incalculable danger to extend this kindness to an entire population segment. The designated pilot examiners of the Federal Aviation Administration might not fudge the stats, but the airlines’ instructors certainly will, to the greatest extent consistent with passenger safety. And then just beyond.

Dese Dem Dose

My small South Side Chicago neighborhood gave us Larry Ellison of Oracle; Seymour Hersh of the New York Times; Sherry Lansing, who ran Paramount Pictures; and just over the color line, Shelby Steele and Malcolm X. And the blues, the indigenous music that came up the Mississippi, became and remains the music of the world.

It is, of course, the music of Black Americans, but it is insufficient to think about the adjective. Its creators were Americans, who defined our country to the world.

Chicagoans invented the skyscraper, and architectural geniuses Adler and Sullivan, Holabird and Root, and Frank Lloyd Wright felt the identity of beauty and utility and created what was called the first American city.

Much of their works remain. Burnham and Root’s Monadnock Building still stuns the eye with its grace. Often overlooked as an architectural achievement is our McCormick Place, notable not only for its structural but its political audacity. Built at great cost, the world’s first super convention center was opened in 1960 by Mayor Richard J. Daley, went up in flames in 1967, and was rebuilt. That’s the Chicago way. Take it how you will.

The South Side also gave us the phenomenon of improvisational and stand-up comedy, which are now the entertainments of the world. The Second City and its beneficiaries began as the Compass Players at the University of Chicago. Lord Buckley, court jester to Al Capone, is an historic instance of stand-up.

The transformative American literature of the twentieth century was written of Chicago and/or by Chicagoans: Richart Wright, Willa Cather, Gwendolyn Brooks, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, B. Traven, Theodore Dreiser, Nella Larsen, and Ernest Hemingway. Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur wrote The Front Page, based on their experiences as reporters for the city’s many newspapers, creating the dramatic form of the gang comedy, onstage and in film.

H. L. Mencken crowned Chicago the “Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920. Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, and I wrote plays that, after the endorsement of New York, became transformational American standards.

Other South Side achievements include the modern economics of Thorstein Veblen, Milton Friedman; and, coincidentally, the Atomic Age, whose first chain reaction took place under the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

Modern merchandising began with the Chicago mail-order houses of our Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. They exploited the then-new technologies in postal delivery, just as their descendant innovators used the internet and changed the ways we shop.

The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan. The two greatest sports phenomena of modern times are Michael Jordan and the Chicago Cubs, a team so courteous they waited 108 years to assert their right to a title. The South Side of pioneer aviator Bessie Coleman; Jesse Binga,* the founder of the Black Chicagoan Binga Bank (“Save save save”) of Muddy Waters; of the Club DeLisa, Buddy Guy, Bricktop, the Savoy Ballroom and the Stroll (Black Broadway), today has one of the highest rates of violent crime in America.

Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed, Louisiana’s Huey Long, and Kansas City’s Tom Pendergast machine may have been less colorful than the First Ward antics of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and John “Bathhouse John” Coughlin. Machine politics have always been the engine of our cities. The go-along, get-along worked—for the preferred groups—with the complacency or fear of the excluded, and the approval of beneficiaries.

But machine politics is now national. Mayor Richard J. Daley silenced dissenting City Council members by turning off their microphones, and readers may finish the comparison to the legacy media.

American cities are dying. Chicago’s current marvel is not innovation and prosperity, but murder and crime. The decay of the machine-run cities may or may not be inevitable, but it is arrestable. The citizens and descendants of those who created the American Century can vote for a return to a deserved civic pride and common sense.

And they are doing so. Black and Hispanic Americans voted in 2024 for just such a change. Margaret Thatcher captured the British press by appearing with a broom to sweep off her front stoop.

The imagery, like Trump’s hash-slinging, was marvelous. It meant that a new broom actually may sweep clean, and that which she was cleaning was her home.

Come Smoke a Coca-Cola

I see that the triliteral tag has once again asserted its superiority to reasoned communication. My nephew, like many a victim of his parents, has been diagnosed with something called PDA, “a pattern of behavior in which kids go to extremes to ignore or avoid anything they perceive as a demand,” according to childmind.org.

This, of course, used to be called laziness or, among the overeducated, intransigence, but none of the three descriptions will get the wood chopped.

What kid enjoys going to school? First, it is a demand (who likes them?); second, to the preacculturated child mind, it is a screaming bore. Kids, however, are brilliantly inquisitive. They are drawn to things that offer surprise, excitement, and novelty—the search for and examination of which might bring not only amusement, but the joy of self-direction rather than submission.*

The stereotypical schoolmarm’s “Learn this or get a whippin’” has become “Learn this or be humiliated.” Much the same affront, with less outlay of energy. The carrot was to be called a good little boy or girl. Many found it insufficiently enticing.

The quest for ratification by those the perceptive person suspects are fools is the child’s first foray into hypocrisy. It leads, as all hypocrisy must, into repression—for who would continually indict himself as a lackey or a prig?

The gazintas challenged many (five gazinta twenty four times), but the failure-at-math who knew the earned run average of every major-league pitcher is a staple of schoolyard lore.

To have failed to prepare for the test is the bad dream of the Western child.

The horrifying test, historically, was factual or practical: regurgitate the capital of Prussia, or deal with the two trains leaving Chicago.

Today’s schoolchild is taxed, it seems, neither to recall nor to reason, but to assent. Genius pedants have asserted that the very notion of “the correct answer” is white supremacy, sparing all the drudgery not only of learning, but of teaching. The ruler wielded for correction is long gone, replaced by threats more variously prurient and delectable. I wonder what the schoolchild of today will find horrific in his dreams.

I recall nothing from my grammar school days but boredom, punctuated regularly by shame.

My summer camp experiences, however, were swell. I learned the Lord’s own amount: sailing, canoeing, lifesaving, woodcraft, knots, Morse code, first aid, and so on. I retain the skills a lifetime later and use them regularly recalling the sweet memories of being free and interested rather than bludgeoned and bored.

Both the Boy Scout and YMCA camps were big on campfire songs and those wonderful ghost stories, which always ended with the shock of some counselor got up as the murdered victim or a phantom, appearing from the woodpile and scaring us spitless and delighted.

“Yes, yes, yes,” you will correctly observe. “Good for you.” But there’s more! An observation about the campfire songs:

As I was walking down the street a billboard caught my eye.

The advertising listed there would make you laugh or cry.

The wind and rain had almost washed that old billboard away.

But the advertising pasted there would make the billboard say:

Come smoke a Coca-Cola, drink catsup cigarettes.

See Lillian Russell wrestle with a box of Oysterettes.

The pork and beans will meet at eight to stage a finish fight,

Hear Chauncey DePew speak upon Sapolio tonight.

Now, if I were teaching grade school, I’d help the kids through their gazintas and then teach them this song and ask them to come back tomorrow, having translated as much as they could.

The task introduced:

Anybody here smart? [Some raised hands.] I don’t believe you, and it’s going to go on your permanent record. However, I’ll give you one chance to prove me wrong. For tomorrow: decode this song. And those who didn’t raise their hands, I think you’re probably just modest so, please, you play too.

Kids love code. All the social interactions in the school yard are the transmission of code. History is a code.

An in-depth study reveals that the song is still in the Scout’s campfire repertoire. Lillian Russell (1861–1922) was that era’s most famous actress, which dates the song. The updated Scout version, however, has it as “see Lee and Russell Wrestle,” a pretty good key to history’s inner workings. Some historian, should the West survive, might agonize over the identity of Lee and Russell. And perhaps find his answer here.

Sapolio was a soap known at the turn of the twentieth century as “probably the world’s most advertised product.” “Without Sapolio you waste strength and miss dirt” was one tagline from 1912 via Wikipedia.

The kids-put-on-the-send might also discover that billboard ads were vast sheets of paper pasted one over the other, thus giving rise to the song. Imagine the bloodhound delight of a child who brought back that information.

Chauncey DePew (1834–1928) was an American senator as well as a corporate lawyer for Cornelius Vanderbilt and his New York Central Railroad. And an epigrammatist: “The first step toward getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”

My favorite: “If my friends stop telling lies about the Republicans, I promise to stop telling the truth about the Democrats.”

Later renditions of the song referred to Eleanor Roosevelt and Tony Galento.

Two-Ton Tony was a heavyweight boxer who brought Joe Louis to one knee (momentarily) in 1939. He was known as the Iceman for the profession he had followed previous to the ring. He would deliver twenty-five- to one-hundred-pound blocks of ice to customers, lugging them from the truck to the domicile by tongs.

Later Boy Scout lyrics include “so take your next vacation in your brand-new Frigidaire.” This was the market leader when electric refrigerators replaced the icebox; today’s ubiquitous contraption, the “fridge,” is, I’ll suggest, more a nod to the brand (such as Jello) than to the refrigerator. My grandparents called it the icebox.

The evolution and the vagaries of language have always been my particular delight. Children, being human, have their own interests, these coinciding rarely if at all with the curricula of schools. Daydreaming, then, is a thermodynamically wise expenditure of energy.

Our American education system has been federalized through the Department of Education, its errors, horrors, and omissions propagandized by government tools in the media. Schools, teachers, and educators (in return for their votes) have been awarded the right to preach and cajole as they wish, within the limits of party doctrine, but independent of the needs of the students, the demands of parents, or the requirement of the community for educated citizens.

These governmental awards are essentially letters of marque—charters awarded by state or crown to pirates who in return split their loot with the awarding power.

In the theater, which is my racket, the true artist devotes himself to the requirements of the audience: they need to hear, and to see, and they deserve a simple presentation unfettered by the good ideas of either the actor or the director.

Schoolchildren deserve a similar consideration.

There are various things schoolchildren need to know, they are the three Rs. Having learned to read, there’s little or nothing they can’t learn from a book, or through observation and practice.*

The child asked to decode the Coca-Cola song might not find the assignment provocative. 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.

The Temp Score and the Look Back

The rough cut is the first assemblage of film footage suitable for informed viewing. Viewing, that is, by those sufficiently knowledgeable to realize they are looking at an unfinished project.

We have long been cautioned not to show a child a rug on the loom, and the rough-cut was such a rug. The children, in our case, were the studio executives. Those with no experience of actual moviemaking (the supermajority) watched the rough cut and were disappointed, as it did not “seem like a movie.” (Similarly, back in the old television days, they would be shown a rough cut and were perplexed until the director said, “Wait till you see it with the commercials.”)

To placate the executives, rough cuts were screened with a temporary score. Energy in the cutting room was then diverted from finishing the film to makework to calm the children.

Where was the rough-cut score to come from? It was borrowed from previous films. Soon the executives came to demand a score for every rough cut, and every film borrowed a score from a previous film, which, since the burgeoning of the temp score, had borrowed from a previous film, and now all film scores sound alike. They sound like film scores. Just as actors in mass media are hired, and succeed, based upon their ability to mime emotions recognizable from the performances of other actors.

The actors and directors understand these dumb shows as “natural,” but anyone in real life huffing and scowling or falsely smiling like the folks in movies would be shunned as a fool.*

Now bureaucrats demand from scriptwriters a “look book.” This is a digital or physical paste-up of how the locations described would look in the actual film. It is, in effect, a coloring book, or cartoon quick-start guide.

The film, however, will not look like the look book, which only existed for two reasons: to spare the executive the trauma of imagination, and, perhaps more direly, to allow him to exercise a prerogative—like coming late to a meeting or lying, “I never received your call.”

The temp score and the look book not only ensure that industry consumers need not exercise their imagination, but they are also a binary off/on switch, admitting into the ranks of executives only those with no imagination, or whose imagination is limited only to personal advancement—independent of the worth of the product. (Or, differently, only those who define a product’s worth in its relation to their personal advancement.)

The executives in Los Angeles and Washington are just competitors in bureaucracy. That of the government differs in that it quite literally makes nothing. All the government actually manufactures is propaganda—in effect the temp score and look book, creating the illusion that the consumer (the voter) is actually being presented a rational, legitimate proposition.

Stalin reminded us that any big lie, repeated often enough, will be accepted, as we are all suggestible. The big lie may also be effective through sufficiently wide broadcast. This our human mind also and unconsciously recognizes as probative.

The old big cons moved the mark from one proposition to another, much as the new recruit, having taken the oath, is ordered to take two steps forward. He might bitch that he hadn’t accurately heard the oath, but his movement denies him of the excuse.

The confidence mark’s compliance is assured by maneuvering him from one scam to the next, weakening his resistance by confusing him, and destroying his rational consideration through engendering compliance in addition to greed.

The conman may find an old wallet on the pavement, stuffed with cash, and engage the mark in returning it to the owner for a huge reward. On returning the wallet the supposed owner may say, “You are such honest men, I’d like to actually reward you. Do you have any spare money you can invest for a certain return?”

A populace terrified by prosperity, we see, may be moved from one confected cataclysm to another with ease. For once they’ve surrendered their reason, heterosexual AIDS, global warming, insurrection, masking, or sexual manipulation of children (as broadcast by the same media) are interchangeable, the stampeded populace given its choice of one or all, as between brands of cigarettes, the “choice” creating the illusion of autonomy.

It is impossible to cheat a peasant, and a lead pipe a cinch to take someone who believes in his superior intellect. Just find out what that little rascal eats—flattery, self-esteem, and “belonging”—and reassure him that everybody’s doing it (compare the internet).

It was a compliment of old that so-and-so could “talk a dog off a meat truck.” How this pales before the ability to induce randy teenagers to cut off their genitals.

The Generation of the Desert

John Stuart Mill pointed out that, given two tasks, one for which he will be rewarded according to his performance, and the other in spite of it, the rational man will devote his energies to the first. Poor Richard had it: if you pay for a job halfway done, that’s what you’ll receive. There’s also the old saw in which a schoolteacher is asked why he chose his profession and says, “Three reasons: June, July, and August.”*

The unionized schoolteacher and his apotheosis as the tenured professor are protected from dismissal. Yes, some may perform with decency and application. They are rewarded, however, independent of accomplishment (in the schoolteacher, regardless of their classes’ failures to read or to add), and in the tenured professor, independent of any goal, progress toward which success might be measured. These pedants spend their lives, from start to close, in school. As students they have been rewarded for supplying the right answer, as teachers and professors for demanding it. They have chosen a life of intellectual ease and freedom from financial anxiety in return for educating our children, which undertaking they have updated into forming them. This is rather different from teaching them demonstrable skills, which at this writing most pedants consider beside the point in a world gone wrong.

Why do they think that? They have been taught to think so by their predecessors, who would withhold admittance to their ranks from the heretic.

Certainly, it is more fun to pontificate and rule than to instruct, except for the inspired. And how many of those would submit to years of classes in “education”? No one with talent, which is to say individuality.

Are summers off and lifelong tenure sufficient remuneration? 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.

We all know of the luftmensch, or professional failure—his lifelong incapability of self-support and his jolly bag of excuses. You or I may have acted similarly in some long-gone time. This person, in a sphere demanding self-support, passes its burden onto others. Is he incapable, unwilling, congenitally deficient? Who can know. We, when honest, know in our own case, and have perhaps experienced shame, when our self-repeated tale grows thin through use. But there are those who will not mend, whatever the (unknowable) cause, or the proffered or implied excuse.

A working stiff, you or I, might wonder at their imagined burden of anxiety, but it is likely that its absence is one of their positions’ perquisites. The freeloader, habitual failure, or preternaturally unlucky chap enjoys the profession he’s chosen. You know him, and I do too—impersonating pathos, incomprehension, remorse, and bonhomie, etc., to extract a living. But he is free of the middle-class work of preparation, resolution, self-criticism, and honest evaluation.

*  *  *

Since the teacher cannot be fired, he has no need to sweat or worry about his lesson plan, his students’ performance, or his year-end evaluation. Who would remove him, thus losing his dues and his vote? No one.

The absence of accountability to community standards, historically enjoyed as a reduced workload, has matured predictably into the assumption of social control of the young and their indoctrination in the delights of the various exemptions enjoyed by their teachers. I recall the beloved last-day-of-school chant: “School’s out, school’s out. Teachers let the monkeys out!”

In 1883, Teddy Roosevelt addressed the corruption of the patronage system by championing the Civil Service Reform Act. But the corruptions of the old pay-to-play awards of sinecures and that of the civil service are and inevitably must be one, for they are both administered by human beings.

Before the First World War, many young women and men, fresh out of high school or grade school, took a first job teaching. The generation that they taught to read and write and add, and who they graduated and so chose, went on to high school chemistry and trigonometry with the object of earning a living. Today’s urban victims of that which was once education learn little other than that the system is corrupt and that it is called Western civilization. But they might more accurately—if with more difficulty—perceive it is “education,” and that their instructors are acting out a charade.

I have decades of experience in a particular form of education: rehearsing a play. Most directors will elide over a wrongly or incompletely rehearsed scene or beat. But there is, actually, neither getting on with, nor coming back to it. For it is not that the mistake will be corrected, but that it will be internalized as “the way we rehearse this play.”

The rehearsing actors are not actually imbibing instructions as to the meaning of the play—they understood it when they first read it—but the communal attitude about its presentation. If such is approximation and hypocrisy, the attentive actors will legitimately start supplying that pretense and self-protection they have just learned is the order of the day. There is no such thing as “fixing it later.”*

Children who had turned savage stormed a New York City school hallway in search of a teacher who had attended a pro-Israel rally. Few who’ve seen the video could doubt that had they broken past the locked door they would have harmed and might have killed her.

What can be done with these criminal children? They could and should (but will not) be prosecuted for riot, unlawful assemblage, and putting others in fear of mortal harm. That is the social answer: to demand they be treated as adults, and that the law be enforced.

But what might be done to reclaim and reintegrate them into society as reasonable citizens? Nothing. They are a lost generation. Or, as the Torah says, “The generation of the Desert.” But those young children still in school can be saved, and saved quite easily, and on the instant: by taking them out of school.

Intersectionality

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)

Delusion may be communicated just like any physical disease. Individuals induced to agree to foolishness, blasphemy, or evil may think their assent merely utilitarian and meaningless. Over time, however, they must come to resent and then to loathe those who are not suborned, embracing as their reason the mass opinion that these are evil. “Evil,” here, means “beyond consideration.”

Individuals suggesting views differing from those of the mass are told, “Oh, come on,” “You can’t mean it,” and so on. These phrases may be understood as some sort of debate, but they are actually warnings to the dissentient.

“You can’t mean it” may seem to indicate “I can’t credit your foolishness” but actually is the warning: “Didn’t you know you are debarred from uttering blasphemy? “Can’t,” here, meaning “not allowed.” “You can’t mean it” is the display of the tripwire between tolerant (if limited) discourse and dissolution of the social contract.

To “read someone the riot act” has come to mean “bawl someone out.” Originally it was the legal warning proclaiming that an assembly was unlawful and that, having heard the warning, those offenders who did not disperse would be killed. See also the Inquisition, which preliminary to interrogation would “show the accused the rack.” Those threatened with torture or death were given the opportunity to comply or assent. They were not, however additionally forced to actually agree with the positions of their opponents.

Today’s conservative miscreants (formerly understood as rational human beings holding political opinions with which others might disagree) are not even offered the option by the woke, but are blacklisted or otherwise savaged. No recantation will expunge the original affront.

The brownshirts of Antifa exist to silence not opposition, but reason. The Glendale, California, school board was upbraided by local taxpaying parents for sexual indoctrination of their schoolchildren. Hooded, masked Antifa thugs appeared, became rambunctious, and were confronted by outraged community parents. “Antifa” means or meant “antifascist.” Putting to one side Antifa’s behavior as fascist thugs, what was their brief to disrupt a school board meeting about sexual curricula? The Leftist media characterized the contretemps as brutishness by right-wing antigay parents. But who questioned the incongruity of Antifa’s cross-decking itself to a school board meeting?

“Intersectionality” is a word meaning “all of us want all of you dead.” “All of you” may be identified as “any and all who do not accept and comply with any and all of our warnings,” and “all of us” as “those who’d like to share the spoils.”

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. And today’s nonliberal is catechized upon subjects as otherwise unrelated as climate, vaccination, sexuality, and political opinion, and dared to dissent. To an irrational mind these matters are unconnected. To the panicked they exist, connected beyond rational consideration as protestations of Faith. They are today’s version of the 39 Articles: a checklist of those propositions to which the applicant is required to assent or be branded a heretic. (Note, these are supposedly assertions of belief, but as belief cannot be tested, they are merely assertions of a willingness to proclaim belief.)

The contemporary liberal no more “believes” that the earth is burning than the Church of England communicant actually “believes” in predestination or purgatory. Put differently, the act of will required was the endorsement not of various assertions about Christ, but about the meaning of “belief.”

For to say that one believes the world is burning because of man’s (sinful) use of fossil fuels is an act qualitatively different from the understanding that if one does not pay one’s parking tickets his car will be towed.

Belief, then, may mean two altogether different things; the belief in the metaphysical may be unsupportable folly, or indeed evil; or it may function to induce to good works and self-restraint. An example of the first is that children are “assigned” a sex at birth, of the second, Christ’s Resurrection.

In the old days, even the second, irrational-because-metaphysical religious belief sometimes functioned through the inculcation of fear. The horror of eternal damnation seems to us now, in an irreligious, antireligious age, an indictment of our forebears’ credulity. A cost-benefit analysis, however, might suggest that the proclamation of a belief in hell was, operatively, also the entrance ticket to a congregation that was the complete community. Absent such inclusion, one would be left to starve in the cold, be eaten by wolves, or in fact, during various inquisitions, be destroyed by the very religious power preaching benevolence.

How much safer, then, to profess a belief in hell and its physical manifestation: Jews, witches, or today, angry terrorist parents—and, having professed belief, possibly in opposition to one’s reason, to understand a reluctance to question it as “Faith.”

Who has ever returned to tell us about heaven? St. John himself says that nobody’s been there, save the Savior. The synoptic gospels recount that Christ spoke of the spiritual realm being the fulfillment of God’s will on earth.

How, then, did we acquire the notion of sheep, clouds, white robes, and harps?

Things accrete. A ship acquires barnacles on its journeys, and a family acquires traditions, each new generation weeding, adding, and endorsing its particular aperçus as “the now-approved version”—all perquisites of growth. (Each generation, for example, believes it has discovered not only sex but sexual license.)

But what of the fleecy-clouds vision of heaven? Many believe it good to accept it, and why shouldn’t they? The roulette player believes in his system, which the most basic understanding of arithmetic will disprove; the soldier believes (sometimes with justification) that his service is for the greater good of his country and its citizens. But who would like to spend eternity sitting on a cloud, surrounded by sheep?

What might eternal bliss actually mean other than the eradication of desire, thus of consciousness, personality, and the self? Eastern mystics understand this as satori or nirvana, the Hindus as the absolute cessation of our unfortunate, continual rebirth into this world of lies.

The Eastern faiths, it seems, are not burdened with the “Better watch out, better not cry” of Christians but believe each individual is free to work out his own cycle of incarnations. This, in contradistinction to predestination, puts the ball back in the home court in a way, curiously less mystical than that of Christianity and closer to the more mundane “You get what you pay for.”

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. The venue, in the political case, is the halls of Congress. There the spirit of collegial goodwill holds sway, while the quondam opponents unite in looting the populace as a whole.

See Congress voting themselves exemptions from their supposedly universal panacea, Obamacare, fighting inflation by awarding themselves salary increases, allowing members to trade on inside stock information that would get the unfrocked sent to the slammer, and so on.

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

What of Donald Trump? He was horrendously prosecuted, twice impeached, raided, indicted, arrested, sued, libeled, slandered, indicted, convicted, and shot for pointing out the king’s nakedness. The assassination attempt was (perhaps) the work of a volunteer, the conviction the final, undeniable announcement by the Left that under its rule, America will be a political police state. It is to this that the wise liberal must assent: take it or leave it.

*  *  *

Napoleon wrote, “A king does not exist in nature; he exists only in civilization. There cannot be a naked king—he is only a king when he is dressed.” Ceremonial trappings evolve to create an impression of power. Grenadiers wore two-foot shakos to look taller. A crown is just a metal hat. Outside the theater, the acceptance of stagecraft as reality is delusion and the demand of unquestioned acceptance is attempted thought control.

Anything presented in a theatrical medium is a fable. This is less a function of the medium than it is of our biddability. We long to hear stories, since they and they alone still our unquenchable hunger to understand reality.

We can abstract the throughline of stories and present them to our children at bedtime with no diminution of their strength. Their encapsulation and broadcast in the media is entertainment and our response to entertainment is relaxation of our reason.

There is little difference between P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth-century fairground presentation of the Real Fijian Mermaid and our contemporary display of the lusae naturae of the other side’s political villains. The tales of Trump’s multifarious perfidies are one with the atrocity stories of the pirate Teach, aka Blackbeard.

The pirates, we know, loved to rape, torture, and kill—simple, comprehensible human urges. The mustachioed villain of melodrama simply enjoyed tying young girls to a railroad track, and no one knew why. One might have said, “If you seek a relationship, wouldn’t it be simpler to bring the young lady flowers, or to buy her a soda?” But no, we understood that the railroad villain was evil devoid of ulterior motive—had there been a motive discernable the melodrama would have been drama—which is more difficult to write.*

Trump is, to the Left, Blackbeard—greedy and lecherous—while Biden and Obama, to the Right, are incomprehensible, smiling villains, seeking nothing other than tying our mutual home in front of the locomotive.

Politicians resort to the media as purveyors (and we below do as consumers) of this entertainment. This is the good, clean, traditional fun of politics, but, in the age of mass communication, it has progressed from a smorgasbord of opinions catering to the ineradicable human needs both to hate, and to believe in a zero-sum game, like thumb-wrestling: whoever gains control, the winner, by virtue of his ability to eradicate dissent.

“The Poor Are Always with Us” Explained

Legislation is never needed to guide the man with vision. But it should protect that vast majority which is without it.

—Frederick Philip Grove, A Search for America (1927)

Philip Grove (born Grave) was a European, translated or escaped to Canada around World War I. He’d gotten into a scrape or two over there and wanted to start anew. The book’s autobiographical hero starts straight at the bottom as dishwasher, hawker, and so on, and we follow him through his physical hardships into the philosophic.

It’s the same story as Martin Eden and Down and Out in Paris and London: life as one of the lowly. We may add Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, and The Way of All Flesh.

The Fairy Godmother in Disney’s Cinderella suggests this: put ’em together and what have you got, Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.* The Godmother’s suggested ingredients, salacapoola and munchacaroolala, are nonsense words, so the recipe’s result is predictably unfulfilling. But the song is catchy, and we may smile and nod along as, if we weren’t inclined to do so, we wouldn’t have watched the dumb movie. This is the essence of liberalism: it makes us feel good because we’ve paid for it.

The Left prospers by exploiting the liberals’ enjoyment of a fantasy.

Grove was a good and persuasive writer. But his aperçu above is one with that of the Fairy Godmother. It is fulfilling, as it suggests to the hearer a supernatural power. The Godmother tells us the one simple rule for transforming a pumpkin into a coach, and Grove and the liberals, an equivalent and obvious solution to poverty and exploitation.

But on rereading we may see Grove’s epigram as an oxymoron. For if the vast majority is without vision, how will reasonable protection for the poor be legislated? How will the visionless vote, other than for their interests (financial in the lower classes of the Left; emotional in the upper) as presented to them (and by whom)?

The legislators themselves, in their vast majority, must be as bereft of irreducible reason as the rest of us—or, if possessed of it, must reasonably support only those projects that keep them in office to steal or to do good, as each understands his position. (The result will be the same, for if motivated by self-interest, how few would “do good”—however they understand it—if it were likely to make them unelectable, and, so, unable to do more “good”?)

For decades conservatives have complained to each other, “Why if we (our side) did what they are doing? (Think the various peccadilloes of the Clintons, the scandals of the Bidens, the murder of Jeffrey Epstein, the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the imprisonment of demonstrators, and so on.) Lately, conservative commentators and voters have stopped doing so, just as we some time ago stopped requesting actual debate.

The fat has located the fire, and in the monolithic one-party state the supposed hand on the tiller has become the unashamed hand in the till. The self-seeking politicians, the thieves, and the incendiaries are devoted to their One Big Notion—one-party rule of the country—and advancement within the party can only come from obedience.

In previous, less monolithic times, ideologue legislatures might occasionally withhold this or that vote for another’s pork, but would have to compromise at least now and then. The party out of office then always had the right to indict the malevolent operations of the current administration, or to threaten to do so in exchange for this or that concession or kickback, as it was understood that at halftime the positions on the field would change.

But if there is only one party, neither those out of office nor those currently secure can oppose the direction of the majority leader, no more than can the householder stand up to the ward boss. He only gets his street cleaned if he goes along with the gag.

Grove wrote before the accretion that is called the “welfare state.” He had not seen, nor could he imagine, the inevitable progression of temporary humanitarian aid into state control.

The New Deal’s stopgap measures of unemployment, Social Security, and welfare created a whole new and productive field for political exploitation. Made permanent and abetted by Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, welfare, affirmative action, and so on, they formed a perennial bloc of dependent voters.

Who among us wouldn’t pick up a lost roll of bills on the sidewalk? Some, yes, might turn the roll into the cops, but how rare the individual who wouldn’t (however guiltily) hope that, after a year, and no owner coming forth, he would inherit the unearned swag?

With the convictions of President Trump, the Democratic Party announced its intent to implement a final transmogrification into the state. Its rulers no longer had to exercise control through various awards (bribes), however expected. For when the state is the only game in town, it need only increase the cost of noncompliance—which is to say, of dissent. This cost, initially social censure, has progressed into fiscal loss (see all those fired or blacklisted for heresy; I know some of them, and you do too), and unchecked has already become incarceration (see the January 6 onlookers), as the Left gropes its way back toward the rack.

The one-party welfare state has failed and so must silence dissent in order to maintain its rule. Furthermore, it must disincentivize not only dissent but also creativity and invention, the concomitants of individuality. The city of Seattle has closed its public schools for the gifted, citing their disproportionate numbers of Asians and whites; but operationally, the closure benefits no one but a system that can exist through stilling current dissent but can only thrive generationally by stifling intelligence.

The vast majority are without vision. They, and you and I, are entitled to protection from the exploitation of the lack,* that same protection without which vision and creation are impossible. That protection is outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—commitment to which is the political expression of that humanistic philosophy once known as liberalism.

If the poor are entitled to protection from their own biddability someone or some organization must protect them. Who would that be?

Captain Frederick Marryat (A Diary in America, 1834) wrote that America’s fall will come about with the death of its founding aristocracy. He cited Washington, Jefferson, and the Tidewater planters as that group of nobles whose dedication to the philosophical ideal would never again be attained by the country’s benefactors.

As the third generation lives in shirtsleeves, the twelfth generation, inheritors of American wealth and freedom, is content to place wealth, preferment, and power before the (to them) outmoded notions of patriotism and religion.

Some take their ambition at one remove: feeling themselves incapable of critical or material service, they vote for those presenting themselves as representatives of the disenfranchised. That the Bolsheviks were nothing but a bunch of thugs was clear to all the citizen-victims of their states. It was unknown or unacknowledged in the West, and in fact, celebrated by those in inherited freedom who profited by self-identifying as heroes of a social melodrama.

But they, the Westerners who had “seen the future and it works” (Lincoln Steffens, 1919, of Soviet Russia), sacrificed nothing in their subscription to a property-free world. They gained a fellowship with the like-minded and the license to despise the unconvinced. Those communists “under direction” enjoyed participation in what finally was a cryptosexual charade of bondage.

Movie folk a generation older than I were called to Washington to grovel before the House Un-American Activities Committee to lie (as did the actual communist agents, among them Alger Hiss*) or to refuse to cooperate and so go to jail. In those 1950s there was, coincidentally, a real threat to the West. The USSR sought world domination. They did not, however, weaponize Hollywood to include pro-Soviet propaganda. Who would have paid to watch it? But today Hollywood has indeed been pressed into the service of political indoctrination. Films submitted for the Oscars must complete and fulfill a list of political requirements: number of minorities, homosexuals, women, transsexuals, and so on.

The 1950s threat of communism was real, that of its infiltration into film pabulum ludicrous. Today’s new totalitarianism is response to no danger at all; it is the threat. To what? To that free expression that alone can confront nascent tyranny, from whatever direction it arises.

Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee hounded Hollywood gag writers but wouldn’t touch the powerful communists in the State Department. Today’s new totalitarians proclaim that “women don’t lie” (#MeToo) and that Blacks can’t be racist (#BlackLivesMatter).

*  *  *

Thugs, at first ideological and then if unchecked inevitably physically violent, cast themselves as free to shout fire not only in a crowded theater, but also in the schools and universities, creating a flight toward safety, which they then provide in their quality of the right-thinking anointed. Theatergoers can be panicked as they have suspended their reason for two hours to see a story. Those stuck on the internet have sacrificed their disbelief similarly.

If someone told you twenty years ago that people are regularly born into the wrong sex and must alter themselves surgically, you would think them deranged. What has changed?

Now legislatures, created to still our human spasms of insanity, have hopped on board to criminalize refusal to assert delusion. Why? To stay in office, of course, but to do so in order to do what—to serve their constituents according to their oaths to defend the Constitution? Observably not. Why, then, would a rational citizen vote for them? He would not. He has suspended his reason in order to enjoy the benefits of a delusion: fellowship and the promise of exemption from terrorism.

But the gays for Hamas would be killed in Hamas-controlled territory, and the feminists doing so would be killed, as would any Westerners. What, then, are the enlightened voting for? For representatives offering them the thrill of social protest. If this isn’t entertainment, I miss my guess. But it is a costly entertainment.

There is a universal precedent in this behavior. It is hypochondria. Here the imaginary invalid extorts care, sympathy, and various other desired benefits from those he feels under obligation for its supply.

The neurasthenic or sufferer from vague ills does not practice his trick in a crowd, but only among those he knows or suspects are biddable. Here he is like any other confidence man—he does not waste his time pitting his skills against random opponents, but only on marks likely to succumb at the lowest cost in energy or time.

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 Zero Point

A Jewish newcomer to the city visits a synagogue. When the Torah is read, various congregants are honored by being summoned to the Bimah (dais). Each one, passing up the aisle, stoops halfway up, squats for three paces, then straightens and continues walking. After the service the newcomer asks an old congregant why the people were stooping. The man thinks a moment, then says, “That’s where we had the heating duct in the old synagogue.”

This explains not only the development from the Sermon on the Mount to the Vatican, but the etiology of all human organization.

*  *  *

The twentieth century was the era of mass thought. For the first time, humanity, in the West, was conceived of as one body. That body was understood as subject to the same laws, mastery of which would allow for the control—call it betterment, or subjugation—of human nature.

Fascism and its evolvement into wokeism are dictatorial, but like communism elicits the aid of the susceptible—the fellow traveler—through an appeal to reason. Poverty and injustice exist, today’s fascist explains, adding that the obvious cure is equality. That the cure is obvious is an appeal to reason, an appeal so flattering that the new adherent will overlook the argument is not reasonable at all—it’s just the Procrustean bed: it will fit the recumbent perfectly, as in if the bed is too short, his legs will be amputated; if it’s too long, he’ll be stretched on the rack. Everyone will in effect be happy if and when we all are forced to be the same.

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.*

My particular racket was warped by that fantasy called Method acting. It was spread in America by a group deep-dyed not only in the jargon of communism but also in that of psychoanalysis.

The Method was communistic, as it treated the actor’s performance as a product of adherence to doctrine, which, when practiced, would make any neophyte great. The doctrine was that of the blank slate, and like that would “work” on anyone as long as he embraced the doctrine of the blank slate. Its priests were revered as they held out to the masses the timeless hope of the talentless to create art.*

The adherent’s performances in the studio or, rarely—as most students spent their lives unemployed—on the stage were critiqued by the teachers and failure was attributed to insufficient study. This study had to take place under the tutelage of the anointed (where, previously, acting was learned—as it only can be learned—onstage, in front of a paying (unsuborned) audience.

The Method was a kissing cousin of psychoanalysis—that lay rendition of religious practice, as Santa Claus is a Disneyfication of the myth of Christ.

Method adherents in the beginning were all involved in analysis and therapy. These, like the study groups of communism, found their happy extension in the interminable character dissection of the Method. It was, if I may, the meeting after the meeting.

Both psychiatry and communism suggested the existence of latent wisdom, which, when revealed and recognized, will change the world. The “Method actors” understood that their adherence to doctrine would improve their performances and thus their careers.

I put “Method actors” in quotes since there is no such thing as “The Method.” 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. Some few with talent went on to stardom—they were chosen (particularly by the Actors Studio) through a long process of auditions; their subsequent careers proved the efficacy not of the technique but of the audition process.

*  *  *

Human beings have always known that things heavier than air could fly. They, themselves, though it seemed, were barred because of the absence of power. Birds flew powered by their muscles, but our weight-to-power ratio was insufficient to get us off the ground.

The nineteenth-century inventions of steam and then internal combustion offered the possibility of powered flight. But most early attempts were ornithopters.

These machines imitated the birds and flapped mechanical wings. The inventors embraced the new power sources but they misunderstood the problem.

The Wright brothers spent years watching birds and noted what all had observed but overlooked: that after taking off, birds seldom flap their wings, and when they do, they are searching for air currents. It was the air currents, the Wrights observed, that enabled the birds to fly. Riding the currents gave the birds lift, which could be traded for distance or speed.

So the Wrights’ design was a glider, which used a power source to create its own air current:* the propeller provided the airflow, which provided the lift.

The Method folk were pedagogues. I can’t call them hucksters, since they believed in their technique. On the other hand, why not, as it was useful, if not for improving the stage, for bringing them adepts whose devotion (rather than their performance) validated the teachers’ beliefs. Like the ornithopterists, however, the Method folks were looking at the wrong thing. They were watching the actors. They should have been watching the audience.

The students matured (or aged) in the classroom, where approval came not from the folks who paid, but from the fiat of authority whom the students had paid for the right to participate in the pageant. But the audience didn’t care, and the soft credits of studio approval weren’t redeemable upon the actual stage.

*  *  *

The showman’s question has always been, What does the audience want? The answer, in entertainment or its virgin sister, drama, is that they want to hear a story. Actual training in acting, then, would consist in learning how to tell a story.

As we watch the audience we see that they require the story be told simply. If it is wandering or discursive, they lose interest. Finita la commedia. A contemporary heresy is the “talk back.” Here, after the show, the audience, the cast, and director get together; the first to tell what they thought and the latter to say what they meant. It is the critique of the studio, where actual entertaining performance is dismissed as inferior to the representation of recognizable doctrine. The phenomenon, of course, is not limited to the theater. It is part of the current—and tragically successful—bid for hegemony by pedants, the wet dream of the schoolmarm.

The bad nun with the ruler has emerged from myth onto the public stage, bringing order to the classroom through humiliation, punishment, and threat of dismissal, and the Western political world has been fairly completely transformed into a classroom—powerless children free only to court favor, or to risk the wrath of power. (Who was not terrified by “This is going on your permanent record”?)

The Methodites were watching the wrong thing, of financial necessity, for if they were dependent on the favor of the audience, they’d be out of a job. The teachers could only eat through exploiting the actors.

Far across the pond, however, a group of twentieth-century artists kept their eye upon the rail. The early Soviet filmmakers had the added benefit of the hand upon the throttle. Film and equipment were scarce after the Russian Revolution. The filmmakers used their time to wonder about the nature of their love. They loved film. And, since they could not produce, they theorized. Like the Wrights, they returned to the most basic fact. In aviation, birds; in film, the audience.

The Russians took themselves for the subject and asked why, in films they watched, this worked and that did not—the question, to the pedant, is subjective, but to an audience member or an honest observer, it is incontrovertible. “At such a point, they went to sleep.”*

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.

The Russians were invaluable to me as a film director.* They pointed out the worth of the zero point.

A play benefits from an intermission. All young directors want to improve an evening by doing away with the intermission. (Other directorial aperçus are limited to “do it in street clothes,” “on a bare stage,” “in a different period,” or “changing the gender of the roles.” All these are moot, as the audience cares as little of these as for changing the hat of the campfire storyteller.) But the audience benefits from an intermission. They are allowed a chance to wonder and prognosticate the progress of the next act. The actual dramatist recognizes this as a great benefit, since, if he possesses skill, he can use their prognostications to mislead them. (“Using the mind to defeat itself,” as Ricky Jay said of magic.)

If the dramatist accepts the wisdom of the interval, he, reasoning backward, would conclude that his great task must be to send them out into the lobby second-guessing about the next act but coming to the wrong conclusion. This, of course, requires skill, and it is this skill that, since it is the requirement of the audience, must be that of the dramatist.

(What about dialogue? We enjoy Greek tragedy, Ibsen, Schiller, and Molière in translation.)

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).

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. 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.*

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 antagonists onstage speak, each, convincingly, in a way calculated to influence the other, the audience pays attention. When the dialogue is written well and the characters speak only those words likely to achieve their desired outcome, the audience will listen as intently as to gossip, or an overheard marital spat. Those so absorbed will lose consciousness of themselves and their rational preoccupations. They will, that is, “be entertained.”

A hack dramatist can have his characters proclaim positions and so appeal to audience members’ sympathies, but having heard the positions proclaimed, they will have no further interest in the interchange and will listen along only for political—that is, conscious—reasons. They have been turned into the choir being preached to, willing to suppress their boredom in return for the compliment.

No one goes in to ask for a raise by beginning with “I want more money, and you are richer than I.” “But, don’t you see that X are people too?” is similarly fatuous if presented as drama. It is not drama but rather propaganda, for there can be no drama if both antagonists stand for straw men representing the author’s political ideas. Then, though we may jut out our jaws in sympathy or outrage, we are no longer entertained by a play, but witnesses to a responsive reading.

On the other hand, if the curtain rises and the boss says, “Come in, sit down,” and the employee responds, “I saw a very expensive car today,” we are likely to listen; for the employee (author) has just engaged the boss’s—and the audience’s—curiosity. We now want to know what happens next. This is rather different from wondering if the dramatist can somehow craft a novel way to interest us in a predictable presentation (the same problem as that of the pornographer).

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?” But we were not ignorant of that, so that response, while laudable, is uninteresting).

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. (They also may be immobilized through threat: that is, if they have paid to sit through a political exercise the rejection of which might redound to their discomfiture.)

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.

Like all film and television of whatever supposed identity, 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.” We have been induced to suspend our disbelief. Because we are fools? No, because we are human, and love to hear stories.

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.

Responsible journalists understand the power to sway readers and viewers with the assurance that “this actually happened.” But though most journalists on the left are responsible, they are responding not to the canon of ethics, nor to their conscience, but to the demands of their employers. Do they come to “believe” in these demands? They must, since to obey while doubting would expose them to self-loathing. The suppressed hypocrisy, however, still may exist sub rosa in the co-opted. This, fortunately for them, is easily discharged by imputing the discomfort to those the journalist has libeled.

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.

Both these cultural icons are lies. They present an incomprehensible evil as unfortunate, but comprehensible. They are an anodyne, hypocritically celebrating human goodness in the least appropriate of places: 1) on stage and film, and 2) regarding the slaughter of human beings.

On October 25, 2023, a man murdered eighteen people in Maine. The media, right and left, showed videos of him committing the acts. Yet he was identified by name as the alleged, suspected, or alleged-suspected shooter.

There is no allegation or suspicion about his acts he committed them on video. That the adjectives are a legal protection for the networks is false—law enforcement is constrained to withhold judgment about guilt, which is reserved for a jury. But the mush-mouthed verbiage leached into reporting has degraded not only the capacity to tell, but to hear a simple story.

Similarly, news outlets fill dead airspace in “an unfolding story” by conjectures about “what gave rise to the murderer’s behavior.” First, how could one know? More importantly, why should one care? One should not. And the conjectural filler feeds an understandable but unhealthy interest in the aberrant.

The attraction to the phrase, “To understand all is to pardon all,” is revealed by its inversion. No one can understand “all,” but anyone can claim omniscience if he will claim to pardon all. But the sanguine do-gooder, being, finally, human, will not pardon those enormities he has actually suffered, reserving his compassion for the perpetrators of crimes by which he is not affected. He mouths compassion, that is, for criminals in gratitude, as they’ve permitted him to think himself omniscient, thus, a god.

The O. J. Simpson farce of a trial was an exercise in self-aggrandizement on the part of his defenders. That being adjudicated was not his guilt, but their latitude in the destruction of the judicial system. Thirty years on, the permitted jollity has progressed to adoration of license, the murderer of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, applauded as a culture hero.

As with the phrase above, we may substitute one equal term with another, and note Elizabeth Warren’s (a sitting US senator) proclamation that the murder of Brian Thompson is an appropriate response to the denial of healthcare: If so, we might let the punishment fit the crime by denying convicted murderers healthcare. Or, in the case of mere misdemeanor, a reduction in coverage.

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.

Woody Allen and the IDF

Marilyn Monroe was one of the screen’s great clowns. Her shtick, though tagged as sexual or provocative, was actually an affectionate sendup of sexuality.

Woody Allen’s screen persona was also that of a clown, mocking the stereotype of Jewish passivity. In all his films he is bumbling, physically inept, and out of phase in a (largely) Christian world. But he always gets the girl.

Just as Marilyn, for all her charming doofishness, always gets the guy she wants.

These are ancient stereotypes—Woody is the schlemiel of Ashkenazi Jews, amended here only by his eventual sexual triumphs. He may bumble his way through life, but he can laugh any woman into bed. Psychoanalytically, he asserts his masculine superiority to the supposedly more macho Christians he moves among.

The stories of Chelm, the city of fools in Ashkenazi folklore, mocked Jewish intramural foolishness. Mythic encounters with the goyim left the Jews baffled by their incomprehensible, dull, or doltish ways, but generally a Jew came off the winner in most contests—if only in his superior understanding of the situation.

Segregation and the Jim Crow South knew the crime of reckless eyeballing, the very suspicion of which put a Black man at risk of his life (see Emmett Till). The folklore of the Old South, of course, contained innumerable instances of Black contempt for white stupidity and (variously modified) references to revenge.

“The Blue Tail Fly” was a minstrel song of the mid-nineteenth century, repopularized at the beginning of the folk music era by Burl Ives. Ostensibly about the death of the master, thrown by a horse, bitten by the fly, and the singer/slave’s stoical reaction: “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care / Da Massa’s gone away.” The slave’s reaction, however, is clearly ironic, as it was he who killed his oppressor. Just as Woody gets the best of the goyish world in which he is sentenced to move, by getting, not only the girl but the youngest and prettiest of the Christian girls—available to him, but not to their coreligionaries, who 1) (in the film) want wit; and 2) (in life) are not rich and famous.

Not long ago, this writer, in his waning seventies, was discussing etymology with a Jewish coeval. (Take that, Iowa Writers Workshop.) We were reminiscing about the turbulent sixties and he mentioned Rizla+ rice paper—then used, I was told, to roll “joints.” “Yes,” I said, “a most interesting product name. It was composed of riz, French for rice (being rice paper), the la, the definitive article in French, and the symbol of a modified Jerusalem cross, or Croix patée.”

He said, yes, he knew the whole thing, but the brand was pronounced, in toto, “RizlaCrosse.”

“No, no,” I responded, “La Crosse had nothing to do with La Croix.” The word, in French, signified a shepherd’s crook. That form was adapted by Native Americans into the game so beloved of the boarding schools.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “I attended such a school, and, of insufficient eye-hand coordination, was assigned to row on the third-string school team, but . . .”

He continued but he had no need to do so, as I recognized from his tone the upcoming disclaimer.

I took French for six years, but when I got to Paris, found . . .

I’ve never been able to digest ____.

I’m Jewish, but I’m not that Jewish.

These are our beloved admissions of a lack or gentle failure interesting to ourselves as proof of our curious and heartwarming (but not culpable) passivity: the last, an assertion of our lack of intent to compete with those we acknowledge as our betters.

My friend continued that he had been placed in a boat or punt with the ne’er-do-wells and dolts, and told to row. The boat could not be made to go straight, and they all ended up in the drink.

Campers, firefighters, police, aviators, sailors, climbers, and others involved with actual danger tell anecdotes about their ineptitude or salvation by chance. The stories are accepted by those similarly familiar with danger and effort as homage to their final inferiority to fate—and to the dangers of inattention. But the Jewish tale of physical ineptitude, told as an entre-nous delight, is self-castigation.

The Jew here doesn’t get the girl, he doesn’t get over on the goyim, and there is no humor in it, unless one wants to misname the masochistic indictment as funny. It’s never funny. It is the offer of commonality with the somehow impaired.

Anyone can learn to use a hammer, to master basic carpentry, row a boat, or use a firearm. Basic skills are no respecters of race or sex—and if a man mocked a woman for some genetic inability to perform them, he would rightly be censured as loathsome.

The “I don’t even know how to use a screwdriver” meme of twentieth-century diaspora Jews is a bid for group inclusion. It is shared as the reminder that safety demands passivity. It comes at a horrendous price: the Jew professing passivity invites and encourages attack.

A passive-aggressive individual portrays inability and submission in order to exercise control. The Jew, alone among minorities, is self-denied even this (unfortunately effective) tool. He actually believes he is powerless against the wider culture in which he is enmeshed, and strives to appease it through a proclamation, first of his powerlessness, and, latterly, of his guilt—a last sick legacy of that still calling itself “liberalism.”

The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and the state of Israel itself are a challenge not merely to the acculturated Jew’s self-image, but also to his worldview. His potential for safety, historically, for the two thousand years prior to 1948, has consisted in passivity and anonymity. It’s a wrench for him to forgo the notional protections he has enjoyed and to recognize them as merely fortuitous, when they weren’t imaginary.

Such traumatic reappraisal is most usually undergone only by those who have hit bottom. But the horror of October 7, 2023, did not bring Western liberal Jews to that state, but only further into the service of adversaries who sided with the assassins, and call it liberalism.

On Sunday, June 23, 2024, Jews on their way to a meeting at a shul in the Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles were barred and battered by pro-Palestinian thugs. Police stood by and legacy media reported it as a “clash of protesters.”

The Jews assaulted were protesting nothing; those denying their access to shul were, supposedly protesting Israeli actions in Gaza, but the actual, dread content of their agitprop was the assertion of shared Jewish guilt for the actions of other Jews. Known historically as the “blood libel.”

“From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is a call for the death of Jews. Yet the LAPD was ordered to bar the Jews from the synagogue and let the “protesters” rant and assault in peace.

The diaspora meme “I’m Jewish, but I’m not that Jewish” has again been corrected by the horror of October 7 and the subsequent mobs’ screaming, “Yes. You are.” They are quite right. That they are shrieking should not prevent us Jews profiting from the correction.

The Western world has concluded that murdering, raping, harassing, and calling for the death of Jews is permissible. It’s insufficient to suggest that it ends in murder, is an actual incitement to murder—a felony under federal law. It is a crime to solicit, command, induce, or otherwise endeavor to persuade another person to engage in a crime of violence against person or property.

The assimilated Jew talks about “changing their minds” or “raising their consciousness” or “altering the narrative,” an aphasia equal to chattel slaves complaining, “Don’t they understand?”

The anti-Semites do understand. It is the liberal Jews who do not. As Golda Meir said, “We want peace. They want us dead. There’s little room for conversation.” 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.

Armageddon

One can’t sing the blues if one ain’t had the blues. The same is true of apocalyptic visions. The flying saucer phenomenon of the 1950s was inspired by our legitimate concern about global annihilation. The atom bomb unified the West in cowering in ignorance about how to get that particular toothpaste back into the tube.

Capitalist and communist countries decided the solution was elimination of the opposing warmonger entity, which led to the arms race. World War I was certainly (if not solely) inspired by the new technology of the airplane and machine gun, offering the aggrieved the possibility of a probative victory. The technology, of course, was available to both parties, who’d progressed in preparation and the attendant umbrage until the process overcame the objective.

We have not, at this writing, used nuclear technology to destroy the world, in the name of either freedom or its eradication, but we’ve suffered under the real threat since Hiroshima.

This anxiety, while preferable to immolation, required an outlet. The films of the fifties provided one in “Obliteration by Radiation” and “Visitors from Space” films. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and the flying saucer dramas of movies and TV were handy off-the-shelf resorts of screenwriters, as were the monsters (notably our friend Godzilla) rendered huge and cranky by uranium.*

As our anxiety about nuclear holocaust and its displacement onto alien invasion aged, space films became about our exploration. In Star Wars, Star Trek, and so on, we were the astronauts, and the onetime invaders were supplanted by the adorable E.T. The Extraterrestrial. See also Contact, Arrival, Close Encounters, and so on, where the visitors are benevolent, and 2001, the great space epic where the villain is not the Other but a computer, which, as made by human hands, means ourselves.

2001 is Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s prophecy, identifying our terror not of a device and its potential for misuse, but of the device’s creator, his flaw not a depraved political notion but human nature. This is, of course, the message of the Bible, which, however denied or decried by today’s enlightened, is the inescapable myth of the West. It predates Western theology since it concerns the nature not of God, but of Man.*

Religious myths are the most basic of human attempts at modus vivendi with the unknowable. Their embrace (and their vehement denial in atheism, communism, fascism, rationality) provides security.

What is the difference between a missionary for Jehovah’s Witnesses and a proponent of atheism? Each finds worth in his certainty of an overriding power, one called God, and one called reason.

Alcoholics Anonymous, like Judaism and Hinduism, confronts the situation with the security of an absolute: 1) You Can’t, He Can, 2) Ein Sof, the wisdom beyond possible approach, and 3) Samedhi. Self-help is the inversion, a modern pseudoreligion suggesting to the wretched, afflicted, or bored that “everything is within himself.” It is popular because the problems it addresses resemble irritations more than tragedies—the answers here may be “Knock it off” or “So what?” These are at least as effective as the mantras of endless literary claptrap of “The Seven Secrets of . . .” and so on.

The alchemists joked, “The lead will be changed into gold if you don’t think about a rhinoceros,” much as psychoanalysts suggested that a progressed dissatisfaction with one’s parents might be cured by a constant reiteration of their wrongs.

Subsequent civilizations may find that somewhere between much and most of those wellness aids marketed as “supplements” were inert. How could it be otherwise? They were actually labeled with legal disclaimers of any proven benefit. Who wouldn’t then, be inspired to fill them with at least some amount of sawdust? Anyone you know?

Happy brave American space traveler films supplanted those of extraterrestrial threats. But the notion of existential threat proved a winner and reemerged in the nineties or thereabouts as zombie and vampire films, games, and books.

In these the affected human beings were presented as immortal (wish fulfillment) and malevolent. (It is perhaps a small price to pay for immortality—at least we must assume the zombies thought so.)

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, bad avocados from space wreaked their havoc in California through the medium of the infected—a modern version of the Old Testament “begats.” Vampires and zombies were also once just folks but were driven into monsterhood by a bite on the neck or its equivalent. They infected each other, the new mass growing with such virulence and speed that opposition seemed, to the healthy remainder, inconceivable.*

*  *  *

Politics and entertainment are two ways of appealing to the mass.

They are as versatile as a bread knife, which may be used to slice bread or to cut the heart out of a lying spouse. To the killer, in his rage, the nonculinary use seems the more logical.

Rare, I am sure, was the old-time grocer who was not tempted to sand his sugar, the butcher whose thumb did not inch toward the scale, the politician who did not adopt a current rather than a biblical definition of decency.

Gone with the Wind and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are divergent views of the same phenomenon, as are Emancipation and Reconstruction, the first an act of justice toward Black Americans, the second its maturity into an engine of their political exploitation.

Nineteenth-century preachers were mocked by moderns for their fire-and-brimstone exhortations. Wokeism differs in that it promotes not individual redemption from but rather mass action against evil, located here not in the heart of the individual sinner but in the political and social ideas of the unconvinced.

The disclaimers on herbal supplements are not understood by the purchaser as a warning, but as an inducement: “Of course the government wants to dissuade you from this product, the sale from which they derive no good.”

Those of the liberal bent here employ that dualism that in all of us passes for happy reason*: the Bad Government, which warns them off “naturally sourced Kaffufanom,” derived from those ancient plants known to native healers (frightened by my exercise of autonomy over my herbal wellness) is the same Good Government, which insists that everyone must inject himself with an untested vaccine, with which demand we must comply or suffer.

Jehovah’s Witnesses and the most climate-conscious liberals may both believe in the imminent destruction of the earth but still save to buy a time-share. There are only so many ways we human beings can understand a situation.

*  *  *

Directing actors onstage or in film is dead simple, as each scene is reducible to a simple two- or three-word description. Nothing further is needed; that’s how the actor understood the scene when he read it. The “direction” is just a reminder.

Politics (like drama) is the struggle for power of two antagonistic forces, and so we understand it as drama—suppressing the knowledge that we are engaged as spectators in an interactive game and may enjoy the performance of rooting for our favorite as the limit of our benefits. To do otherwise, of course, would be to reduce the activity to a mere acceptance of the least terrible of two choices.

A friend who had done some favor for the administration was offered the chance to participate on a military base as Ranger-for-a-Day. Here middle-aged men would be coddled through ten hours of hiking, drill, obstacle courses, firing ranges, and basic instruction in knife fighting.

I was asked how I, an ancient American boy, could pass it up. I explained I could do so in order to escape the legitimate contempt of the actual Army Rangers “playing war” with granddad. Fury politics is “Ranger-for-a-Day.”

Our preferred politico offers the interested the fantasy of heroism in return for our vote and our taxes. It’s expensive entertainment. Yes, one has to pay taxes. Regarding them, past basic services, as rent on one’s life rather than an endorsement of fantasy may not only induce one to monitor the expense but also lessen the additional psychic cost of codependence.

Trump’s 2024 slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Biden’s was “Don’t Vote for Trump.” Wilson’s, in 1918, was “He Kept Us Out of War” (prior to his involvement of us in World War I and, consequently, World War II).

*  *  *

Late Victorians sold to health-conscious teetotalers “tonics” made of alcohol and opium. Heroin, a brand name, was a cough-suppressant for children; women wore bustles, people of color in the West were considered subhuman, and homosexuals were hounded by a society made up of the same percentages of gays as ours today.

Why?

Is it not inevitable that a future time must look back on our enormities equally stunned?

The alternative is reasoning that the Victorians were uniquely stupid, arrogant, and corrupt, and that they would have done better and been happier if they had only delayed their appearance for a hundred years.*

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.

Where can they be found?

We may examine our daydreams. In them we are either hero or victim (which is to say, hero). As the victim we are misunderstood, unappreciated, plotted against, and so on, and achieve apotheosis either in revenge or in Christlike martyrdom. As hero straight up we inherit vast wealth and use it for philanthropy, revenge, or sybaritic abandon. In all our daydreams we seek bliss in its constituents of release, wealth, revenge, apology, recognition, immunity, power, and so on.*

That these are the constituents both of entertainment and of politics must suggest their identical derivation. They devolve from our unavowable (and thus suppressed) understanding that we are weak and the world around us is out of control.

Drama diverts and tragedy cleanses since they end with the revelation that we are all the same.

Firewall

The legal system is constituted under the metaphysical rubric of Justice but can only be operated by an agglomeration of human beings—that is the foolish, the misguided, the self-interested, the confused, the careerist, the mistaken, and the idealists; the same admixture of qualities found in you and me.

Hamlet’s list of life’s screaming miseries includes “the proud man’s contumely, the law’s delay,” and we the affronted have all thought, Surely there must be a better way. And there may, but if it has been previously discovered that knowledge is lost to us.

Those who serve as jurors realize, “Oh. There’s nobody here but us chickens . . .” We’re instructed to put prejudice aside and rule on the facts as presented under the stringent rules of jurisprudence. But we are flawed and prejudiced, and many of these procedures we are instructed to follow are absurd. Again, the question presents itself: Can’t we find a better way—are we really to set this depraved murderer free because of a technical error; do we actually have to deprive this mother of her child because of some outdated statute . . . ? And so on.

Anyone who has experienced the jollity of the court in any capacity knows that all parties, ourselves included, will scheme to exploit the absurdities, technicalities, and ambiguities of the system to his benefit. We’re constrained from too obvious transgression by fear of discovery and punishment, but all decisions, even by the righteous—if such there be—will involve a calculus of the cost of an overnice obedience to the law.

Back in Vermont in the sixties, the old-timers used to refer to a fellow’s lawyers as “his liars,” a designation in which there is, you may agree, some truth in addition to entertainment value.

At what point does a shading of evidence, or the gentle preparation of a witness, tick over from a vigorous prosecution or defense into misconduct? The determination of that point is the lawyer’s main job, for success in which he’s lauded. That is our adversarial system, which is the survival of trial by combat. Opposing attorneys, given the same rules of procedure, fight it out and, consciously or not, accept that the chance of the more just cause prevailing is perhaps equal to, but finally independent of, the actual merits of the case—should the victor stay within the rules, which is to say, escape discovery of their violation.

The old Texas verdict had it, “Not guilty, but don’t do it again.” We know its application was not limited to Texas, for the law, can, finally, free both Jean Valjean and Ted Kennedy. 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.

Eugene Debs, the Socialist leader, was jailed in 1918 by the Wilson government for his opposition to our participation in World War I. He was convicted under the Sedition Act, which criminalized expression of opinion questioning our involvement. The act was passed under Wilson, elected in 1916 with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War.”*

Power is arrogant, and none of us is immune to its intoxication. Each of us knows not only the bully but the meek narcissist who bludgeons us through his passivity, ineptitude, or unassailable goodwill.

The first recorded acts of humankind are crime and disgrace. Eve broke the one law she was given, and Adam denounced her to mitigate his sentence. He blamed his wife, and his wife blamed the snake, but the snake blamed no one. What was the snake doing in the Garden? God put him there—he represents that portion of our human depravity that is not ashamed to sin.

*  *  *

The indictment and conviction of President Trump demolished the line between prosecutorial sharp practices and persecution. Granted, the fig leaf of judicial probity is often transparent, but its glib removal announces the advance past one last firewall against abject thuggery: shame.

To excuse his invasion of Poland in 1939, Hitler dressed a company of German convicts in Polish uniforms, trucked them to the border, shot them, and announced that Poland had tried to invade Germany. With our knowledge of his subsequent monstrosities, we might see this charade as quaint. As his war progressed, I’m sure that he did too.

Joseph Stalin was the greatest mass murderer in history, responsible for tens of millions of deaths.

Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet novelist, wrote in Everything Flows about Stalin’s last crime: the Doctors’ Plot. In 1950, just prior to his death, Stalin conceived the notion that various high Soviet officials had been murdered by Jews. The officials were largely his contemporaries, elderly, and ill, and being treated in the elite hospitals of Moscow, reserved for the Nomenklatura.

The hospitals boasted the finest medical practitioners in Russia, and they were almost exclusively Jews. Stalin declared, however, that the officials had been killed by the doctors. The accused were arrested and tortured until they confessed. Grossman asks why Stalin thought it necessary to extract the confessions (the accusations were, in themselves, a sentence of death). He concludes that it was a sign of his vestigial guilt.

Who, among the notable, caught in the act, ever confessed to anything other than “having been driven to it”? But the late O. J. Simpson, on hearing the verdict in his murder case, hung his head in submission and shame (look at the footage). The jury said “Not guilty” but that was not what he heard. Bill Clinton, on the other hand, when asked if his lawyer had lied about whether the president had had sex with Monica Lewinsky, replied, “It depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is.” An act, to my mind, more shameful than his tawdry (and near-sanctioned by tradition) sex with a White House intern.

When does one come clean? “On the scaffold, the murderer, having lied to the jury, the judge, his lawyer and himself, will lie to God.”* Is it not so? Save those who discover Christ—the (presumably few) sincere among them, having actually accepted the shame of their crime, easily bearing the scorn of a world assuming them to be hypocrites.*

*  *  *

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.

The immediately affected (either by the chaos and crime in their vicinity) and those at a remove by the violence to our Constitution may confront and choose to oppose or suffer under the enormity. Those aggressively unaware or unconcerned about what was undeniably a government putsch could undergo the destruction of the American Way, sneering at the phrase and those who would employ it. 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.”

Upstage of the Couch

Stage directors love to muck with the script. Just as historians succeed through rediscovery, invention, or reinterpretation of the Given, the director takes an immutable script and strives to “put his mark on it.” (See: dogs and trees.)

This marking is understood by the director and accepted by the cast as revelation or clarification, but it is merely paint-by-numbers. His job is merely to stage the play to better allow the audience to see and hear the actors, to stage the actors to better allow them to operate upon their antagonists, and to amalgamate the two objectives with the knowledge, if I may, that they are actually one.

How will it increase the audience’s joy to see King Lear played by a woman, in street clothes of the twelfth century, on a bare stage, with no intermission? Do car salesmen dress up in period clothes and talk funny in order to increase sales? Do they even do so selling antique cars? Unschooled directors here are do-gooders, exercising their advanced perceptions for the benefit of the ignorant.

Life in that world capital which once was New York was some fun. We working artists delighted in explaining to any who were considering egress that they by so doing they would sacrifice access to culture.

Culture, to us, did not mean music and theater, which were the everyday stuff of our life, but museums, ballet, and opera. None of us, however, ever went to any of the above.

Los Angeles is a wasteland between the desert and the salt sea, hanging on to its position through accumulated, and fast-dissipating, generational wealth of real estate, oil, and entertainment. We here delight in indicting our sunset home as Sodom and Gomorrah without the charm. There is a bit of culture, however. The excellence of the L.A. Philharmonic diluted only by its fortress position in the midst of a crime wave.

There are the various art museums too. My wife dragged me to one the other day, the Hammer Museum. They had advertised new exhibitions, the vapid horror of whose descriptions was only outpaced by their reality. But there was the Armand Hammer Collection. And so we went and delighted in the Winslow Homer, the Sargent, the Rembrandt, the Monet, the Van Gogh, the Cézanne, and so on, a compendium of several hundred years of Western genius.

And then we “looked into” the exhibitions of new works: of worktables with filing cases on them; of various large geometric cutouts pasted to the walls, of metal chairs like inverted tops, with concave receptacles for the art lovers’ bottoms, as they spun around and around. What is the connection between the genius paintings and the puerile folly of the museum’s patrons? Nothing but money. Hammer paid for the paintings; current philanthropists pay for the right to assert their superiority to them.

*  *  *

Q. What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a Bank?

A. It is theft.

Politicians are elected to enforce existing laws and legislate new ones, in service of a previously agreed-upon understanding (the Constitution). But like do-gooders, they are impeded from full exercise of their preferment by strict adherence to that document, until they may come to a progressed understanding of it as the ornamental portal framing the entrance to their garden path. The theatrical equivalent is an intellectual understanding of the script.

The actors, the director, and the theatrical management have agreed to present the script to the audience. This does not mean the Ideas Entailed in the Script, for the very act of “discerning” the artistic invention of the author and replacing it with a limited, academic, and moot observation cheats the audience of a direct experience and reduces them to the status of gallerygoers, invited to appreciate the art, yes, but, more importantly, the curators, who induced the boobs to pay them.

What is the “meaning” of The Great Gatsby? Or of Hamlet? That which can actually be reduced to an incontrovertible “meaning” is not art at all, but propaganda—the recapitulation of that human abuse of reason for which art is a blessed balance.

What is the “meaning” of a baseball game? We watch it with expectations; they are fulfilled, postponed, dashed, or resurrected, and then the game is over. Where was the greater lesson? Who would stick around the park to hear the players expound on the meaning and symbolism of baseball? Yet modern theater regularly follows the show with an exposition called “talkbacks” with the audience.

These are simply an extension of a directorial pedagogy. Shakespeare did not write advertisements for good behavior or right thinking. He did not require his actors to sit around a table for a month discussing the meaning of the play; those actors merely had to learn the lines and get up there and say them. Their acceptance of the script, as well as devotion to its clear performance for the benefit of the audience, was wisdom. Any embellishment was and is ignorance.

What can it mean that guidance is found in the “penumbra” of the Constitution? The very assertion invites the goodhearted and inspired to proclaim that the Constitution’s purpose is not restraint but rather license. (See also the actor’s “Do you mind if I improvise?”) For though we thrive under good direction, in its absence the opposite desire for autonomy will assert itself and, unchecked, spread until the most persuasive or vociferous take charge and the group is now reconstituted under the banner of self-direction and “freedom”—here called wisdom.

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.*

Slavery and freedom chase each other down the ages in a Hegelian spiral of plenty and poverty, drought and storm, growth and decay, with art and obscenity for seasoning. “And that’s how it is on this bitch of an earth,” Beckett writes in Waiting for Godot.

Do-gooderism is the unassailable insight of the intellectual that “there is a better way.” That in effect, if the wheel would just stop on a winning number, there would be enough for all. A good idea, of course, except that the do-gooder always becomes either the tool or the prey of the rapacious. How could it be otherwise? He has advertised himself as one who is willing to pay for the right to refrain from doing the math. Just like any other fashion victim, his vanity has been flattered and he has paid for the privilege.

Who is strong enough to hold out against fashion?

We are imitative creatures. We require the protection of the herd, as we cannot live alone; the tropism is never more evident than in the individual’s assertion of “freedom.” All the beatniks, all the hippies, and all the rockers dressed alike as an expression of autonomy. American women, as if on the instant, have all adopted the baby-duck voice.

In postwar Britain, radio announcers took up an Australian-Cockney accent, just as today American women tend to quack. The regional accents of my youth have disappeared, replaced through instant communication with new vowels previously unimagined. It all happens without cogitation. As it must, lest we understand ourselves as without free will.

Fashion sense is experienced as the apogee of free will: the God-given ability to perceive, on the instant, that the shade and cut of jeans one had to have last year are now the blazon of loathsome ignorance on the hips of the Auslander.

Those egregious jeans, we see, are the choice of one with whom we can have nothing in common—they are the choice of a slave, misapprehending her acceptance in the company of her betters. They are as the red dot painted on the neck of the seagull, inciting her fellows to peck her to death.

We feel as if our choice, of the incontrovertibly superior current jeans, is a laudable expression of free will. But we wear them, as the wary seagull might expunge the accidental red smudge, to escape being pecked to death.

How terrible to be pecked to death. This is the entry-level threat of blacklisting: “You don’t really want to become conscious, do you? Seek your legitimate assertion of individuality as do your fellows, in endorsement of the prejudices of the group.”

Total strangers in Los Angeles accosted me on the street demanding to know why I’d left a New York production of Hamilton at the intermission. Would they have been so moved at my defection from an entertainment that actually delighted them? I think that in that case they would have dismissed my flight as that of a poor soul—or indeed, had they thought about it, supposed that my aunt had died or the like. What fanned their umbrage? That they understood my action as an indictment not only of the herd but of the herd instinct. (In point of fact, my aunt had died. That she died in 1976 is not germane.)

Panic and fashion are the same. Nowhere is this more operative than in that most basic of human urges: sex.

The sexual latitude always concomitant to wars, and their separation and reassembly of men, women, and cultures, culminated in the brand new jollity of the pill and penicillin. The short period 1960–85 was the first in human history when sex did not carry the possibility of either conception or disease. This freedom from anxiety inspired modern feminism, which, prior to the technology, would have been moot.

“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” became the catchphrase of a generation, expressing not so much a call to universal lesbianism as a rude insult to men. After Enovid, it was not that men were incapable of aggressiveness (decent or evil) or capable of inveigling, inviting, or forcing their partner or victim to have sex, but that they no longer could use their wiles and/or the female sexual urge to force women to raise the rug rats or to perform the taxing immemorial female computations of acquiescence versus the risk of conception, the courting merits of compliance versus procrastination, and so on.

The Left’s inaccurate call to panic about the heterosexual transmission of AIDS was operationally an invitation, given the chaos caused by the pill and penicillin, to step back and consider. So perhaps there exists a corrective countercurrent in the tide of human affairs. I doubt it, but then, I am old.

The Hangman’s Rope

In olden times the hangman was permitted to auction off the clothes the condemned died in. The beshitten pants, the sweaty shirt, and hood were thought to possess great magical potency. The most sought-after of the hangman’s vails was the rope, cut and sold by the inch. The pieces were sold to individuals with no connection to each other, so there was no telling if their aggregate number indicated a reasonable length of rope. The hangman, then, could sell as much rope as he dared—his position happy not in proximity to the deceased, but to the dispensers of patronage.

The souvenir hunters were, of course, purchasing magic. Its power resided not in a piece of hemp, but in the hangman’s guarantee. See also Bernard Berenson, the great critic and connoisseur, made wealthy through his commissions authenticating Old Masters paintings, many of which were later discovered to be fake. The purchasers found magic (here called beauty), not in the paintings but in their certificate of authenticity. Like the untold possessors of fragments of the True Cross.

Career politicians understand promises, alliances, and “programs” as ruses necessary to obtain, maintain, and widen power—the same power as that of the hangman; a sinecure from which they may profit in protection dispensing magic. Their employers and patrons are selling theft licenses, exactly like the race-hustling pols and officials of today’s blue cities.

Shaw wrote that every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. We may think the phrase oversimplistic, but we all know it’s true of our own racket. The shop talk of the lawyers after work is not about procedure, but of the score they are making on their brand-new, frightened client, or the difficulty of collecting from the previous bastard. And surgeons, catching each other’s eye over the anesthetized patient, may exchange that glance the meaning of which will never reach the afflicted nor his relatives: “Oops.” Both groups are to a certain, unavoidable extent selling magic, their job finally not much different from the hangman’s: to drop the fellow in an orderly fashion, through the hole.

Various professions conspire, yes, to mulct the laity—those frightened, sick, or beset, worried, ashamed, starry-eyed, and so on, as we know. But a conspiracy is a special sort of crime: it is the association of two or more persons to commit an unlawful act.

Individual services (appreciably depravities or exactions of the client, or, in the case of the medicine-as-priesthood, the application of magic) are committed retail; the conspiracy is the amalgamation of individuals to ensure their right to dispense their various tonics, or practice their depredations immune from the law and away from the oversight of their clients or patients.*

The turn-of-the-century nostrum Liquozone was a phenomenally successful tonic. Its come-on line was “Liquozone is liquid oxygen, that’s all!” A line not only snappy but perhaps even an inspiration to the end credits of Looney Tunes.

Some science buff pointed out that liquid oxygen can only exist at minus-218 degrees Fahrenheit, and so the company dropped the line. But they continued their claims, that the stuff cured cancer, emphysema, consumption, chilblains, and every other gosh-darned thing. Its components, however, were water, sulfuric acid, and black pepper.

It killed a lot of people.

How did the hucksters get away with it? They bribed the press. Liquozone ad revenues nearly supported many publications. And the ad contract came with a rider: that the publisher would not allow to be included in his rag anything questioning the efficacy of Liquozone.

The American Medical Association lobbies to ensure their members freedom from investigation and enforces organizational compliance by mandating that this may be done, and that may not, thus protecting the doctors against their patients and ensuring that they do not break ranks. (Contrast the stricture against suggesting alternative treatments for COVID-19, rules debarring practitioners from suggesting alternatives to abortion or “sex change” in counseling of preadolescents.) The American Bar Association exists to protect lawyers. How could it be otherwise? Who protects their clients? The law. Who writes the laws?

The old Vermont folk song had it that there are only two things that money can’t buy: true love and homegrown tomatoes.

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. The dam built in Idaho will not be built in Nebraska; money thrown at magic lightbulb manufacturers will not be spent on street repair, brush clearing, or any rational goal. 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.

Political Pork is like the magic inch of rope: the purveyor won’t be around to ask “how’s it working out?” The individual buyers have no connection with each other, and even if they did, no buyer would question another about the supernatural benefits gleaned from his nice piece of hemp.* These dupes are like the two friends discovering each other in a whorehouse; it needn’t be said that neither could denounce the other without revealing his own sin. This is the case of the Democratic Party.

The purchase of the magic program carries with it a commitment to silence, and to a silence most easily maintained by amnesia.* It would never occur to a convinced liberal to ask, of the magic lightbulbs, wind turbines, school closures, masking, and so on, “How did that work out, what was the cost, to whom, what was the benefit, who benefited, and whom did it harm?”

To ask the question, indeed to wonder, must never occur to the liberal mind, for magic is hedged about, just as the roof has a parapet. The sight of the parapet spares us the horror of the dizzying height; the edge may cause fear, but the parapet means safety, beyond which one would be a fool to venture. It has been placed there to protect us, like the priest’s chasuble, the judge’s robe, the doctor’s greens, the lawyer’s concerned frown, and the used-car salesman’s smile. From what? From knowledge.

We can be manipulated by those offering to spare us awareness. Any marginally savvy person knows a horse race or boxing match may be fixed; therefore, that match on which he is betting may be fixed. The knowledge will predictably come to the fore should his sure thing lose in a close race to a long shot. But if he was hip at the end, was he not hip before he placed his bet?

The rules of the ring and of the track exist, like those of a Chicago election, to clothe the nakedness of the thing—just like the PricewaterhouseCoopers invocation at the start of the Oscars.

*  *  *

Commentators on political game shows, called “debates,” award points to that person least looking like a fool, much as in the old days the winner of the Miss America talent competition was she already selected for her beauty or biddability who didn’t fall down.

Our political candidates put on their straight (or enraged) faces and “say their piece,” as we a century ago stood up in the assembly hall and slogged through “Horatius at the Bridge.”

And our contemporary Solons, performers, receiving their trophy weep their thanks not to Mom, or Betsy, but to that particular afflicted group, a sympathetically suffering member of which they are currently impersonating. Much like a surgeon, honored for his contributions, might express thanks to the appendix.

*  *  *

The PricewaterhouseCoopers disclaimer at the Oscars is meant to reassure us that the voting results have not been tampered with. Why would the Academy reassure about an improbable event? The announcement, then, must indicate if not the likelihood then at least the possibility of balloting fraud.

We know that there have been “errors” in awarding the Oscars, that both entrepreneurs (see Harvey Weinstein) and studios have spent fortunes influencing (buying) voters, and that the rostrum has been used to flog various schemes for social betterment—to punch out Chris Rock, or to denounce the Jews. What, then, are we looking at?

I mention the signs appearing, as if an infestation, on the doors of restaurant bathrooms: Gender Neutral Restroom. 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.”

*  *  *

Sport bettors are offered a choice, and in a contest which may be fixed, each congratulates himself on his superiority to the possible chicanery, claiming some personal wisdom superior to that of the crowd (the favorite has to throw this fight in order to increase his odds at the upcoming match); or he may know a guy who knows a guy who told him a thing. In either case he is congratulating himself on his superiority to a myth in which the dupes believe that the thing is on the level. Here the falsity of the presentation itself induces him (with his superior understanding) to take a chance.*

Professional wrestling is an enjoyable joke about the supposed sanctity of boxing and enjoyed as such. But no one bets on the outcomes.

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.

But what if these curtains of hypocrisy did not exist?

What if the public, against whom all professions conspire, was assured that the thing was fixed?

If the doctors assured us that we were an imposition, that our complaints were inflated, or our ills incurable? What if the attorneys made the fish face and shared with us the knowledge that we were fools not only to have gotten into the mess, but in our belief that they could work some magic to turn back the clock? What if the politicians and their stalking horses in media merely informed us that, when they got in, we would discover ourselves more screwed than we are now, and that, since they then had the power, “What were we going to do about it?”

The above instances of a world without palliative hypocrisy is the description of a totalitarian state, in which the operatives cannot be bothered to supply either services or a decent hope. We saw it jelling about us.

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.”

Failing Up and Down

In the 1950s, television destroyed radio.

Some stars of radio were themselves survivors of the death of vaudeville, radio’s victim, and persisted through radio and into film: the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, and many of the first movie stars had come first from the music halls, like Charlie Chaplin. Will Rogers became a movie star after his preeminence in vaudeville.

Earliest silent films, however, in the main attracted performers insufficiently skilled for the music hall or stage (the merely beautiful), and those of limited skills, exploitable only on-screen. (Anita Loos, who wrote all of Douglas Fairbanks’s films, said he was good only for “jumping off things.”)*

At first, successful stage folk held the flicks in contempt. When the wind shifted, they shifted too. But many of the plum spots in film were then occupied by those who’d been on the lookout, or merely on the set. The unbilled actress Clara Bow became so popular, Paramount first advertised her with the moniker “The IT Girl” and later were forced to give her actual billing.

Chaplin was an acrobat in music halls, Buster Keaton in stock companies; and Harold Lloyd was a gag writer and inventor. None of these made the transition into sound. Neither did silent sensations John Gilbert, Ramon Novarro, Mary Pickford, or Marion Davies, though all of them tried. Who can say why, but they were not suited to the new medium, nor vice versa.

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. (I recall New York in the seventies and casting discussions themed, “Do you think he would consider doing a Movie of the Week?”)

Early television featured performers who’d made the leap from vaudeville to radio (Eddie Cantor, Jack Benny, Burns and Allen) and then into their own shows on TV. But many of the first television successes were the previously second-rate performers whose niche had just revealed itself: Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Joan Davis, Stu Erwin, and Gale Storm.

Television and film rubbed on, misharnessed, till the current amalgamation. In 2013, I wrote and directed an HBO film, Phil Spector. On hearing of it, my young son said, “Dad, you’re doing a made-for-TV movie. That’s shameful.”

The newcomers in early television got the best claims and persisted in them till the Money People got wise. Not only did Lucy and Desi get silly rich as producers, but other independent producers did well turning out product and flogging it to the networks. Then the networks closed the loophole and started churning it out in-house.*

I made ten theatrical release films for independent producers. They were done on small budgets, the producers having presold them for a small profit, and were not advertised, since the expenditures would have put the producers again at risk. Some independent producers made a lot of dough, but most were essentially peddlers and/or money launderers content to get in and get out.*

Now new technology has again upset the apple cart. Streaming has forever disrupted the old means of distribution, which, after all, is the determining factor in disseminating information—and so in determining content. Industrial production requires and rewards economies of scale and expenditure. The sellers controlling the output are in the position of setting wages. The corporation buys in bulk, with neither time nor interest in that which one might call artistic integrity, which a comptroller, looking at numbers alone, could only understand as insubordination. The actually talented—those disposed and able to bring their idiosyncratic vision (art) to manufacturing—are as much of an obstruction as Chinese devotees of feng shui would be to the Hyundai production line. (To disrupt a production line is the original meaning of sabotage.)

The Pony Express existed for eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, closing the gap between the Union Pacific Railroad building eastward and the Central Pacific building west. When the lines met, there was no further need for the Pony Express. As the information-carrying capacity increased, the one-sheet, half-ounce letter, sent by pony for five dollars in 1861 was 49 cents per ounce over the railroads. The costly half-ounce letter could only contain vital information, but a train could economically carry masses of news, chat, or even books of self-published verse. The transportation of the previously prohibitive changed the way people communicated. In 1888, Sears in Chicago issued their first mail-order catalog, which upended American retail. (At college, in the mid-sixties, we bought our clothes from the Sears catalog, which also offered artificial limbs, firearms, and tractors.)

As the means of production change, the content changes. The first American television franchises were awarded (sold) to three networks. To finance the production of content, programs were interrupted every seven minutes with commercials. Early television’s heritage thus was linked to the medicine show, where the “entertainment” offered was essentially a commercial come-on to keep the yokels still for the pitch.

There is a hopscotch effect in show business. (It may be universal, but this is the only racket I know.) The entrepreneurs and adventurers jump on the new thing. Some become successful doing so, and its creators, actors, hucksters, and thugs may exist in some sort of equilibrium until the tide turns.

Independent television was much cheaper to produce than network shows. The networks had the advantage of size and bulk buying, but they were not nimble, and the savings of bulk buying were absorbed by the cost of burgeoning bureaucracy.

Early TV scripts were farmed out, one or several at a time, to individual writers. There was a writers room, generally, only in comedy shows. No writers rooms were required for horse operas, and Warner Television churned them out in bulk, on their lot, distinguishable only by their theme songs. With the success of the industry, land values increased. The studios—Paramount, Warner, Universal, Fox—cut down or eliminated the backlots where the films were made, turning them into quick cash. (Century City was the backlot of 20th Century Fox.)

Independents then took to the streets and the countryside to film on location—a process greatly simplified by the Steadicam in the mid-seventies. Now one didn’t need to lay “dance floor” to allow the heavy cameras to move, and the more sensitive film stock lessened the need for elaborate lighting. Filmmaking, then, migrated first away from Hollywood, and then out of the United States as the unions caught up with the economies enjoyed on location.

When I first showed up, movie scores were recorded on a soundstage in New York or LA by a full orchestra, the conductor watching the film projected, full size, behind them. Today they’re recorded over the internet or its equivalent by musicians in some Baltic land while the remote conductor watches the film on his iPhone. The number of working film musicians in Hollywood has decreased from thousands in the forties to virtually none today. But the number of writers increased.

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. This is the ancient contretemps between the Workers and the Owners (Capital and Labor).

The workers, however, have always been split between the Crafts and the Industrial unions; the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) were the bitterest of enemies until their merger in 1955. Marx, that jokester, said all the worker has to sell is his potential for labor. Well and good, for a miner or cotton mill girl, but a craftsperson, let alone an artisan or artist, has something more to sell: the productions of his unique talent and skill, or, to be Marxian, its potential beauty.

Artisans have little in common with those on the assembly line; they are, however, in the same unions in Hollywood.

Movie stars represented by SAG are free to negotiate salaries based on their box-office draw—the SAG minimums are just a floor, and the star actor is not hired as from a shape-up, but for his perceived individual value.*

The case with writers is somewhat different.

In demanding a minimum number of staff for the writers room and a regular pay raise for seniority, the WGA asserts itself as an industrial union, the strength of which is the interchangeability of its members.*

In 1920, Sherwood Anderson wrote Poor White. Here an old, revered harness maker is affronted by the purchaser of second-rate mail-order goods. The fellow asks the harness maker to fix the shoddy work, but he refuses. He says to his assistant: “A man who has a trade is a man, and he can tell the rest of the world to go to Hell.”

Very true. And the rest of the world may accept or reject the suggestion, or the craftsman may on reflection choose to temper his speech, starve, or be beaten to death by the Pinkertons.

So much for the craftsman. The worker, however, can tell the rest of the world to stuff it only in conjunction with his fellows, all of whose work is interchangeable, and in acknowledgment of that proposition.

There is a third player in the perennial hopscotch of owners and workers: the unions. Their position is distinct from that of the workers. 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. Much like our government representatives, these live in a hermetic world, separate from those they are elected to represent, and amassing power through their control, which is to say their manipulation. 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.

Interchange between the parties may sometimes appear static, but it is always in flux. Greater pay causes an influx of union members, which gives the union more clout in making demands and more dues with which to enlarge recruitment, “research,” DEI, “outreach,” and similar bureaucratic metastasis, and to raise the salaries of their litigators and staff. Successful wage hikes force management to reduce profits or forgo modernization. Or changes in technology may incite management to attempt to cut employment, prompting the unions to insist on the status quo as a floor for an “Oh yeah?” renegotiation suggested by management’s new display of greed.

The railroads went bust in the sixties. The hard-won gains of the railroad unions were potentially sustainable, in an era of automation, only by insistence on featherbedding—that is, staffing of mainly automated trains by now-redundant workers.

Negotiations between unions and management must result in higher costs to the consumer, which weakens the producer, and finally these, like all negotiations, are a game of chicken, played by teams with catchy slogans on their sweatshirts: “We owe it to the stockholders”; “We owe it to our brave union martyrs” (essentially the two teams’ mascots).

The United Auto Workers negotiated the richest deals in the history of organized labor in the sixties—employees won great benefits in wages and pensions. But twenty years later, American automakers were effectively paying three sets of salaries where the Japanese, unhampered by unions and unfettered in employing automation, could make a better car cheaper, and so capture the market.

But everything changes, as we know.

Observant folks at Kodak (younger folks, raised on the computer) saw that film was on the way out, but a pivot to digital would have destroyed the stock price of the company and management’s insistence on its golden goose led to the company’s downfall.

Few gold-rush miners got rich. The big money was made by the folks who sold the shovels. On the other hand, the Aboriginals of Australia were doing swimmingly for millennia, until the coming of the Europeans in 1780. The newcomers saw what they thought were ignorant savages, but the Aboriginals had worked the land and managed it through inventive technologies of crossbreeding, fertilization, and controlled burning, and could find water and both sustain and consume the odd local fauna. The Europeans could do none of the above and starved until the next ship arrived. They drove off, killed, or enslaved the Aboriginals, who were displaced by a technology (firearms) that has the power to coerce, but none to create.

The slash-and-burn methods of Australian Aboriginals can be called primitive, or magnificently effective methods of environmental control—harnessing natural processes for human sustenance through understanding of the cycles of growth and decay. The ash of the burnt-over areas fertilized the ground for new growth, not only of planted crops, but of shoots and berries to attract and support the food-source wildlife.

A similar though unintended example can be found in the auto industry. Allied bombers destroyed the industrial capacity of both Germany and Japan, and then American money rebuilt them with the new, 1950s technologies, to compete with (and outdo) American production’s outmoded plants, and the cumbersome employment contracts based upon the old technologies.

Q. Are technological changes beneficial?

A. To whom, at what time?

Has society benefited by the ubiquity of streaming? Endless internet outlets have resulted in the proliferation of chaff, and the inevitable reduction of writers to the status of stoop laborers.

Talent cannot assert itself in communal production. Thwarted inspiration will search for an outlet, which can most easily be found today in the writing of refrigerator magnets, for if these do not amuse, shock, and delight, they aren’t purchased. The purchaser/audience/consumer here has a choice, as he does not with industrial (buy the subscription and take it or leave it) entertainment; one, however, cannot spend the evening with a glass of vodka appreciating a refrigerator magnet.

How will it all end? It will not, but will continue, willy-nilly: the unfolding Grand-Guignol of human nature, rushing like the wild river in flood, unchecked and so on, carving its own banks and channels, while some in the Lowlands flee or pray, and some, thinking themselves immune, picnic on the high ground, clucking at the spectacle and suggesting to each other that Something Must Be Done.

The Chinese, in Charles Lamb’s fable, discovered roast pork when a house burned with a pig inside. The aroma suggested its succulence, so for centuries, when the Chinese wanted roast pork they would tie a pig in the house and burn it down. In 1963 the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc immolated himself at a Saigon intersection to protest American involvement in Vietnam.

Contemporary liberals relish the odor of sanctity as if it were that of courage. They are burning a house down. But not their house—as if fire does not spread.* Western liberals in effect celebrate their humanitarian protests by setting fire to monks. The monks here may stand for Western civilization; the liberal spectators are the perpetrators, standing by and pointing at the outrages in sorrow, mouthing See? The tone is recognizable as that of the wife-beater, who explains to his battered spouse, “See what you made me do?”*

The Benjamins

Anyone encouraged to talk at great length will eventually reveal himself as inconsistent, foolish, or mistaken. This is the operation of both the celebrity interview and a criminal interrogation.*

The criminal suspect is, of course, aware of the absolute necessity of dissimulation. This very imperative eventually leads him to self-indictment. He devotes all of his energies to concealment and misdirection, but the skilled interrogator encourages him to continue, as the suspect will fatigue, and his extended defenses elaborate into inconsistencies and contradictions. His energy and thus his ability to improvise are progressively compromised by the imperative of concealment. The smart money is on the side of the interrogator.

This is also the case with the celebrity interviewee.

The off-the-cuff repartee on the old, late-night talk-show panels was largely scripted. The guests were there to flog a project, a cause, or a career; they showed up with their agenda (generally simple self-promotion), the host’s gag writers punched it up, and it was presented as “chat.”

Today’s daytime panel shows have replaced the gossip over the back fence of a simpler time. Women hanging up their washing once enjoyed the camaraderie and the permitted light viciousness of gossip. Who does not? This, however, took place in the backyard and was not broadcast to the world. Today’s unrelenting audience imposes on the entertainers miming backyard gossip, the need for stringent control: one wrong word, unacceptable sentiment, or, indeed reticence at endorsement of a prevailing opinion, could lead to outrage, dismissal, and blacklisting. The need for control imposes upon the chattering celebrities a unanimity relieved only by the occasional confected disagreement on minor points of doctrine.

But rigid self-control is draining, and even Rumpelstiltskin eventually had to get his duplicity off his chest. This was not actually a shout of triumph, but a release from the burden—it is screaming in the car. As are the various unfortunate ebullitions of anti-Semitism among the current gossipers en titre. These eruptions are like those of the cornered criminal—out of excuses, he will curse the judicial system, or the world that made him.

Celebrities maddened by the need for pretense may lash out. They cannot blame themselves for agreeing to show up and imitate themselves, nor the industry (whose money they take) that puts them on the street. Should there be no sexy diseases left to champion, they may crack open the tool kit and take the all-purpose tool: vide Jonathan Glazer at the 2024 Oscars, who confessed, by way of thanks to the Academy voters, that he “refuted” his Jewishness. His confession of shame (that is, of racial inferiority) was a tertiary development of cinematic decay.

It proceeded from the mechanism of the Oscars itself: a pousse-café of self-congratulation, trade-show promotion, and a mutual exploitation like two bored spouses cheating in a motel room.

*  *  *

Indicting Jews is the equivalent of kicking the cat, screaming at the secretary, or wife-beating: it is identifying the cause of discomfort as one less powerful than oneself.

Here the Jew-hater reveals himself through his inconsistency. For he cannot simultaneously assert that Jews rule the world and demonstrate he finds us an acceptably passive object for attack.

“If you want a difficult job done, give it to a lazy man” is an agreeably provocative saying. But if the lazy man ain’t forced to do the job, he’s likely to leave it undone, which is the essence of his condition.

Thugs, robbers, and politicians aren’t looking for a fight, but for victories. The last thing in the world the pol wants is expenditure of effort in an equal contest—one, that is, which he might lose.* He will always prefer to combat a straw man, like the Jews, who won’t fight back, or a phantom like white supremacy, which doesn’t exist. Efforts that can never succeed can always demand more funding, like the once-great metropolises “combating homelessness” by attracting and funding vagrancy.

Social justice films appeal to the budding do-gooder in the untutored breast. This little creature differs from a true politician thus: the liberal enjoys daydreams (and their cinematic renditions) of eradicating evil. He fantasizes that, were he king, all wrong would disappear before his wise policies (just as they do at the end of the film, manipulated into resolution by our doppelgänger auteur). But the actual politician dreams and schemes only of the money, sex, and power for which he can put the do-gooder on the send.

Lesbians and Whaling

I had a television show on CBS some years ago, The Unit. We ran for seventy episodes, turning out, in effect, two-thirds of an action film every eight days. The gag was that the special forces men went out to kick in doors and save democracy, while their wives stayed home and dealt with the problems incident thereto.

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.”

Now, we have close friends who are lesbians with children, and watching them, I’ve come to reconsider the old canard that a child needs a father and a mother.

An entire generation of British men died in the First World War, and their offspring were raised, whether at home or institutionally, by women. My father was raised by a single woman, and in my neighborhood you could swing a cat in the grocery store with good odds of it hitting a single mom, war widow, or divorcée.

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.

I have four children, and I am fond of them, but I am not maternal, nor was I interested in “raising” the infant and toddler—my efforts were confined to the odd diaper, the endless afternoon babysitting, and cursing the day I was born. I don’t know how well a couple of gay men are apt to do with their children, but I doubt that, however they love them, they are, together or separately, not going to be as maternal as one woman, let alone two.

It was a staple of the on-screen domestic drama of the midcentury that the wife was distressed as her husband preferred the office to life at home. What nonsense. The wife has always known that the husband who claims to prefer domestic chores and responsibilities to work is lying.

The working man wants to get out of the house if he can, just as today the working woman does. She may leave the kid, if possible, in daycare, or with the nanny; he, if possible, with the wife.

Is the child injured by this fandango? Someone needs to make the money to feed and house him, and someone needs to keep him safe. But it is not necessary to keep him amused, or to “portray” qualities or behaviors for his betterment.

The child will learn who is doing what, and how we take it around here, quite handily, through observation. Indeed, it is impossible to impede his accurate assessments.*

Many, myself among them, are horrified by the sexualization of children in the media and schools.

These, given or usurping the parents’ legitimate place, indoctrinate the children in something that is none of the pedagogues’ business. If sexual orientation were inborn, why would one require a schoolteacher to explain it? Perhaps, one might say, the kids could benefit from some technical suggestions, but as a randy straight teenager, I had no trouble figuring things out, and I don’t think anyone else has either. Some person or other might require a bit of indoctrination, but as I recall, that’s why they had back seats in cars.

Those in loco parentis force-feeding adolescents on sex is child abuse. The young, especially those on the cusp of puberty, are anxious about the transition—barring a family death or divorce, the first abrupt and irreversible changes.

Children should be left alone by the state and its assigns. It is their right to be protected, and the responsibility and right of their parents to raise them. It is an obscenity to suggest the schools must step up because the parents may be “wrong.” Here, as elsewhere in the totalitarian state, the question is “Wrong according to whom?” Or in Chicagoese, “Who died and left you boss?”

The child is perfectly capable of noticing who is sleeping in what bed, and equally, when it comes his or her time to choose accommodation, of discerning who gets to do what to whom.

*  *  *

The whaling communities of New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and Nantucket sent the men to sea for over two hundred years.

What of the women? They stayed home. And ran their communities. The men came back infrequently, impregnated their wives, were introduced to their offspring, and hurried back to sea, since the boat was making no money in the harbor.

The women ran not only the homes but the communities. They contracted various same-sex alliances, and everything was hunky-dory (“Glad to see him come, thrilled to see him leave”), and raised the children without men.

The male children raised by the gay women became the merchants, the sailors, and sea captains of two hundred years. The Iron Men in Wooden Ships. The New England women did a fine job raising the boys and the girls, who grew to run the towns and raise the children.

Their mothers and aunts and schoolmarms prepared the children with the three Rs, the Bible, history, and shut up and sit down; those skills necessary to a productive life in the working community into which they were born.

Someone is going to raise the children; if it isn’t done in the home it will be done in the streets—or, in their upper-class equivalent, the universities. These are Hillary Clinton’s “villages,” that is, the Mob.

The whalers’ cruises took them to the South Seas and their various carnal delights, and to the Orient, in which they found (and later brought back to their wives) pottery, silks, and opium.

The women of the whaling towns used opium for medicinal purposes, entertainment, and the happy gray areas in between.

The druggy lesbians of rock-ribbed New England raised their children well, according to their personal beliefs and free of interference. They had a community to preserve, and they did so. Might we do the same today.

We are now petitioning the state for the right to raise our children. Liberals do not realize that this is the inverse of our constitutional protections from government. We may raise our children badly or well, to be good or bad citizens; the state is only equipped to raise slaves.

A democracy (for example ours, a democracy in a republic) is ideally rule of the people by the people, according to those principles, formed into law, to which they and their forebears have agreed. But as everything in life changes, as one cannot step into the same river twice, a democracy, like any institution, creates winners and losers. Over time and whether in possession of gains ill-gotten, legitimate, or undeserved, the winners will solidify their positions through application to or purchase of legislators, and the intimidation of opponents.

Our constitution’s unique wisdom is found less in its rules for conduct (the Ten Commandments did just fine) than in prescriptions for correcting their violation.

There is no more universally understood cultural archetype than the Evil Schoolmarm. Its power is in the ability to induce our regression—the reasoning process can equally be subverted by tautology. “Love is love” cannot be disproved, nor disputed; it is, therefore, understood unconsciously as “true,” and we imbibe, along with its useless “truth,” the underlying message of its originators—in this case, “agree to our politics, appear to, or be attacked.”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences now requires a tell-all report of how many minorities, sexual and otherwise, were employed on a film seeking Academy participation. Joe Biden rebranded Easter “Trans-Visibility Day.”

Who benefits?

The answer is not clear, but we may ask: Who intends to benefit? The answer: the state, and those who aspire to usurp or to duplicate power to coerce.

Some Maxims of Napoleon

Napoleon said that will is to all other factors in war as ten-to-one.

The Vietnam War was fought by American servicemen conscripted to serve one year in combat. The objective of the North Vietnamese, however, was to drive the Americans out of their whole country. Their servicemen would not go home until that objective was fulfilled. Our servicemen had day-to-day tactical aims, which were informed by the individual’s overriding strategy, which was to survive.

Faced with on-the-ground decisions, in a close call the American soldier might rationally vote for that action more likely to result in his going home: for that was his objective.

An army made up of soldiers, no matter how brave, dedicated to serving time and going home, could only be—and the individual soldiers knew themselves to be—part of an identical strategy at the political level. How could it be otherwise? The politician had crafted the rules under which our soldiers served—those rules suggested to them by a concern for global realities, which meant a craven fear of both the communists and their constituents.

Napoleon pointed out that the side that dictates the rules of the battle dictates the rules of the peace. Our objective in Vietnam (as gauged by our actions) was to maffick about, with a constrained strategy, sparring with adversaries free to operate at will. Whom do you like in a fair fight? Choose one of these objectives:

To win hearts and minds?

To drive the Americans out of our country?

Nixon promised “Peace with Honor,” meaning killing a lot of youngsters on both sides until something happened, which allowed us to withdraw with the proclamation that we had “saved face.” The North was committed to fight for its country, and their Russian and Chinese quartermasters thrilled to bleed us out on a savage war of peace.

The war dragged on until Nixon changed the objective. It was no longer to win hearts and minds, nor to unite the country, but to hurt the North badly enough to bring them to the bargaining table. He succeeded; the war ended.

The essence of theatrical technique is the determination of an objective. The dramatist, the director, and the actor must understand what the character wants. That’s all there is because that’s all the audience wants to know.

The same should be the basis of any active counseling: therapy, psychoanalysis, or a cup of tea with Aunt Molly. The question that must be extracted from or presented to the confused must be: “What do you want?” “How do you feel?” or “How were you wounded?” is beside the point unless one’s objective is to complain.

In the therapeutic setting this is done to gain sympathy, to self-aggrandize, to stall, or to flat-out bitch for its entertainment value. On the street and in the family, it’s done to exert that grand ability of weakness to muscle strength.

If we know a person or an institution’s objective we can predict possible outcomes. The inevitable outcome of the intention to “win hearts and minds” was withdrawal, and the young adult described by his parents as “still finding himself” will, we know, be sucking the family tit till death.

*  *  *

Freud observed that dreams and fantasies can reveal an inner mental landscape—that is, they can unearth intentions. This, of course, was known of old.

Under the rubric “psychiatry is the art of the obvious,” he reexpressed the ancient and obvious wisdom that a person’s intent may be determined by his actions.

One who fails repeatedly at simple tasks is probably intending to fail. That the observer can’t see any benefit in the process does not mean that his conclusion is wrong, only that he is not similarly afflicted.

Between the world wars, to protect against another German invasion, France built the supposedly impregnable Maginot Line from Belgium to Switzerland. The German army attacked in 1940 and skirted the line along the same Belgian route they’d used in 1914. The French retreated and France fell to Germany in two weeks. The French objective was to defend themselves against attack, the German to conquer Europe.

To the extent that we are rational, we determine what people mean by observing what they do. When we cease doing so, we are irrational—when they are doing it to us and we forgo analysis, we are their victims,* and the inevitable end of defensive warfare, as the Corsican observed, is surrender.

Why would we forgo an analysis of actions we find distasteful, absurd, or destructive?

The ability to inculcate this reluctance is one of the great tools of aggressive weakness. We may believe we are preserving the family unity by not acknowledging Mom’s drunkenness, Dad’s philandering, or Junior’s dope addiction and shoplifting. But it is our reluctance that is destroying the family, not their depredations.

If we are silent, our communal aim is not family health and mutual support (what else is a healthy family for?), but accommodation. Accommodation to destructive behavior, however, we know, always leads to its increase.

The city of Santa Monica may set itself up to Solve the Homeless Problem. But as the Bible says, the poor are always with us. And how could the various challenges of dealing with their situation—mental illness, confusion, idleness, disease, and their admixture—be solved by a few retired businesspeople on the City Council “bobbing for votes”? They, observably, cannot.

The City Council, however, while not “Solving the Homeless Problem,” could adopt an achievable objective—one, incidentally, that is within their writ—and get the derelicts off the streets.* Operating under the first objective only attracts more homeless. Though it may be characterized as “compassionate,” it was not within the council’s brief to “exercise compassion,” but rather to enforce laws. We must conclude that whatever they think they are about, it is not about fulfilling their sworn responsibilities.

*  *  *

What of the young who want to “get into show business”?

Their strategic objectives must devolve from their definition of the direct object “show business.”

Before we can determine how they’re doing, we must ask their understanding. Or we may determine it from their actions. Why would one squander riches and irreplaceable youth on years of schooling in screenwriting, acting, directing? One learns nothing in those years save that one can postpone making a decision indefinitely if someone else is paying for the freight.

One can learn none of the skills required in a school. An acting school might teach voice, diction, and posture, but that’s it. Nobody in any school knows how to write a screenplay, and directing can only be learned through on-set observation, trial, error, and trauma.

But perhaps, as the confused (co-opted) parents suggest, students might make connections there. One might ask, “Do you mean, then, that your child will so shine at school that he will not only be snapped up by the industry, but also, when there, have enough clout to drag along with him his less talented friends?”

But of course, the parents mean the opposite: that their prodigy, though insufficiently gifted to gain traction on his own, will meet in school those who actually are, and so impress them by his affability that the successful friend will drag him along, freeing the parent from his role of ombudsman.

We might say these parents don’t expect their children to succeed, or we may say they do, but at another job. This job, for which the children are actually training, is a position as a bureaucrat. The Lord must have loved barnacles, since he made so many of them, but the audience, which pays their salary, as Mom and Dad did in school, they don’t love ’em. Why should they? They aren’t supplying any need other than their own to portray obedience in return for a paycheck.

Anita Loos was the first superstar screenwriter in Hollywood. She started scripting silents for Doug Fairbanks and D. W. Griffiths and wrote hundreds of successful films through the forties. From her autobiography, 1966’s A Girl Like I, of the late Silent Era: “By this time the stars were moving out of the Hollywood Hotel and beginning to live in their own private houses with servants, most of whom were their peers in everything but sex appeal—which pinpoints the reason for the film capital’s mass behavior. To place in the limelight a great number of people who would ordinarily be chambermaids and chauffeurs, give them unlimited power and instant wealth, is bound to produce a lively and diverting result.”

Before the nineteenth century, Western arts functioned at the whim of and at the courts. With the growth and primacy of the cities, the patrons became the audience, and the artist’s job was no longer to appease and flatter power and its pretensions, but to entertain the mass or a portion thereof. The gauge of success was the weight of the cashbox, and the artists failing there had the choice of learning or starving.

The theater, and then films, attracted those looking for excitement and challenge, or maddened by talent. But when the objective of an enterprise devoted to entertainment changed, its applicants changed. Eccentricity, talent, audacity, and that near-criminal urge to lure the asses into the seats became the bureaucrats’ willingness to submerge the self in return for a paycheck.

There are the combat troops and the generals. World War I soldiers quipped, “Bread is the staff of life, and the life of the Staff is one long loaf.” There are street cops and administrators. And there are showfolk and members of industry. You could not pay an actual theatrical trouper enough to sit in a room and “agree,” any more than one could pay a criminal to go straight. Do-gooders might opine that if they went straight they’d make more money than if they stuck with crime. And they might, but the cost of that money would be, to them, unacceptably high.

How many films have the criminal pulling “one last job,” after which he would retire? Doesn’t he always die at the end of the film? Yes. What’s the lesson: there is no final job, the only possible end to his ambition is death. For to matriculate out of his beloved life, to him, is death.

The incentive for the actual artist is the ability to produce. Pay to limit or adulterate his efforts destroys him as an artist: it is his choice to accept or reject the thirty pieces. The successful encounter the horror of that choice as part of the price of their success, for we all have to eat, and as we prosper with our bellies full, our tastes become more refined.

But back at the ranch, bureaucrats, studio hacks, and the audience extension “experts” have always been with us. They are the price of institutional success. How did they worm their way in? Because the actual artists, succeeding through talent, exuberance, and an unarticulated but absolutely sensed understanding of the audience, didn’t know how to defend their improvisations against the charge of lack of method. So we artists may have listened. But when we listened, we did not understand what the suits were accusing us of. They were accusing us of endangering their livelihood.

*  *  *

The subscription audience destroyed the American regional theater, as directors no longer aspired to delight the clientele into the seats, but to “reason” with them.

People want to see the show that “you can’t get a ticket for.” Whoever wanted to trek out because you could get five plays for the price of four? As if they were galoshes? Who was attracted by that theatrical idiocy passing itself off as mercantile wisdom? An audience willing to forgo its right to be entertained—an audience that, in effect, had been seduced by flattery.

It was reasonable to remind a reasonable buyer that five plays for the price of four was a reasonable gain of 20 percent. As it seems reasonable today to assure an audience that every possible race, sex, and persuasion will be represented in the film or play on offer. But these appeals to reason are the act of fools.

For folks do not willingly choose their entertainment on the basis of the purveyor’s political notions. They will only do so when they have no choice—as with the hegemony of the streaming services. Even so, we will note that, discussing this or that woke show, the viewers might share delight about an incident or effect but forgo applause for the cast’s “wonderful diversity”—this accepted (and ignored) as an inert but unavoidable part of the presentation, much like the “talk” scenes in pornography.

To succeed in show business today, the neophyte must accept the industry standard of writing garbage. Who would sign up for such a life? Those whose ambition was “to succeed,” but no one driven to create. The racial and “gender” politicization of our time does not stifle ambition; it only kills ambition to produce.

A story of Stalinist Russia:

A tractor factory was given an order for five hundred green tractors. They could build the tractors, but though they had sufficient red paint there was a shortfall of green paint. So they did not build the tractors.

If we do not aspire to fulfill the needs of the consumers (tractors), but to escape the wrath of the dictator (Stalin and his like today), talent will never assert itself, nor will enthusiasm (other than for the political), nor perseverance nor common sense. Milton Friedman wrote that one would never hear a supervisor chiding a postal worker, “Slow down, you’re killing yourself.”

How further might we thwart ambition? Through racial policies. If the currently ennobled races need not compete against a larger populace for place and preferment, and if the currently disenfranchised observe their disadvantage and despair, the Way of Ambition is open only to those who see the way to exploit the horror.

These, the Nomenklatura in Soviet Russia, were the commissars, the political hacks, the secret police, and a lapdog press and artistic establishment happy to write endorsements for slavery. Today they are the proponents of DEI.

*  *  *

William Best (1913–62) was an actor on stage and screen. He performed in his later films as Willie Best. In earlier films he was billed, in comic walk-ons, as “Sleep ’n’ Eat.” The name was an homage to his hugely successful progenitor, Lincoln Perry, known as Stepin Fetchit. Both were African Americans performing a stereotype for a white American audience.

Best’s turn was the perpetually terrified, wide-eyed lackey (A Haunting We Will Go, etc.). Perry was something quite different. He was the wise fool, shuffling effectively through life in spite, and in the midst of, the hyper dolts who thought him their inferior. He was a comic genius who’d played in vaudeville with Will Rogers and W. C. Fields.

He was the first Black millionaire in Hollywood. The second was Hattie McDaniel, who made a fortune in real estate. She was, always, the wise Black Mammy, as was Louise Beavers. Beavers’s 1934 performance in Imitation of Life as the maid of Claudette Colbert is beyond praise. There’s no better turn in the movies. She’s the cook who shows up to work for an impoverished Colbert in return for food and lodging.

Colbert takes her recipe for pancakes and the two become millionaires. The majoritarian fantasy here, as per the script, is that Beavers is happy just to live with Colbert and doesn’t need to take the money. The fantasy surfaces again in Places in the Heart (Robert Benton’s 1984 film). Here Sally Fields has to get in the cotton first in order to win the prize that will save her farm. It’s done by Danny Glover, her devoted Black worker. The farm is saved, and she awards Glover by pointing out to him, “You did that.” (This may be the last recrudescence of Louise Beavers’s pat on the head.) Theresa Harris (1906–85) played the maid many times through the 1930s and ’40s—always lovelier and generally more talented on-screen than the divas she was seconding.

Many of the bit or walk-on parts were necessary stage action (a porter, a maid, a houseboy), which it was permissible, prior to the seventies, to grant to Blacks. Just as Sophocles needed a shepherd to move Oedipus along, so drama (on stage and film) required a messenger (prior to the telephone, and now the iPhone) to bring information, or a spear carrier to take the queen’s cloak or the boss’s briefcase. Early films allowed those roles to Blacks, as Jews were permitted stock turns as pawnbrokers.

But early films also contained the gratuitous turn of the Negro dragged on as a buffoon, his presence neither mechanically nor thematically necessary, let alone central to the story. (See Willie Best in Busses Roar, a 1942 wartime propaganda film, in which he is the constantly terrified and/or drunken porter.)

Many films of the same period, 1931–60, also had wedged in them a song in a nightclub. The songs were written for the film, and all were empty, listless examples of “You’ve paying me, so I’ll do it . . . There!” Why were the songs there? As the principals met in nightclubs. Why did they meet in nightclubs? As they’d done so in previous movies. Why? Because the scenes were always narration (one character conveying information to another, for the supposed benefit of the audience), and so it seemed a good idea, if one could not spice up the content, to spice up the setting, and what cheaper choice than the standing (permanent) nightclub set.

But the songs took the disease from the scene itself. As the scene was inessential to the story, all decisions relative to it were arbitrary. Any scene in which decisions are arbitrary is unnecessary. The inclusion of the nightclub scene was industrial, a narrative “user’s manual” for the rest of the film. The elaboration of the song and songstress was a logical extension of the moot.

Various porters and maids served a purpose (as messengers) and their portrayal by African Americans was a faux-largesse on the part of the studios identical to that of Claudette Colbert in Imitation of Life. Well and good. But what of the gratuitous “darky” turn, for example, Butterfly McQueen’s “I ain’t never birthed no baby”?

The fellows who cast the songstress into the unnecessary scene may have gotten a good-night kiss, but who profited from the pointless (if not disfiguring) inclusion of the “darky” turns? Theoretically, a majoritarian, white consciousness. The scenes were included, consciously, as an extra treat, like the plastic toy in the cornflakes box.

Eighty years ago the present was the wide-eyed Black; today it is the gratuitous sex scene. What do they have in common? Each is an act of repression.

Mid-Victorian culture was obsessed by sex.* The leg was called “the limb,” the chicken thigh the “second joint”; women would not sit on a chair previously occupied by a man, lest some of his body heat persist; books by female authors were placed on different shelves than those by males; a well-bred woman was never seen out of the house unaccompanied by a male, and so on.

The necessity of a male co-ambulator, supposedly a protection against rogues, insured, operationally, that any woman on a walk would be in the company of a potential mate. Thus men were both beneficent and frightening; pick one, but not both.

The Victorian obsession with women-in-peril and so of female unsexuality (what else is the woman-in-peril genre?) was actually the assertion of the opposite: that women, being human, were like men in being sexual. Its denial was its assertion.

Willie Best, “the terrified porter,” is the assertion that Blacks were laughable and cowardly and was unnecessary (to the film), but operational as the reiteration of a lie—and a lie so fragile, it must be constantly reiterated.

We see the so-human mechanism today as “Blacks cannot be racist,” “Women do not lie,” and the metastasis of identity politics. The mechanism of repression through repetition in Victorian England and twentieth-century America ran back and forth from the supper table to the culture, and to politics, its pimp.

It’s not that confrontation of the lie would show the individual his mistake (he knows his mistake) but that it would reveal to him his sin.

Stonewall

On June 28, 1969, patrons at the Stonewall, a gay bar in Greenwich Village’s Sheridan Square, fought back against the police harassing them. This was the signal event in the formation of the modern gay rights movement. Sixty-five years later, homosexuality, then illegal, is an accepted part of American life.

On October 7, 2023, savages murdered, raped, and kidnapped 1,200 Israeli citizens. American Jews reacted by voting for the Democrats.

In November 2024, Blacks, Hispanics, and gay and straight Americans decided they’d had enough of government corruption, incompetence, malversation, contempt, and crime and voted for a return to common sense and the protections of the Constitution. They forsook identity politics, save to identify themselves as Americans. Absent from the roll call of groups rebranding themselves as citizens were the Jews.

The Obama-Biden-Harris regime bribed Iran, the sponsor of world terrorism; they abandoned American weapons in Afghanistan, to be used against Israel; and they admonished Netanyahu to exercise “restraint,” to not go into Gaza or bomb Iran. Not only did Harris “cut” him in his visit to Congress, but she arguably cost herself the election, sucking up to supposed Muslim voters by bypassing Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. She chose instead a grotesque nonentity who’d abandoned Minneapolis to rioters.

Christian and Muslim citizens across the country rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and so for peace.

They saved the Jewish State.

A Democrat victory would have signaled Israeli isolation. Iran would have escalated, compelled Israel to strike, and brought about a world war, while American anti-Semites and Marxists then in power would have done what? They had made it plain that the United States looked with disfavor on the right of the Jewish State to survive.

To my fellow American Jews: What in the world do you think you were looking at during the last four years? Jewish students were harassed and terrified on campuses receiving government funds. Anti-Semitic brutality was not given the status of hate crimes. Our president and vice president shunned their constitutionally mandated duties to greet the prime minister of not only a foreign power, but of our supposed ally. Congressionally voted funds for Israel defense were withheld by executive fiat. Our government issued continual calls for Israeli “restraint” while withholding similar requests of Iran and her proxies.

My fellow Jews voted for these people.

It is a mistake to aver that one voted against his own best interests—he voted for them—that’s all anyone ever votes for. His vote may, most reliably, identify his determination of his best interest.

What is the American Jew’s benefit in voting Democrat?

I’ll explain it to you: he is “passing.”

The Democrats were the party of the immigrants (my grandparents), and my parents, the first American generation. Republicans in my youth were fairly reliably identified as country club WASPs—the party of big business, while the Dems were for the worker, the unions, and so on. Those were the party’s loglines.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later, “affirmative action” and its bastard child, DEI, and anti-Semitism.

But the Jews vote Democrat, and continued doing so through November 2024.

Other minority groups have not only abandoned the big stick of the Left, but identity politics toute entiere. They voted as citizens. They stood up, not to promote “their party,” but to protect their home. Our country.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents—but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

It’s said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago and American Jews criticized the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.

For two thousand years we Jews didn’t have a country. We survived by accepting the various strictures of those governments that grudgingly allowed us (intermittently) to live, and when the strictures abated (to whatever extent) we called it a blessing. We voted, such as for Franklin Roosevelt, “a friend of the working man” whose administration sent thousands of potential immigrant Jews back to their deaths in the ovens.

We grew up with the slander of “Jewish guilt”—that the Jews were somehow children of Original Sin, which could only be expunged by good works and a dedication to whatever identified itself as social justice.

But Jewish anxiety is caused not by insufficient compassion, but by insufficient Judaism.

We cannot escape “the hot thumbprint of God” on our hearts. If we could have we would have assimilated millennia ago.

“I am Jewish but not that Jewish,” or “but I’m not observant,” or “but I despise this man Netanyahu” and so on are the utterances of fugitives willing to cringe rather than face their Jewishness.

In what does this Jewishness consist? Each person must, of course, answer it for him or herself. The Torah is a traditional guide. Its advice, strictures, and contradictions, and their consideration, are certainly more productive and more rational than the absurd blather of legacy media.

The world is corrupt, and has always been so, since human nature is corrupt. The Bible teaches that it is because we’ve fallen away from God; the media, because of Donald Trump and Republican Deplorables.

Ours in the greatest country in the History of the World.

The Democratic Party and their chaos has been defeated by our fellow citizens.

The Gay Rights Movement’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” is wisdom. Anti-Semitism is not the Jews’ problem, but that of our opponents.

Herman Melville and the Jews

How may one today elide the choice between defending the Jewish State’s right to exist and support for its determined assassins? One group only makes the attempt: American liberal Jews.

I was recently invited to a presentation by IDF veterans wounded in Gaza after October 7. The organizer, a friend who taught at West Point, brought several of his cadets to hear the stories too grim to make the news, from the soldiers they might soon be fighting alongside. There were other guests; they were older Los Angeles Jews, like me.

When the floor was opened for questions, there was little more for the veterans to say; they fought to protect their country from savagery, and they were wounded. The questions, in any case, coming from Jews (like myself), were predictably statements. They were expressions of outrage, followed by suggestions: the state of Israel must be helped by “changing the narrative,” which invariably meant “changing the minds of others.”

I don’t know how one changes the minds of others. Through fifty years of writing, I’ve regularly heard that film and drama should be enlisted in the service of good works; but no one has ever had his mind changed by a play or movie. That’s not how they function—they’re entertainment, with as little ability to alter ones thinking as does a meal. Exodus no more reduced anti-Semitism than tacos clarify the border crisis.

All the guests at the presentation were enraged at the eruption of American and international Jew hatred. The World Court, whatever that is, had indicted the Israeli prime minister as a war criminal. Our president and vice president pointedly insulted him on his visit to Congress. The administration withheld the release of arms voted by Congress for Israeli defense in contravention of the Constitution; and so on. The affronted Jews each proclaimed what he considered a solution, but which I understood as cries of anguish.

Islamists at home and abroad have been demonizing the Jewish State since 1948: Why would a bunch of septuagenarian Jews in Hollywood conclude they could be defeated by “changing the narrative”? The answer: they did not conceive of them being defeated; they merely wanted peace, which to their minds might be achieved rationally, without war, through mere dialogue, as if murderous savagery were the result of misunderstanding.

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.)

We American Jews traditionally vote for the Democrats, since we look around and see social ills—and believe it is the job of the government to eradicate them. But this concern with social justice is a warped understanding of the biblical injunction to do justice. The Bible admonishes us not to respect the claims of the rich, nor of the poor, but to pursue justice. It can be pursued, we learn, only through application of previously determined rules: set by, for example, the Torah, the Talmud, and the Constitution.

“Social justice,” though, is the appeal to the sentient to assert that the rules are insufficient, and that “surely there must be a better way.” But there is not. A dedication to law, as untidy and indeed absurd as it may sometimes be, is the firewall between peace (even precarious peace) and anarchy.*

“You cannot spill a drop of American Blood without spilling the blood of the whole world,” wrote Herman Melville in 1849. “Be he an Englishman, Frenchman, Dane or Scot. . . . We are not a narrow tribe of men, with a bigoted Hebrew nationality—whose blood has been debased in an attempt to ennoble it, by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves.”

Melville might have stuck to his whales, but he also trots out his anti-Semitism, turning his proclamation of American brotherhood into an oxymoron. Jews are despised for enforced separatism and for attempted assimilation, as we are loathed as a minority up until the moment when minority status is preferred but is denied us, and we concur that that’s fine too. Our problem is not public opinion—but denial.

Today the Democrats have become the party of anti-Semitism. Obama and Biden’s policies have given money and arms to Iran and withheld congressionally mandated military aid to Israel—yet Jews vote Democratic. Charles Schumer, the former Senate majority leader, is a Jew, representing a significantly Jewish constituency. He pointedly insulted Prime Minister Netanyahu on his visit to Congress, refusing to shake his hand. For whom was Schumer performing his discourtesy? Who does he think he is, and what does he think might defend him, and his constituents, should the Caliphate come knocking?

Kamala Harris, as vice president, was president of the U.S. Senate. It was both her responsibility and her honor to preside over the joint session of Congress convened to hear Netanyahu. Instead she chose to attend a reunion of her college sorority. Can one imagine a more appallingly calculated slight? Her absence announced that under her administration, the United States will abandon Israel. Yet American Jews supported her.

A Jew who votes for the Democrats is a damned fool. I know that no one ever acts for any reason other than “it seemed like a good idea at the time.” What is the idea good enough to induce Jews to side with anti-Semites? It may be called liberalism, but it contains the unavowed fear of demonization. The good news is that the Jew need not worry, as he has already been demonized.

As Rebecca West writes in her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: “There are better things in life than fighting, but they are better only if their doers could have fought had they chosen.”

Motherless Children

The foster child system is notoriously insufficient, inefficient, and often corrupt. Many may foster out of benevolence, many for the government stipend, some for nefarious reasons, and who will watch over the custodians?

We Jews are the world’s foster children—homeless for two thousand years, and thus powerless but to accept whatever measure of protection (real, imaginary, or probational) is offered by the fostering country.

In some we were slaves, in some tolerated as second-class. In no country were we accepted as citizens, full stop, our citizenship awarded, at best, with that hyphen, which is always an asterisk.

The child in a moderately happy home is not continually required to reassess his security. He is free to use his energies elsewhere, even in rebellion. But the stepchild or adoptee must first and always consider his existential safety in an unhealthy home, whose full citizens at any moment may remind him of a status as designated victim.

Every family member discovers and crafts his identity in the group: the clown, the long-sufferer, the sage, the peacemaker, the beauty, the troublemaker, as we know. The Jew-as-stepchild has, since the fall of the Temple, been identified as the default villain.

Batesian mimicry in animals is the adoption of coloration outline and behavior mimicking more savage creatures. The liberal Jew employs an opposite tactic: he performs cooperative passivity, demonstrating his lack of demand for full citizenship.

Diaspora Jews were, and now again are, bluntly reminded that we exist on sufferance, which might be withdrawn if we do not acknowledge the fact and make obeisance to the host—including, if required, indictment and sacrifice of our like. This is the engine of liberal Judaism’s dedication to a Democratic Party, whose sole benefit (to Jew and non-Jew) is staying the threat of exclusion. Jews have an unfortunate cultural sensitivity to the threat, which is why we are the last identity group to remain Democratic.

Christianity is devotion to a Man who was, and to the Christians is, God. He was born without human intercession, as was his mother, Mary. He is the aspirational figure of a human free of sin. But Christ, of course, was not a Christian—he was a Jew.

Isaac, the son of Judaism’s founder, was conceived miraculously, in Sarah, our first matriarch. Abraham whored her out to Pharaoh in return for his safety. The mother of the Jewish nation was a victim of sex-trafficking.

We Jews hold that the Messiah has not come, and await his arrival, as a descendant of King David. David’s ancestress was Ruth, a Moabite. They were descendants of Lot and Lot’s daughters, conceived through incest with their father. David’s line continued with Solomon, who was conceived through David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba. That is the line of the Messiah.

Christians believe that though Jesus descended from David, the tainted lineage was broken through Immaculate Conception. Observant Jews hold that eventual human salvation must come from one descended from sinners. Like you and me, and our offspring.

The acculturated Jew may observe humanity’s inherent sinfulness. Unlike his Christian brothers, he is unaware of the analgesic. For them it is submission to Christ, for him the biblically mandated repentance, charity, and prayer. “Good works” are not part of the prescription, for the flawed human mind is imperfect at determining their identity. The Jew, however, is susceptible to fascination by that group promising to spare him the trouble.

The rabbis suggest we should act as if the world is balanced evenly between good and evil people, with oneself the dividing factor. That ones own life is equally balanced, and the complexion of the world will depend on his next act.

*  *  *

The frightened, homeless stepchild might mime “goodness” till the end of time and accept any indignity rather than risk a tenuous momentary acceptance. He has no voice at the kitchen table. Like him, the acculturated liberal Jew cannot criticize the protective entity. That is the reserved province of the full citizen.

There is no such thing as a “step-adult.” The mature individual, Jew or non-Jew, is one who recognizes childhood is over; that his life and fate will now be the results of his actions, and that his next act is all he can control of the world. His thoughts, feelings, intentions, and explanations count for absolutely nothing—he cannot change the past, and the future is unknowable. The future, that is, including both his next act and its repercussions.

Theodor Herzl was an assimilated Jew. He saw the degradation of Captain Dreyfus and reasoned his way to The Jewish State, a book that inspired the founding of Israel.

Charles Schumer, a Jewish senator in New York, blocked both mandated military aid to Israel and a congressional resolution censuring the World Criminal Court for indicting its prime minister for genocide. Perhaps it is Schumer’s destiny, like Herzl’s, to bring Jews to their senses.

Song of Praise

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. I was reminded of the story of the Shadchan, the traditional Jewish matchmaker.

He comes to the Goldbergs’ house and asks if they would entertain an offer in marriage of their son, Shmuel, from Princess Margaret of Great Britain. The Goldbergs go into conference.

“Yes, she is not Jewish, but on the other hand, her family is quite religious; yes, she is older than he, but they tend to live long . . .” and so on.

They come back to the Shadchan and announce, “Yes, we would entertain an offer for our Shmuel from Princess Margaret.”

“Great,” the Shadchan says, “my job is half done.”

What does a poet laureate do? I don’t know, but I suspect the job might entail a semantically supportable fulfillment of its title: to sing the country’s praises, or present the work of those who have. It would be hudspadik to flog my own works from an official pedestal, which left official endorsement of the works of others. My problem in this second case is this: Most of that passing as American poetry leaves me other than fulfilled. That represented of old to schoolchildren was largely drivel—Walt Whitman and Robert Frost’s work would not be out of place on greeting cards. Whitman’s grand but unfortunate contribution to the genre was the abandonment of rhyme, form, and rhythm.

That passing as poetry, for some time, has been drivel celebrating the writer’s (and, so the reader’s) superiority to mere form. And content. No. Whitman heard America singing, and he sang about it himself, as did Carl Sandburg; but poetry would have been better off if they had limited their singing to the shower.

There, however, I would be, on day one of the Restoration, on the podium in my ceremonial robes, all dressed up with nothing to say. But in my fantasy I had a job to do, and my job was to do it. Who, then, were the poets? For certainly there were many who could both write and praise our country.

I name: Huddie Ledbetter, Hank Williams, Randy Newman, Dolly Parton, Johnny Mercer, Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Carole King, Leiber and Stoller, Bob Dylan.

Irene, goodnight

Irene, goodnight

Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene

I’ll see you in my dreams.

This by Lead Belly is as good as anything written by Yeats, who was the greatest poet since Shakespeare.

The poets above wrote the American Songbook, which is the soundtrack of our lives. It was said that 80 percent of the kids born between 1950 and 1965 were conceived to the music of Frank Sinatra, much of which was written by Johnny Mercer. “It’s a quarter to three, there’s no one in the place except you and me.”

The poetry of Sandburg, Emerson, Whitman, and so on is icky. Who needs it? Not I.

But, you might object, the songs listed here, most of them derivative of the blues, are sad. Indeed they are, and life is sad. And the blues are the spark of the soul in that sadness.

Tragedy is that celebration of life as God-given sorrow, and the possibility of finding strength and dignity within it. The celebration of the joyous, in these songs, is also praise—as the rabbis wrote. Just as it is forbidden to do that which is forbidden, it is forbidden not to do that which is permitted.

“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Bring It On Home to Me,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Stand by Your Man,” “God Bless the Child,” “Up on the Roof,” “Baby Please Don’t Go.”

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.

Moses was prohibited from entering Canaan because of his actions at the Bitter Waters. God told him to address the Rock and waters would pour forth. Moses instead struck the rock, twice. The incident was not mentioned until Moses stood on the heights overlooking Canaan. God told him he was not to enter, because of his disobedience.

Mythologically, though, he was not punished, but spared the experience of seeing his people struggling in freedom.

At the conclusion of Deuteronomy, Moses sings a song of leave-taking and presentiments of blessings and peace. His predictions were quite mistaken, as was proved when his charges crossed the Jordan. The song was continued here by the Blues.

Bartenders’ Guide: The Shirley Temple and the Molotov

Our two national birds, the bald eagle aside, are Daffy Duck and Donald Duck. Warner Bros. had Daffy, Bugs, and Looney Tunes. Disney had Donald and Mickey. How did the two teams differ? The Disney cartoons weren’t actually funny. They were cute, in the same way that child actors were schooled to portray, in a sweet, simpering idiocy, a childhood that existed only in the director’s misapprehension.

The Left is a regression to infancy. Its proponents are fixated not only on the genital, but on the previous stage (as Freud would have it), the anal: sexualizing the processes of elimination. What else can “gender-neutral bathroom” mean? The convinced use baby talk (“Is they here . . . ?”) and, when challenged, scream.

They stand on their right to ignorance of natural forces—conception, weather—and social—production and compensation, law, religion. They live in the magic realm of the infant, furious at the adults who have brought them into a world that challenges them to matriculate. And so they herd together assuring each other they need not do so, that “everything is already within them” and that “at birth each child already knows who they is.”

Their shrieking tantrums are those of the bad seed, here progressed, as unchecked, in thuggery; from breaking things like the porridge plate, to the family itself, and now attacking its elaboration to the tribe, country, and civilization. Saddened young Leftists announce that they will not bring children into such a world—well and good, since, as parents, how could they do other than perpetuate their evil precepts?

The Left’s shriek is the infant’s birth scream: “As you brought me here, cater to me or suffer.” It is the bad seed’s: “In fact, I will make you suffer regardless, for nothing you do can discharge your debt.”

While the Left uses words to confuse and threaten, among themselves they are free to communicate actual thoughts and concerns. The mantra of “I wouldn’t bring children . . .” seems to be an example of intra-clan-speak, for they certainly aren’t appealing to conservatives to let the line die out. So, like decent human beings, they gossip to reinforce solidarity, and to relax and coo, and slander among the like-minded.

But those fans of the current meme “I wouldn’t bring children into a world already on the brink of destruction” seem to be asserting a life greater than love of self: that of the earth. They are enjoying the benefits of its exploitation by their continued existence here. The more truly committed to its service would not only forswear contributing to a future threat, but address the current one and take their own lives. In their refusal they are like Washington and Jefferson, whose slaves were freed at their death: the founders took the cash and let the credit go, freeing the slaves only when they had no more use for them.

It is, unfortunately, past time for the mature to explain to the infants that a certain level of behavior is required. The infant lives in a preverbal universe. It persists in adolescence into a rejection of speech and custom as hypocrisy, and if uncorrected (by authority or necessity) must develop into group sociopathy—human communion reduced from control by laws and customs, to herd tropisms (Occupy, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ, Free Palestine). These herds are peopled by those who feel exactly the same way, but since their feelings cannot be reasonably expressed as ideas (as incapable of logical consideration), dissentients can be readily identifiable by a traditional use of language.

The sad, proud Leftists who wouldn’t bring a child into the world seem to proclaim a sacrifice; but as they don’t want the responsibility and can’t imagine the joy of children, they are sacrificing nothing. By announcing an exemption they are excused from drudgery by their superior insight. Like Washington and Jefferson’s “bequests” to their slaves, the nulliparous (of all sexes) chant means “I’m done, &*$% the lot of you. You didn’t appreciate me while I was here. I’m gone. You figure it out. I leave the earth to you fools.” As such it is—curiously in their agnosticism—a suggestion of some sort of immortality: I am gone, but I achieve glory through my sacrifice.

The well-to-do liberal drags the bad seed—the child he will not discipline—to counselors (gender, sexual, and so on) who are essentially beauticians, primping the young thing’s ego and narcissism as if they were rubbing inert unguents on the self-obsessed’s body. Why oh why did little Johnny set fire to the cat? Because nobody stopped him. What might have so affronted him that he acted this way? The cat don’t care.

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.

Munchausen by Proxy

Psychologists observe behaviors and class their observations under memorable names. They then devise strategies to deal with those behaviors; but the strategies could, more accurately, be said to deal with the names.* For their treatments are perhaps addressed not to the individual’s behavior, but to the diagnosis. This is an inevitable progression, an aping of that of medical diagnosis.

Even today, a disease or syndrome generally has a Latin name, both for specificity and to facilitate multilingual communication. The Latinity is a survival of profession once conducted entirely in Latin, both for the reasons above and to shield the physicians from colloquy with patients—adding a remove in which erudition was indistinguishable, by the laity, from ignorance or doubt.

Medical terminology also differs from the psychological in its (supposed) reliance on replicability—that is, on the application of the scientific method. A normal pulse rate can be established by method, and variations assessed accurately and potentially interpreted for the patient’s benefit, as can respiration rate, blood pressure, blood count, and so on. Diagnoses, then, and treatments may be helpful or not, and of course opinions as to their efficacy may differ, but they will presumably be based upon metrics subject to interpretation, but themselves matters of fact.

Without reference to indisputable fact there is no scientific method, and thus no replaceability, and thus no medicine.

Psychology, even that based upon statistics, is essentially the employment of opinion. The opinions employed are secondarily those of the practitioner, and primarily those of the accredited who have managed to have their observations codified. But their observations of human nature and behavior were perhaps no more exhaustive or invariably correct than yours or mine. Ours may be dismissible as “anecdotal evidence,” but why should the observations of sixty years of human interactions be necessarily inferior to those of one who has read twelve books?*

The advice or treatment of the trained psychologist is potentially fettered by a treatment code perhaps less scientific but no less stringent than that of his medical brothers, the psychiatrists—and (as constrained) necessarily less intuitive than that of the lay figure he has displaced, the wise uncle.

The hard-won medical degree and certification in psychiatry may provide a legitimate sense of empowerment based upon stringency and length of indoctrination. The psychologist, however, dealing finally with the moot, without perhaps this empowerment, is naturally more tied to procedure, which is to say, to the codified, which is to say, the opinions of accredited others, who themselves . . . et cetera.

*  *  *

The universality of the therapist in the lives of a certain class does not alleviate but in fact encourages that class’s dissatisfaction. 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.” That a health professional might assess and aid a sufferer from psychological complaints is not impossible, but it is no more likely than that a clergy person, relative, or wise layperson might do so.

The children of the well-to-do have long been acclimatized to seek continual and various “therapies.” We parents and elders should take care that unevaluated influence is not spread by those who have always had a financial stake in its promotion, and who now risk prosecution and social anathema should they question governmentally approved “science.” There can be no science that penalizes doubt.

There are, of course, individuals with severe mental illness and acute trauma in need of help, medication, or sequestration. But how able is our current West to deal with these?

Professional assessment has devolved through psychology into sociology, and further, into social dogma and the notion, for example, that crime is a disease—that there is, in effect, no crime other than treating the socially aberrant as other than privileged?*

Understanding, which once meant comprehension, has come to mean a lazy entitlement, excused as compassion. For if we are all troubled (as we are, being human), and this trouble may be described by exotic names, and addressed endlessly, are not those who exhibit actual aberrant behavior deserving of not only that same concern we award ourselves, but also of a greater concern as their antisocial, destructive, self-destructive, or frightening acts, legitimizes our own downstream protestations—as their behavior ratifies our assertion that everything is terribly wrong?* This is a vicarious endorsement of the homeless, the Palestinians, the criminals, the snail darter: “Yes, yes, we are all victims, who could understand better than I, who, myself, have experienced longing and disappointment?”

This is a sort of Munchausen, or Munchausen by proxy.

In the first the sufferer confects symptoms in which he believes, and from which he then suffers or claims to suffer some version of the associated ills. In the proxy version, the victim is persuaded or convinced by another of his sad state; this is a folie-à-deux in which both the Svengali and the Trilby character participate with some degree of sour awareness and from participation in which both benefit. The connection offers that endorsement so precious to participants in folly (such as a mob).

The individual confessing imaginary symptoms differs from the goldbricker, who pleads unreal ills to escape from work. The Munchausen-afflicted complains not to gain exemption, but to gain acceptance, sympathy, or praise for his stoic persistence.

The beatification of those certified underprivileged asserts the champion is a member of the just. He also enjoys the thrill of superiority over both the afflicted and those unconscious, unconcerned, or unconvinced of the tragedy, whom he is now licensed by the group to hate. The goldbricker is aware he is lying, the victim of Munchausen by proxy is not, and the effects of this delusion on unformed minds, children, and others is contagious. See the epidemic spread of anorexia and adolescent transgenderism.

Marx popularized the notion that the weak are to be preferred to the strong. But since the weak cannot lead, their supposed communal power is always usurped by the strong, and then among them by the least principled, who despite their protestations must view the biddability of the weak with contempt, and the rubbing together of hands.

Greta Thunberg, professional truant, announced she had the power to change the world by staying home from school. Well-to-do adolescent girls in the West convince each other that they’ve been “assigned” the wrong sex, and that society must therefore agree to mutilate them.

An individual, rational family would “send the above to their rooms,” or conclude (supportably) that they would outgrow it. As they would; as would the teenyboppers of Salem Village who sent old women to the pyre.*

An untraumatized society would observe and culturally remember that adolescent girls, on the cusp of puberty, are troubled by physical changes, attendant emotions, and psychological doubts and anxieties.

Men, old stodgy dads that we are, may be unaware of the traumas of this change, but how can it be that a feminized West (influenced importantly by women) would ignore their memories and understanding of female sexual maturation?

The answer lies not in feminism but in human nature.

MeToo-ites proclaimed “Women don’t lie,” but of course they do, as they are human. They similarly are subject individually to the same unholy desires as men: for power, revenge, license, and so on.

Feminists, under the banner of women’s rights, champion the rights of young girls to destroy their sexuality, and the right to unlimited access to the abortion of fetuses, half of which are female. They are engaged in warfare under a false flag. That of the Marxists was the rights of workers; the mechanism is the same.

The Bolsheviks seized power in the name of the workers and turned an entire civilization into slaves. But a slave state cannot exist without masters: tsars, Gauleiters, party chairmen. These rule through allowing preference to apparatchiks: in Soviet Russia to the political commissars; in our contemporary West to the DEI thuggery.

Most, being herd creatures, go along if and when the price of nonsubmission is too great. As we go along—supplying “pronouns” to various forms, and listing “sex assigned at birth”—we become habituated to submission, which habituation is so little indistinguishable from compliance that it becomes compliance, and then support.

For once one proclaims or condones that human beings are born into the wrong sex, one must develop an antagonism toward the noncompliant, whose very reserve is to him an accusation.

The arresting officer of old offered the apprehended a choice: “The easy way or the hard way?” The hard way to today’s challenged is denouncement as “haters” or “domestic terrorists,” with attendant loss of income, and potential prosecution. The easy way is “Go along. It’s the right thing to do.”

It is a crime to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. Unless, of course, the theater is burning, when it is criminal to refrain.

My Romance

One cannot criticize a neighbor’s spouse or his dog. To the artist his work is both: the rule is love me, love my dog.

The professional artist opens himself to criticism as little as possible. One sickens immediately of the critics’ derogation, and soon after of their praise. The actual artist isolates himself as much as possible from that promiscuity which would open him to the affronts not only of detractors, but of solons and fans. He accepts criticism not as a necessary evil, but as an obscenity—the necessary evil is the control of his outrage.

The artist who is neither amateur, huckster, nor fraud is concerned with form. That is, at least, the case with my racket, which is dramatic writing. In order to succeed, the play must evolve and resolve according to the expectations of the audience.* In the West, these are manifested in the three-act structure. This is not the imposition of the artist but his understanding of the human mechanism of sequential analytical thinking and prognostication. A problem arises, without the appearance of which there would be no play. Informed of the problem in question, we, along with the hero, search for its solution. In tragedy, that Othello has been made to doubt his wife, in The Honeymooners that the apartment’s heat is off because Ralph forgot to mail in the rent check, and the boss is coming to dinner.

The audience expects that the play will end when the stated problem has been resolved. Their desire for resolution may be thwarted (as in French film) and the end made clear by its proclamation on the screen, but in this case they will not have gotten that bang for the buck the Western form was designed to provide. They may come away momentarily chatting about the costumes and the effects, or “the writer’s intentions,” but these are only their reward (gossip) for having forgone a good time, just as we award ourselves the bliss of malicious gossip on exiting the wretched soirée.

The professional dramatist,* if dependent on audience delight, writes to that form that he’s come to enjoy. If he can.

Few can. For the form is exacting as that of the sonnet—more so, since the sonnetist gets offstage in those fourteen lines, which, to the dramatist, are just the first beat of the first scene.

*  *  *

“Ol’ Man River,” the greatest American show tune, is essentially a slight inversion of “St. Louis Blues,” the greatest American song, which is itself a reiteration of “St. James Infirmary”—a folk song. The blues, and particularly the twelve-bar blues, is the African American reiteration of the African call-and-response chants and work songs.* The bridge of Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River” is a quote from “The Song of the Volga Boatmen.” A delightfully similar homage is Holland-Dozier-Holland’s 1966 “Reach Out” instrumental intro, taken from the Russian folk song “Meadowlands.” There are only so many notes (in Western music, twelve). Schoenberg used ’em all. One of my family’s favorite songs:

Would somebody here please stuff a sock in Schoenberg

Cause I’m sick to death of his Diatonic Scale.*

Gone with the Wind is Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a bodice-ripper.

*  *  *

There are only so many ways to skin a cat, but the process and the results, though similar in gross, will differ in detail according to the skill of the tanner and the physical condition of the animal.

Form is the study of the dramatist, the magician, and the confidence man. Each bases his machinations upon his understanding of how his mark perceives. And the question of each, in planning, is always “What have I overlooked?”*

*  *  *

It is obvious that confession and absolution cleanse; an equally important function is their prophylactic limitation of sin, given the occasion for which one might perhaps elect to refrain rather than undergo the humiliation of confession.

The process of confession here is the inverse of analysis, which is, in Catholic terms, largely the sin of the confessional—that is, incomplete or fraudulent avowal, or submission undertaken as a pastime.

The analysand is guided to understand he is evolving rules with the analyst, those rules stringent enough to maintain his interest but lenient enough to involve no risk, like Old Maid or Crazy Eights. He, like the confidence-game mark, is led to infer that his comprehension of the rules is itself an achievement.

The Muslim believes that everything occurs because Allah wills it; the Hindu, similarly, that the world unfolds according to the will of the gods. But the Judeo-Christian West holds that one does this and so gets that. The unresolved remainder (the bad flourish, the good suffer) may be explained away by the notion of the afterlife, or of God’s sorrow, and the doctrine of free will remains unimpaired. Implicit in the doctrine, however, is the idea that we are rational, a notion that non-Western metaphysics does not even consider.

But though we think ourselves reasonable creatures, we know that in passion we are prone to indecency and violence, and in confusion to submission to thugs and fools offering that control or explanation momentarily beyond us.

Form is the dramatist’s true friend. Unchecked, he will subject us to those things he loves, whether or not they are interesting, and to theories in which he believes, but which in the theater and film are an imposition.*

The audience craves resolution. That’s why they came. The problems of the play or film’s hero stand for their own. Absent dramatic structure, the piece may divert or thrill at moments but will leave the viewers unfulfilled—which means cheated of two hours’ respite from themselves.

A dedication to form saves the body politic from descent into anarchy and its subsequent control by despotism. Faced with a difficult question, artistic, political, or legal, “What is the answer?” is a less useful question than “What is the rule?”

The Constitution, like Robert’s Rules of Order or the directions for the use of a chain saw, is a manual for operation of a dangerous (but controllable) mechanism—in this case, human nature.

The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse are aspirational documents with no practical application other than as a come-on. Someone must produce.

Q. Karl Marx never earned any money. How did he live?

A. He knew “all the Engels.”

Oklahoma

There is no education in a hit. There is, however, the unfortunate tendency to do the successful thing again. This is a good idea in a recipe, but the happy play or film did not succeed through imitation, but rather through inspiration. If imitation were all that was needed there would be no reason for fortune to favor one offering over another.*

The actual creator, however, followed the promptings of his own blessed soul or tortured mind and may have found his needs for expression somehow momentarily consonant with those of his audience for connection.

But that particular connection cannot be replicated, since first, the audience, like the creator, has changed, and changed rapidly. They have aged, their needs have altered due to age and current events, and their humor has been altered most importantly by the very success with which they’ve participated. The joke succeeded the first time because it surprised. The second time it can only spark nostalgia.

The phenomenal success of Oklahoma! in 1946 could not have been capped by the author writing a Utah! in 1947. The inevitable changes in the authors have been accelerated by success. The poor writer might like the price of a meal, or three squares a day. Early recognition to this young creator would not inspire an appetite for five squares a day, but financial competence matured, in success, into luxury sparks ambition for an extra car, a summer house, a mistress, a plane, and so on. Just as in government.

The American men who died in Vietnam were not fighting for their country; they were fighting because of their country. The Writers Guild of America went on strike in 2023 to ensure that each show would staff the demanded number of writers, who after such-and-such seniority would be paid more. The strikers were not marching in support of the writers, but of the union.

Unionism, which opposed the studio exploitation of midcentury writers, matured through success into institutional emulation of those forces originally opposed. How could it be otherwise? The fifteen-year-old boy who wants to possess his fifteen-year-old girlfriend is a normal teenager; the seventy-year-old man who wants to possess the fifteen-year-old girl is a pervert.

The Teamsters Union controls transportation on film sets, additionally mustering any allied crafts, which they have co-opted into unity (casting directors, location scouts, animal wranglers, etc.). Their mercifully infrequent strikes, unlike those of the WGA, the Directors Guild of America (DGA), and other crafts, do not allege injustice, or exhort the members to a historical unity of purpose with oppressed brothers of the past. They merely, and to their credit, demand more money.

Here again we have the old AFL-CIO divide. The Teamsters are an industrial union, while the WGA and SAG are crafts unions, who nonetheless allege (simultaneously) the irreplaceable and precious individuality of their members’ talent or skill, and their interchangeability. Which is to say, their potential to close the place down.

Like postal workers, the Writers Guild members are paid for showing up and performing a specified minimum of actions. Should they do so for a stated period, they are paid more, under contract. The output of the “writers rooms” is considered, to the largest extent, communal, each writer rewarded for being a part of that particular room and sharing in its success.

Can the talented individual succeed to greater renown and pay within the room? Perhaps. But in my experience (seventy episodes as the head writer on a television show), actually not. There are those in the room who hold positions of seniority (longevity) who may be pleased by a writer’s contribution, but it is the contribution of the group that is rewarded, and advancement given for longevity within the group (in effect, for a lower-number party card).

No actual (good) writer would expose his work to consensus rule, unless paid to do so. But this person, having made a legitimate bargain, would be unlikely to walk away from its rewards because of an artistic dispute. Why would he? He is now no longer an artist, but a bureaucrat.

Bureaucracy is the inevitable concomitant of success. The wealthy of Beverly Hills have personal shoppers to spare them the anguish of making retail decisions; their wealthier brethren have not only yachts but (the wealthiest) chase boats, to carry the defense team and the helicopter.*

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.

*  *  *

The institution of marriage gave rise to the marriage counselor, and the simplicity of the Commerce Clause, some twenty words, engendered the Interstate Commerce Act, allowing government to do most any old thing it wanted, and outsourcing the quest for those things to countless committees who were, in effect, their personal shoppers.

Success creates the fear of loss. The old poker adage is that a loser can’t get enough to eat and a winner can’t sleep. The same yacht owner’s people hired to buy and staff a chase boat will certainly advise engaging organizations to oversee that crew’s behavior. After all, the chase boat crew is out of sight and likely to skive off, overbill, or drink away the rum ration. And the bureaucrats who hired them, aware of the likely perfidy—occasioned by their employer’s lack of oversight ability—may smell the coffee and engage in some jollity themselves.

The United Nations is the Chase Boat Oversight Committee to the Free World—an avowal of fat laxity, and thus an invitation. Our membership is that gold Rolex on the wrist of the rich fella walking at night in the quite wrong neighborhood. What can it mean but “rob me”? It is to international relations as Disneyland is to entertainment. Both promote the notion that we all think alike, and that dissent to this notion indicates an existential deformity. The United Nations, a militarily inert force stationed in Lebanon, votes for self-defense consisting in opposition to an imaginary threat: Israel.

Disneyland has always held that it is the happiest place on earth and has always ensured that dissidents are barred. These, historically, were long-haired youth. Today they stand firm against those who champion the (to Disney) obscene idea that there are but two sexes.

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.

Big Pharma and government not only insisted on a universal COVID vaccination, but on the squelching of any discussion of it. Why?

And, in Anaheim:

A temporary flight restriction (TFR) is a restriction of sensitive airspace for one or two days. It is usually invoked to protect VIPs or for sporting events, and is always issued with precise time limits. There has been a TFR in effect over Disneyland since 1955. Its times are listed as permanent. The Disneyland permanent TFR is not unique. There is one other, covering the nation’s capital.

Question: What is it that walks and talks like a duck?

Unfortunately acceptable answer: What am I, an ornithologist . . . ?

What Shall We Give the Sun God?

I grew up with the constant anxiety of the first generation faced with the actual threat of instant annihilation—the eschatologist’s dream made real. Our children and grandchildren inherited the second instrument of the final days: instant global communication. What was and is spread instantly? Fear and fury. (Who, of what organization, ever communicated instantly to an anxiously awaiting world, “Things fine”?)

The Western populace thus finds itself in a feedback loop: the desire for information becomes, in the anxious, the desire for inclusion, which he explains as “connectedness,” “keeping current,” “catching up,” and the like, as at the coffee corner or the courthouse steps. But the current mechanism is addictive.*

When away from our devices we become anxious, just like the smoker, habituated to light up a new butt every X minutes. We recur to the device to allay our anxiety: it is frequently anxiety that the world is ending.

How are we, poor creatures that we know ourselves to be, capable of forestalling the end of the world? Not through individual action, certainly, but perhaps through the power of the group—that committee of one-half of the populace that shares our horror at “the way things are.”

Of old, we addressed our anxiety intermittently by religious celebrations—most involving or derived from the sacrificial: the bris substituting for infant sacrifice, mass a celebration of God’s self-immolation, Ramadan the ceremonial abjuration of nourishment, and, so proclamations of our transient mortality. The Catholics abstain from meat in Lent, the Jews from nonkosher foods, and from work on the Sabbath; the Mormons send their young on a two-year foreign mission. All these soothed unavoidable human anxiety with concrete, structured, and limited observances.

But our modern world has no limit, neither on those things to be worshipped nor those to be shunned. Without the notion of delineated sin, sinful behavior may be found everywhere, identified at will by any new shrieking by the Concerned. And how might one seek protection from this fury other than by acquiescence to any and all new blandishments, omission of any one of which might lead to excommunication? How might one keep current with a perennially expanding list of sins and gaffes other than through the internet?

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. Absent the control of gratitude (religion) or common sense (conservatism), the ability to consume continually (abundance) has maddened the unconstrained of the populace—as if the partygoers found themselves unable to make their adieux and, horrified by their inability to leave the table, ate the hosts, the servants, the party favors, and each other. Pacific Northwest Indians celebrated the potlach, a periodic feast, which involved setting fire to all they owned. Should we think the practice ludicrous or savage, we might find its like closer to home.

Christians teach that God sacrificed that which He found most precious. Our Judeo-Christian biblical tradition is laced with sacrifice, from the extensive Levitical prescriptions to the homilies of philanthropy and generosity. All are framed as offerings to God.

The Jewish round of donations (of first fruits, burnt offerings, priestly gifts) in the Christian Gospels are reduced to individual acts of charity and obedience, much as the great sacrifice of His Son is recapitulated and popularized as the modern West’s mercantile celebration of Christmas.

Here, rather than sacrificing a child, money is sacrificed for children—expended, that is, in useless things, their essential sacrificial nature hidden by their characterization as frivolities.

The impulse for the potlach can be seen in the Jewish Passover. All the hametz (leaven) must be cleaned out of the Observant Jewish home in spring. As with any intercourse with the mythic, the process can be understood as practical (e.g., shellfish are forbidden to the Jews because they may have gone bad); as ritual (we refrain from meat on Friday to emulate our Savior’s sacrifice); or as traditional (no one can remember why, but it honors our forebears to do it).*

But, as a tour de L’horizon reveals an underlying universality in supposedly unconnected and indeed opposed practices, we may attempt a generalized human understanding of the phenomenon that gave rise to religions. That is, fear.*

The Cowardly Lion asks, “Why does the muskox protect his musk? Courage.” What gives rise to the need for courage, but fear? Those who have been frighted into blasphemy or idiocy must seek out a society which will accept them. This can only be made of those equally blasphemous or threatened into cooperation. Hitler had the SS swear an oath on blood and fire, but their real initiation was the commission of atrocities. These may be characterized as those acts after which one may no longer be readmitted into decent society.

Elia Kazan excused his indictment of his former friends by explaining that the House Un-American Activities Committee already had their names. This was, of course, the point of demanding denunciation: it served no purpose other than his indoctrination in complicity. Having ratted out his colleagues, Kazan forswore membership in any society more decent than that of his new coreligionaries.

One proclaiming there is no such thing as male and female has drastically limited his community. Finding himself accidentally in a wider (nonsuborned) world, and reduced to conversation with unknowns, he must either refrain from self-proclamation, or, should he feel sanguine of easy exit, indict and slander those who disagree with him—his arsenal not of logic or debate, but necessarily of invective: not that his opponents are wrong, but that they are unclean.*

*  *  *

When we sacrifice reason to the mob we have paid dearly for the promise of acceptance. Those who have not paid are then freeloaders, enjoying the benefits of our sacrifice at no cost to themselves.

What are the benefits they have forgone? Those of club membership. In what do these consist? Supposedly, the right to function free of the fear of exclusion. But this right is tenuous; as the adherent quickly comes to fear that the group which as he has just asserted is all powerful, might employ that power to expel him.* He then cathects his fear (as loathing) onto nonmembers, whose existence, he proclaims, threatens not his belief in the group, but the very existence of the earth.

The liberal loathes the unconvinced additionally, as they have escaped not only the initiation fee, but the duties of membership. Chief among these is the drudgery of self-absorption. This, as in the sick family, is a constant exaction. No action, word, or—in self-protection—conscious thought may be entertained that would threaten the liberal’s inclusion. He knows that, though the group cannot read his mind, they need not, as they (like him) are constantly vigilant and incisive in evaluating speech, behaviors, and mode of life, in the search for threats.

Rationalists guffawing at the biblical notion that blasphemy would result in death today accept that uttering the two magic syllables means irrevocable excommunication.

*  *  *

Laurel and Hardy’s Sons of the Desert has them sneaking out of the house to the annual convention of that fraternal lodge; Jackie Gleason and Art Carney, in their television masterpiece The Honeymooners, belonged to the Ancient Order of Raccoons.

Both comedies affectionately mocked the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the lodge (Elks, Odd-Fellows, Masons, Moose, etc.) and their inevitable totems, passwords, shibboleths, and funny hats. The reader may finish the sentence.

Maverick

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.

The movies are periodically suggested to have power to save this or that—to eradicate racism (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?); sexual prejudice (Philadelphia); anti-Semitism (Gentleman’s Agreement)—but movies have always been a racket, luring the rubberneckers in with the promise of something.*

At the carnival, it was freaks and nudity and feats of strength. It’s no different today. The carny pitchman bawled, “They’re on the inside, folks, they’re on the inside.” “They” were the bearded lady, the dog-faced boy, and Little Egypt, doing the Dance of the Seven Veils. What’s changed?

The politician’s pitch is just this, seen through a mirror: “World peace, an end to racism, equal rights for all.” Increasingly the lure of the sexual is in the mix, which is the secret of “gender politics.” It is the equivalent of the first-grade boy of old, looking up “naked” in the dictionary.

“They’re on the inside” and “My fellow Americans” are operationally identical. They promise a treat for your vote, or for one-tenth part of a dollar, one thin dime. They are both hypnotic, as is the magician’s “watch closely now.”

The con men of government and of entertainment present their pitch (it is called advertising) in order to misdirect. Their phrases are misdirection from the actual world to whatever marvel the mark is presented at the time. The marvels on offer are always suspensions of the natural order (which is the definition of a “marvel”). In the carnival, the rube is gawking at the glaring signs hawking thrills. In the electoral process, he (living his everyday life worrying about the rent, the raise, or the young person in accounting) is informed the world is ending and he alone can save it.

“My fellow Americans” suggests that he’s about to hear that which will remove his anxieties and fears, focus his hatreds, and make him powerful by association. The politicians’ blather taps the deepest and saddest of a human longings: “If only someone important knew what I suffered and would, for the love of God, make things a little easier.”

Our perennial childish fantasy is of the strong big brother. In its fulfillment, as Orwell observed, Big Brother has become as the state. For actual maturity is the realization that each has to take care of himself; and wisdom, that anyone who suggests differently is a liar, out to take us, should we listen to the honeyed words.

Who is immune from the power of semantics (the ability of words to control thoughts, and actions)? Who from childhood fantasies: of power, of wealth, eternal life, and love, beauty? No one. What else is advertising?

Political language asserts that YOU have power. Liberal thought exhorts the receptive to change/save the world. Conservative invites the voters to use the power of the group to protect the power (freedom) of the individual from liberals. Can each tool be used for ill? A person may be beaten to death with a spatula.

Slogans are incantations; they capture the attention. As the French observed, a woman who consents to listen, consents. But all women past puberty are aware of blandishment’s intent. Until they, like their brothers, get into the voting booth.

“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.

The computer is a magician’s wand. Not only are we taxed to look away from it, but should we do so, the urge to “catch up” is the addict’s trigger driving us back.

The tent-pole Marvel films hire stars to dress funny and stand in front of a blue screen uttering dialogue. Why? Who remembers one line or interchange from any Marvel film? Why do they still contain dialogue? Because we’re in a period of transition.

There’s no drama at all in Maverick. Any excitement is offered by the computer progress of his imaginary plane, intercut with shots of the star, in front of a blue screen, looking, perhaps, like someone might look in that situation.

Political candidates and pitchmen operate through a form of autosuggestion. We are assured that if we vote for the suggested candidate or thing “all will be well.” Logical consideration will reveal the things either as actually unspecified (Progress, Equality) or impossible (Peace, an End to Poverty). The pitch is not designed to enlist aid, but to get our vote, after which, we all sadly know, the pitch and the voters will be forgotten until the next election, when, again, the human urge for understanding, power, and association will be exploited.*

Inbred male lustfulness is excited to get the suckers in the hootchy-kootchy tent. We will watch the tired stripper, drooling because—though not aware that—we remember that after a woman gets naked before us we have sex with her. In the car showroom and the peep show the mechanism has power because it is subconscious—the seller has bypassed the conscious mind.

Top Gun: Maverick is not the avatar of a new golden age of films, but its death notice. Just like putting the streets’ nicknames up on the signposts (“State Street That Great Street”), Tom Cruise is a reminder offered as an inducement. See also films with eighty-year-old female stars “discovering life, on a journey to . . .”

Maverick is a computer game.

*  *  *

By the way, contemporary makers of essentially computer-game films are like the first-time directors of years gone by who used the mirror. At a loss, neophytes discovered that a shot in a mirror could reveal two of the same image! It was attractive to the clueless who were incapable of framing one.

Top Gun: Maverick finesses the above with a new twist. There is no particular story problem to solve, as there is no story. Is the progress of the One Important Flight more interesting followed on the computer than phonied up on film (like the scene shot in a mirror)? To a contemporary audience, yes, it is, as the appearance of the computer triggers the itch for unity with our beloved drug. Association with the addiction. If the scene has a computer it must be interesting—the content is not only moot, but completely disposable. No interaction with a computer is conclusive, as it can always show us one more trick—its lure is not only physiologic, but psychological. It, like the vodka that “understands us,” will never unilaterally dismiss us to the horrors of our own wretched thoughts. See also scads of golden-age films showing the female star getting out of a bath. We all know we aren’t going to see her naked, but we are so triggered to watch we aren’t surprised, nor particularly outraged, when the maid intervenes with the bath towel.

Carmen Miranda and the Panama Canal

The Great and Mighty Oz instructed us to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We were admonished similarly in the O. J. Simpson trial. The curtain here was that draping the goddess, Justice.

Our adversarial legal system, her progeny, considers an issue according to legal rules; these are supposedly more humane than those of trial by combat or ordeal. The jury, instructed to regard nothing other than the facts as presented in court, is receiving the same charge as that given by the Wizard.

The charge evolved, certainly, in the service of impartiality, but like that of the Wizard, it is employed (if not essentially then largely) to bamboozle.

O. J. Simpson killed two people as incontrovertibly as Jack Ruby shot Oswald. The trial was a sick farce. It was not a test of the guilt of the accused, but of the jury system—essentially, to what extent can a jury (representing the populace) be convinced, induced, or coerced not to look behind the curtain?

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? In the Wizard’s speech the warning was a plea; it became a threat.

Race has always been a sure winner in a close contest (its identity of the winner predetermined, once white, now Black). Johnnie Cochran was defending a murderer, but the thing being tried was the strength of the race card.

One might opine that today, whites get justice, and Blacks get mercy to the same extent that one hundred years ago the inverse was the case. The observation, however accurate, is an attempt to impose a philosophical acceptance onto a wretched (but remediable) situation.

The supposed symmetry suggests the actual existence of a metaphysical concept: Justice—that is, a justice beyond the human power to corrupt. The metaphysical belief is a basis of atheism. Its proponent explains that it is impossible that God exists; for, as we look around, we see only randomness, cruelty, stupidity, and chaos—disasters man-made, natural, and those once thought natural and now revealed as our own fault. How, we are challenged, could “God” have made such a mess?

A response: “Who?”

“God, the Supreme Being who made the world.”

“But you, the atheist, have just explained God did not make the world. As God does not exist, who or what are you complaining about?”

But he is not “complaining about,” he is complaining “to.” The atheist is bitching, his complaint presented as an inescapable deduction that God does not exist, as his existence is not consonant with any belief in justice (which he calls reason), which is to say with his ineradicable belief in a just God.

The atheist does not believe in the nonexistence of God, but only that He is doing a wretched job. Who, he wonders, might be better suited for the position?

*  *  *

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.

Nineteenth-century technology made possible the construction of power-altering canals. With Suez (begun 1859), a commercial British-French venture linked Europe with India and the East. We proclaimed the Western Hemisphere our turf, and possessing at the turn of the century wealth beyond measure, it remained only to pick a spot in our own hemisphere and dig our own ditch between the Seas.

The site we chose for the Panama Canal was perfect in all respects but one. It ran through the sovereign state of Colombia, and they weren’t willing to play ball. So we funded and staged a so-called popular insurrection and “came to the aid of the rebels.”

After they’d designed their flag and uniforms, we allowed them to bow on the dais of that new, sovereign state, which would be called “Panama,” and to sit down and shut up. As always the final word of realpolitik was “What are you going to do about it?”

Behind Oz’s curtain, we see there’s just a man, and a machine, and as we look beyond our shock, that the machine has a very limited number of levers. The machine’s operation might seem to depend on the genius of the operator, but he is only free to choose among its few controls previously installed and known collectively as human nature.

The grab bag that every politician inherits on achieving office is opened with glee like that of the discoverer of a lost, stuffed, unreturnable wallet. The politician’s lucky bag contains those few tools that will operate on our shared nature: greed, fear, flattery, envy, deception, sophistry, incitement to rage (or its equivalent, patriotism), license, and indulgence. The last two are the secret sauce of politics: the practitioner’s freedom from scrutiny allows him to wield the other tools (sticks), and his license to award preferment and exemption is the great carrot of politics.

The admonition not to look behind the curtain is essentially biblical: once one has eaten the apple and got wise, he must pay the price, in shame for a continued complicity, or in guilt or mental exactions for his repression of self-knowledge. His acceptance of indulgence frees him from shame (he is, after all, among his like), and any repressed guilt at complicity is licensed for expression as rage against the current dastardly heathens.

The triggers employable by politicians and government are the same as those in drama. The story may be one of individual sin (Othello) or the sins of human nature as a group (An Enemy of the People; The Crucible). These, our beloved human failings, are as limited as the number of ways in which it is possible to have sex.

Film wisdom has it that if one Twinkie is funny, two Twinkies are funnier, and an orgy scene might depict a “three-way,” but pulling the camera back far enough to frame forty writhing bodies only creates paisley.

How few are the ways, O best beloved, in which things can go wrong? Theater, and its redheaded stepson, Film, know of only three: folly, circumstance, and sin.

Folly is the purview of comedy, and tragedy gets sin. The first, ideally, permits us to guffaw in safety at our own idiocies, the last to sigh at our godless self-absorption.

So far so good, but what of the middle term?

Comedy and tragedy are fairly interchangeable. Othello could be easily written as a bedroom farce, and The Honeymooners as A Doll’s House. The forms share this mechanism: that something essential has been suppressed, and an unforeseen event impels the protagonists to a course of action that, in spite of themselves, reveals the cause of their misfortune. They discover it is themselves, and it has evolved to declare itself through their exhaustion by attempts at repression.

They have swept so many troubles under the rug that the rug can no longer accommodate them. They may, forgive me, get a new vacuum, or a new rug, or try to explain the gathering dust as somehow other than noxious. All of these above may function as mechanisms of repression, but none of them make either the dust disappear or cease accumulating.

What, again, is Othello’s problem?

His wife is cheating on him. [No]

He suspects his wife is cheating on him. [No]

He is Black. And knows he is accepted only on sufferance. [Yes]

Iago, Othello’s yetzer hara (the portion of his consciousness given to evil), is jealous of the preference Othello has given to another. He contrives to convince Othello that Desdemona is committing adultery.

Why would Othello, the greatest general and most attractive man of his time, be likely to believe it? Because he knows himself to be thought inferior by the powerful of Venice, because of his race.

He is allowed to almost-matriculate into Venetian higher life, but when Desdemona’s father is told the two are married he throws a fit. Othello is permitted to serve, and lauded for his accomplishments, but he has forgotten his place, and the insults he suffers are consonant with those he has internalized. He feels worthy, that is, because and only because of what he has done. (“I have done the State some service and they know it.”)

Hattie MacDaniel was the first African American to win an Oscar (Gone with the Wind, 1939). In her speech of thanks, she refers twice or three times to her race, and being a “credit to her race” because a bunch of movie hegemons gave her a trinket for making them a billion dollars. But if she doesn’t steal the movie call me Meyer.

She succeeded, like Othello, not because of the state, nor for the state, but in spite of it. Her case is neither comic nor tragic, but closer to the middle term: drama.

Straight-up drama is neither about folly (two male musicians escape from the Chicago mob by pretending to be women, Some Like It Hot) nor tragedy (a Russian noblewoman loses her head, and her mind, and lets an adulterous affair lead her to destroy her home and kill herself, Anna Karenina). Drama, being about circumstance, may be identified as lacking a precipitating event: Anna does not meet Count Vronsky, Jack and Tony do not witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Things Just Are. Willie Loman is an unhappy salesman.

Why, then, does the drama begin? As the writer feels the situation is in itself dramatic.

See Look Back in Anger, the New Theater of postwar Britain, and the introduction of the Kitchen Sink Drama: People are poor therefore their condition is notable. As it may be, but it is only entertaining to those not similarly affected, which is to say, by the mass, being entertained by a show about the poor unfortunates worse-off than they. Here superiority can present itself as compassion, and few the wiser.

See the numerous “troubled-marriage” dramas of the late last century: Kramer vs. Kramer, Falling in Love, The Bridges of Madison County, and so on, most of them extolling adultery as the logical specific for boredom. The ongoing circumstance here is a long-term marriage. The fig leaf of a precipitating event is someone is just spending too much time at the office, and simultaneously the other one meets a handsome stranger on the train.

The films are forgettable (for all they may have been momentarily a specific for the lack of inspiration), as they end with a lie. They are neither fish nor fowl. A) The participants come to understand that they’ve behaved like fools (Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice), or B) that they have irremediably sinned (The Letter, Rain, Miss Sadie Thompson). When the lie is revealed the participants can, in the first instance, suck it up and get on—if not happily, with resignation—to their humdrum lives (just like you and me), or in the second case, blow their brains out.

The middle form, the drama, is the easiest to write, as the author does not have to posit nor then solve a dilemma.

What is compelling about poverty? Nothing.

What about racism? Presented as a drama, it is merely an advertisement for right thinking (on the part of the unaffected). It comes upon no one unaware, and nothing in the story will change it—for better or worse. Thus it cannot be dramatic.

It can, however, be a starting point for tragedy (Native Son).

Dramas about an ongoing condition are simply travelogues, at the close of which, we know, the narrator says, “And so we bid adieu to beautiful Sicily, its azure beaches, and brisk, bracing waves.”

In the ongoing drama, we bid adieu to folks left right back where they started—much like Sicily. In both cases we are simply tourists. As we are at the mere drama.

Elmer Rice (The Adding Machine, Street Scene), Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty), and Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh) were essentially writing travelogues of life among the lowly, or, in the case of Arthur Miller, the vaguely discontented.

The stage and movies liked ’em since they were easy to write and could be cast-up sufficiently to allow the audience to enjoy the acting.

All television drama is an ongoing recurrence to circumstance. So-and-so are doctors, lawyers, crooks, cops, and so on. The particular circumstances may change week to week, but nothing changes in the characters. If it did, the series would not be able to continue, and it is its longevity that creates the shekels.

Gunsmoke could not have run for twenty years if Marshall Matt Dillon had decided, after season one, that violence was wrong and embraced the priesthood.

*  *  *

Politics and its sad reification, government, are exploitations of the middle term: drama. Candidates use advertising to allow them to progress, in office, into extortion.

They do so, as do the solons in the writers rooms, by suggesting an ongoing situation of which we are either aware, or of the existence of which we may be convinced, such as racial inequality, income inequality, environmental change (named destruction or depletion or misuse), white supremacy, and so on, down to and including, as we see, the Jews.

The last may be instructive, as we Jews have been around forever. Thus any cataclysm (or inconvenience to the quiet mind) may be attributed to us, as has been historically proven.

We are no more going to go away than Marshall Dillon is likely to take orders: the ongoing situation, among us, is Life, which is always in session, and which of us is immune to consternation, regret, anger, or self-pity about its vexing continuity, or from the impulse to take it out on the other?

*  *  *

During World War II, Nelson Rockefeller was dispatched to Latin America by Roosevelt to head the new Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs.

This supposed cooperative body of equal neighbors was of course, our government and its big brother, money, telling the folks down there how it was going to be: one for you, one for me, and walk the line, ’cause look what happened to that other guy—Batista, Lumumba, Mossadegh, and so on.

The gov reached out to Hollywood in the forties and told ’em to hype South America, the Sleeping Giant* on our Doorstep. See Lupe Velez’s eight films in her Mexican Spitfire “series,” The Girl from Mexico, Mexican Spitfire Out West, The Mexican Spitfire’s Baby, Mexican Spitfire’s Elephant (really), and one gets the idea. See also Carmen Miranda’s oeuvre as the ultracaffeinated Cuban (actually Brazilian) songstress clothed in bananas: Week-End in Havana, Down Argentine Way, That Night in Rio, and her reincarnation as the cartoon fruit huckstress Chiquita Banana.

Warners contributed to the war effort when Bugs, Daffy et al. went to fight against the Axis in “Der Fuehrer’s Face.” Disney offered “Donald Gets Drafted,” and they also answered the call to flog South America in their 1942 Saludos Amigos, a repurposed Song of the South with sombreros and Goofy as Uncle Remus.

Today’s money and its tools in government and entertainment see the same natural fact of suggestibility and exploit it in a contemporary manner. Where once oligarchs got rich clear-cutting forests, they now prosper through government subsidies to put up windmills, both exploitations of the environment, and, now, of the idea of the environment—banning brush clearance as destructive of habitat and spending the savings on DEI. The southern border, once a happy demarcation beyond which, we were told, were the lazy, drowsy peasants just a-waiting our aid, is now hawked as an obscenity, barring oppressed masses from showing up and voting Democratic. As always, the movies do their part: guessing about and pandering to supposed national gullibilities, and to official suggestions and threats.

The great tool in exploitation of our biddability is not the machine (human nature), nor its shockingly few levers, but the wizard’s curtain. Today the curtain beyond which we are warned not to look is DEI, social justice, and wokeism.

Anyone questioning the morality of DEI is marginalized by its attendant lackeys in the press. Why? Because the barrier between the populace and tendentious aridity is—to torture the conceit—a curtain, not a wall. The barrier to free choice in entertainment and arts is as flimsy and as powerful as the draconian operations of the IRS. Anyone is free to cheat on his taxes. Nothing easier. But if discovered, he will go to jail.

We are free to disregard or oppose the exaction or mock the vapidity of race-and-gender-based programming, but members of the industry who do so know they will be punished. As the forces of repression cannot engage in debate, they cannot chance it, nor dare withholding assent. Here they are like American jihadists, so enraged at being called out as thugs that they will assault any who suggest it.

The death of free speech is foretold not so much by the firing or shaming of its proponents, but in the silence of the majority reduced to consider—so many times a day—if this or that minor enormity is worth “getting into an argument.” The weary soon cease asking the debilitating question and then forget there is a question, and then turn against those who suggest its existence.

But among the great heroes of literature, let us remember Alice and the emancipation offered by her phrase “You’re nothing but a pack of cards.” Which is the great lesson of the drama.

There are only so many cards in the deck.

Biden’s senility was irrefutably displayed during his debate; Trump’s resolve and strength at the assassination attempt.

The revelation of their essential humanity allowed the dazzled or enraged a previously repressed reassessment.

Harvey Weinstein, in prison, is neither a “god” reinventing cinema nor a Svengali rapist preying upon susceptible starlets—he is a pathetic, forgettable, “dirty old man.” The correct human understanding frees us from his further consideration.

*  *  *

The repression of the politically obvious kept the pot boiling in horror and outrage. But Biden was simply a figurehead hack. Trump was an entrepreneur from Queens, and the media furor a Manichean myth of good versus world destruction.

But, as Tolstoy reminds us, even the most powerful leader cannot give a command that cannot be obeyed: something greater than Napoleon’s command motivated the French Army toward Russia, and though emperor, he could not have commanded them to invade Australia.

Rebecca West observes that all great upheavals are the result of changes in climate. A less passionate time may observe that rather than human perfidy changing climate, the equation runs the other way.

Writing or directing a play or film, the essential question is this: What is the protagonist always doing? This is called the throughline. Every scene must be understood as a step toward accomplishment of his goal. When confused, distracted, or seduced by a scene, the director or writer must force himself to recur to the throughline. It’s often difficult and trying, as one falls in love with a moment or pictorial solutions—but the audience doesn’t care—if they leave the movie theater talking about “the visuals” they’re just trying to leech some enjoyment out of a failed evening.

Drama is about repression. If all the facts were known to the hero, and, so, to the audience, their attention could only be kept through tricks—generally simulacra of sex and violence. But the throughline keeps them on the edge of their seats.

If it is the correct work of the creator, it need not be revealed to the audience until the final curtain. In The Sixth Sense, it was the troubled hero, Bruce Willis, who was dead—and the audience delightedly reassesses the entire film in the light of the new knowledge.

The assassination attempt of July 24 revealed that the vehemence of the previous political battle was not about the personalities or policies of the contestants, but about the power of repression.

When the repressed has been revealed our ability to reason is restored: Bernard Madoff obviously was a thief, and, like O. J. Simpson, he may be forgotten. They were kept in the consciousness through appeals to our imagination.

Certainly their personas, like those of Biden, Trump, and all politicians, are managed by entities hoping to profit from the charade. But the events of July revealed that finally, the antagonists were just two mortals, possessing various human qualities, and we were free to name them if we chose.*

Donald Trump, an American citizen, had been persecuted by forces whose position was untenable without his destruction. Their party figurehead could no longer be primped into an illusion of mental ability, let alone probity, and their mortal enemy was a man of courage.

Attorney Joseph Welsh inaugurated the end of Joe McCarthy, saying, finally, “Sir, have you no decency, at long, long last?”

The question, posed to President Biden regarding his son’s pardon, must have been answered “no.”

The Farmhouse

Some hold that Shakespeare’s plays were not written by him, but by another fellow of the same name.

My question concerns hypnosis. Is it, I wonder, that the subject is actually put into a trance or does his desire to participate cause him to approximate a trancelike state? Or is there no difference between the two propositions, this being the meaning of “autosuggestion”?

There is real potential for amusement in convincing a person to woof like a seal and, on awakening, to forget the experience, or, when under, to recall that dread occurrence in the boathouse.

I once afforded the amusement. In a lounge act in Las Vegas in 1958, Arthur Allen, the Famed Stage Hypnotist, invited me onstage from my parents’ table. Up there I performed various acts of which I was unaware and then returned to normalcy, descending from the stage to the applause and amusement of the merrymakers.

We know that brainwashing works. I never met a German, of age during the war, who did not confide that his parents, at the risk of their lives, aided a Jew.

A story told long enough becomes, to the teller, true. That is not to say that it actually occurred as he remembers it, but that that is his belief. The macro-application of the principle is the Big Lie—that lie insisted upon by sufficient power, or broadcast over a long enough time to make disbelief inconvenient—either through fear of exclusion or reprisal, or through the individual’s surrender in preference to the drudgery of continued opposition.* Either will, eventually, result in the same belief as that of the soldier in his war story. His is both a remembered and a confected performance. It is the memory of trauma and horror—shared as his privilege (with the attendant right to presume belief or acceptance in his audience) and shaped as a fable. In this fable he is either the tool of fate, excused by chance, or through his own timidity or cowardice here presented for dramatic or comic effect. He is the hero. But never heroic, always saved in spite of himself.

“Jack and the Beanstalk” is a war story. Jack appears first as a fool, selling his cow for nothing, and then as a thief, appropriating the Golden Goose, then as a murderer, chopping down the beanstalk and sending the giant to his death.

Vide: There I was, separated from my company, lost, cold, and starving. I snuck into what I thought was an abandoned farmhouse and found a loaf of bread on the table. As I was wolfing it down a German officer came downstairs buttoning his tunic. He saw me, gave a yell, and chased me out into the yard when I killed him with an ax.

The war story becomes refined, over the years, through its repetition to an audience—just as the stand-up comedian prunes and shapes his jokes. The finished product is a work of successful refashioning, in which the soldier, like the comic, takes pride. The soldier’s pride is allowable both because he served and because he does not cast himself as particularly heroic—the hero of his story is always Fate or the heroism of others. He believes that the story is true, his belief supplanting any question of the truth of the actual occurrences. For the telling of the story refers to a profound emotional experience—it is not that of the soldier, but of the storyteller.

If the soldier were presented with incontrovertible proof that he was never in the area he described, that he was in the rear during the battle alluded to, that the farmhouse did not exist, he would shrug it off, or doubt the evidence or the motives and honesty of its presenters. See the stunning last paragraph of James Jones’s The Thin Red Line, his novel of combat on Guadalcanal:

“Ahead of them the LCIs waited to take them aboard, and slowly they began to file into them to be taken out to climb the cargo nets up into the big ships. One day one of their number would write a book about all this, but none of them would believe it, because none of them would remember it that way.”

*  *  *

The exclusion of the third term.

The law of the excluded third states that for every proposition either this proposition or its negative is true (with thanks to Wikipedia). Either Abraham Lincoln is dead, or Abraham Lincoln is not dead. Either the occurrences at the farmhouse occurred, or they did not. A proposition, though it may be proved, may be disproved. But to the soldier, and on another level of abstraction, the story may be true, not under a strict application of the law, but by the redefinition of truth.

It is true to the soldier that the story has been repeated and given pleasure both to himself and his attendants. It has been refined to an ultimate operationality—as it now works he has no need to further embellish or condense it—it is as ensconced in his memory as surely as a television jingle and exists in and of itself. It is the third thing.

In the Big Lie, the unthinkable cost of questioning is shifted from the storyteller to the audience. The soldier is not threatened by exposure. His audience will be either those of similar experience who enjoy his tale per se, those ignorant both of the facts and their probability, or those of similar experience endorsing his right to tell it. But a pacified populace lives under threat, the threat of nonacceptance, and the fear of exclusion operates here like the fear of annihilation in the soldier’s recollection—it must be suppressed.

The soldier metabolizes it in his fable. Aeneas’s Trojans had a horrendous time at sea. On landing he said, “Someday perhaps the memory of even these things will be pleasant.” The war story supports his supposition, but memory here is not only selective but (as it is drama) necessarily confected (in the story of the farmhouse to give pleasure to the audience and the performer).

The third term, that which is neither true nor untrue, does actually exist. It operates in the conjunction of journalism, entertainment, and politics, where it is known as propaganda.

In a two-party system one may potentially take it or leave it. In the monolithic state one may do likewise, but leave it only at some cost, the cost dependent on the moral and legal restrictions imposed or threatened by the state. They increase as the restrictions erode, and in proportion to the absurdity of the lie.

The quackery of the nineteenth-century spiritualists was often uncovered. The bolder mediums asserted—and their adherents believed—that, though this or that manifestation was revealed as engineered, the trickery was done to lure and instruct the spirits in that way in which they should communicate their presence. The living, that is, were teaching the residents of the other world how to be ghosts.

Houdini devoted the end of his life to debunking spiritualism. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the most eminent of its believers in England. Houdini met him and demonstrated how the simple supernatural séance effects were produced. Conan Doyle informed him he was deluded, and that, unknown to him, he, Houdini, possessed supernatural powers.

William Dean Howells, in The Undiscovered Country (1880), wrote of a séance:

Nothing is clearer to my mind . . . than that it is our business, after the first intimations of a desire for converse, on the part of the Spirits, to afford them every possible facility, to suggest, to arrange, to prepare, agencies for their use. Suppose you had detected Madame LeRoy in the employment of stuffed gloves; at that very moment a genuine spirit hand might have been about to manifest itself, in obedience to the example given.

Contemporary equivalents of the Big Lie will occur to the reader. I will suggest the hockey-stick graph of the International Committee on Climate Change, which fabricated an abrupt increase in world climate during the last century, supposedly attributable to the use of fossil fuels. When it was discovered, officials of the committee defended the fraudulence as necessary in light of the impending catastrophe, the existence of which their fraud disproved.

See also: “A firearm is 80 percent more likely to injure its legal owner than an intruder.” If so, why not issue firearms to burglars?

“A woman has a 20 percent likelihood of being raped at college.” If so, what sentient parents would send her there?

And the ever-popular “All the monies [of lotteries, off-track betting, marijuana taxes] will be used for schools.” Why then do the schools not educate? Does more money ablate the human capacity to teach the three Rs?

A fine contemporary instance: In 2020, Gavin Newsom, governor of California, proclaimed an immediate existential threat from COVID-19 and demanded that, in self-protection, all citizens be masked. He then went, unmasked, to a swell dinner with unmasked members of the medical community. Was it true that the diners believed their lives in danger? Obviously not. Why, then, did they support the charade? The governor, a politician, made the proclamation since it gave him power. The medicos went along for the same reason (theirs being the secondhand benefits—real and imagined—of sycophancy). The Leftist media did similarly. But what of the liberal who heard of the discrepancy between proclamation and action?

If the authorities had claimed that lack of a mask equaled death, why were they unmasked? The question was simple, as was the answer, but its resolution, to the troubled citizen, could not come from science or logic, but like the politicians, from self-interest. The real threat the citizen faced was not the flu, but exclusion from his moiety; thus those who questioned his received beliefs were quite literally an existential enemy—neither the flu nor the lying politicians, but any of his fellow citizens who refrained from the Kool-Aid.

The bigger and more absurd the lie, the bigger the sacrifice on the part of the citizen, since to accept it he will have to suppress not only reason, but a natural curiosity. (“Why am I being instructed thus?”)

He must take out the cost of his (actual) sacrifice in anger at nonbelievers. The cost is substantial—he has sacrificed his self-respect.

The proponent of the Big Lie is like the soldier whose tale was questioned by one “who was actually there.” That person is, to the storyteller, a mannerless killjoy. But the citizen who resists the Big Lie is, to the convinced, a heretic. For he is doubting a shared metaphysical precept, as much as (and today more than) if he questioned the Resurrection of Christ. He is applying logic to a religious belief, a process historically known as sacrilege.

The Wheel

A cycle is a change or progression that, at some point, will return to its initial state.

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 process must at some point fail. This failure point may be beyond the lifetime of its owner, in which case, for his purposes, it functions eternally. The social engine, similarly, seems to its beneficiaries to be immutable, if it is imagined past the end of his life.

But no one, however patriotic, would suggest that country of the American Century would persist for three thousand years. And who but those denounced as lunatics would, fifty years ago, have foreseen its near destruction at our current date?

The speed of the piston of change, and Hegel’s spirals, and the natural order of boom and bust, reform and laissez-faire, war and peace, have been unforeseeably accelerated by an addictive technology—our midcentury horror of global annihilation through nuclear war, now supplanted by happy ignorance of the more present threat.

The Bomb was created as a tool of mass destruction. The computer evolved as a labor-saving device, but it is so handy it is near impossible to put it down, look at the world, and trust the evidence of our senses.

This aphasia brings exploiters—individuals, parties, and governments—upon us, just as pickpockets once thronged the bus stations, looking for unwise out-of-towners. These yokels advertised themselves by staring at their maps, their contemporary like by being glued to their screens. Sub specie aeternitatis, we are just witnessing the end of a cycle of longer period length than those of which we’re usually conscious: the end of one culture, and the coalescence of that which will be its successor.

*  *  *

I am an American boy. I got my nose broke playing high school football and lost my cherry after the junior prom.

The West Coast paragons, it seemed, were the beach boys and the lifeguards. They were those around whom the girls always hung. In the Midwest, their place was held by the kid who worked at the gas station. He was, to our ignorant midwestern understanding, as close as one came to the Bad Boy—he, that is, whose proximity terrified the fathers of daughters.

Who were these girls, attracted to an obvious ne’er-do-well, he who would never go to college, or have a career, and so on? They were our sisters, dates, and potential mates. The fools. But we, my friends, the Jewish kids, wanted to be Just Like Him.

He wore those blue jeans known in the fifties only as dungarees, rolled at the cuffs, and a white T-shirt, with a packet of Luckys tucked into the sleeve on the shoulder. He had a duck’s-ass haircut, oiled and frequently combed, and he could be found under a shade tree, adjusting the engine of a car.

We could not say the fellow was obsessed with automotives, for obsession implies an unhappy derangement—he was relaxed and content. He was at home.

What could be better than his occupation with an inexhaustible study?

Nothing at all. With his broken fingernails and barked knuckles, the American boy’s midcentury boast: “Wanna see something that hurts?”

This is the fellow James Dean impersonated on the screen. But we knew him of old, that type more laconic than Chuck Yeager. What became of him?

Some went to Vietnam, and some came home. Those Apollos the shotgun wed to little Susie returned, in my fantasy, to the drudgery that is the silent half of the prediction of early promise. And we who envied him went on to college and into various careers. We may, on the way, have learned differential calculus, but few employed it for fun and profit, as did our Apollo in calculating compression ratio, weight-and-balance, or cylinder headspace.

His, to us, was not the road not taken, but the inconceivable path, for our first-generation American parents didn’t work and fight to have us end pumping gas, nor mucking about with cars. Their parents, my grandparents, got off the boat and slaved to send their kids to college and into the professions.

It went wrong along the way, as what does not? The colleges, expanded by the GI Bill and government aid, conspired to race each other to the limits of license, offering independent study, off-campus work-terms, pass/fail, and then ungraded classes. Now the educational vista is more suited to depiction by the pencil than the pen.

Our children, the third- or fourth-generation of the American Ashkenazi, are generally unemployable.

The gas station, the fire department, the cops, the military, and the DPW once provided work to the lower middle class—jobs that, if offered to us, would have been greeted as if we were asked how we’d like to be a mermaid.

The world of the first generation in Depression-era America offered the (granted, remote) possibility of self-support, but none of the “safety net.” The lower classes had, as above, employment theoretically available. It was known as “work.” Among the American Christians, the comfortable may have sold bonds to their friends or gone into the professions with the promise (or possibility) of matriculation into traditional practices or firms.

But my father’s generation of Jews studied with a different promise: exclusion. They were handicapped by anti-Jewish quotas at the schools and colleges, and under a ban in the established firms and practices. They had no network to support or guide them, as there was no one there before them in their struggles.

If there was a 5 percent quota for Jews in med school, the aspiring doctor had to work harder than 95 percent of the contestants in order to be allowed to compete against his fellows. No wonder, then, that the Jews rose to the top of the professions. They had no choice.

How difficult for my now-senescent generation to see a general acceptance of the notion that merit is cheating.

The Bus Station

One might say that the French Revolution insisted on the creation of a New Humanity, as do the woke today. But human nature cannot be changed. Control is only exercisable against human actions.

The revolutionary French threw out the physically based units of life: the inch, which was the thumb, the foot the foot, the yard the distance from the nose to the outstretched fingertip. The year divided according to the solar calendar, the weeks arranged to allow a day of rest, the mile, one thousand double paces, and so on. The revolutionaries substituted the decimal system—rational but derived from nothing in our experience of the world. The week became a “decade” of ten days, and all the months and the days were renamed: Fructidor, Brumaire, Thermidor, and so on. All adults had to refer to each other as “citizen”—see the communists’ “comrade” and today’s pronouns.*

We say the changes were instituted by the revolution, but like the supposed accreted misnomers they were to correct, they could only be the product of human nature.

The Revolutionary Committee’s members were unified in their supposedly mutual goal—but as such goals are either inchoate (world peace, justice) or impossible (a dictatorship of the proletariat, “equity,” reparations), their truest operation is in the determination of hierarchy and the distribution of spoils (gauleiter of Poland, director of diversity, etc.).

The new group suggesting itself as the old regime’s replacement preaches the inducement: in unity there is strength. The supposed exhortation to courage is powerful as it suggests but elides the corollary: in individuality is weakness. The call to unity is an indictment of individuality.

The indictment is presented as an appeal to Reason (the larger the group the more power available to move a burden) and a threat: if not supporting the Communist Party, Black Lives Matter, the Left, Hamas, LGBTQ, you, standing alone, exist only on sufferance—not from the Old, Indicted Oppressors, but from the New Order.

The thirty-year-old radical, Marxist do-gooder pushes for social change, believing, ignorantly, that he lives in stasis. The septuagenarian is stunned by the magnitude and speed of the change all around him. We have seen inevitable alterations not only in weather, but in climate.* We have seen the fugue of political reform and the reaction in equal malfeasance played often enough to doubt any substantive difference wrought by the change—or, more sadly, of change for the better.

Paucity and prosperity, the aged see, are an inevitable cycle—the cause of a boom is a bust, and vice versa, and peace, as Ambrose Bierce pointed out, is just a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

The poor man may grow rich, but his grandchildren may likely be poor, unless the fortune is of such magnitude as to make them generationally wealthy, in which case they will (like royalty) be overbred or depraved, thus only postponing an inevitable family decline. The villages that prospered because they lay on the Erie Canal died with the coming of the railroads; towns on the old coach routes, with the coming of the canal. Since the Second World War, the urban railroad hubs—our great cities—have died, since there’s no further reason for them.

Various failing cities have repurposed now this and now that district, until the phenomena—slum clearing, bohemianism, gentrification, low-income housing, and so on—spread to the entire metropolis. Manhattan is now Manhattanland, a tourist destination, alike to Colonial Williamsburg save that there they wear the funny old-timey clothes for money, while the Gothamites in their trendy togs are unaware that they are living out a fantasy—a sort of carnival or masked ball.

The ball became the Masque of the Red Death when the cities invited illegal aliens to partake of some of the good things; after which the guests rationally decided to take them all. Or, at least, any which caught their fancy, thus aping the politicians who invited them. For were the Democrat politicians not distributing things to which they had no right? (A process historically known as theft.)

Brushfires on uncleared state land have been devastating California for years. The ecosystem Newsom’s commission was protecting* did not extend to human beings and their property in the Palisades, or Altadena, or Franklin, et cetera.

The largest and most catastrophic fire in Los Angeles history resulted from fairness. Newsom, Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, and Fire Chief Cowley, though not on the hose, have been in the frontline of the struggle for fairness.

Fire Chief Kristen Crowley wrote to the Board of Fire Commissioners on December 4, 2023, that budget cuts “have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations.” Karen Bass had just cut $17.8 million from the fire department’s budget.

From CBS News: “When asked about the budget cuts at Thursday morning’s press conference (Jan 9, 2025), Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said they did not impact the department’s ability to handle the ongoing fires.”

Many hydrants had been stolen for scrap and never replaced, as periodic inspections had been cancelled due to budget cuts; and hydrants ran dry in the Palisades and in Altadena, where firefighters were reduced to filling their tanks from homeowners’ garden hoses.

County officials said this (shortage) was to be expected due to the constraints of the municipal water system, which LA County Public Works director Mark Pestrella said is “not designed to fight wildfires.” (LA1st) One must ask why it is not so-designed, and, as always, what happened to the taxes we pay to insure public safety?

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.

Gandhi N’ Me

I feel about Gandhi as about a beloved old wooden spoon: a useful tool, bettering itself with age, reliable, and deserving all affection.

My friend Joe Mantegna was shooting a film in Montreal soon after the release of Ben Kingsley’s masterpiece. Joe and his crew were climbing into the airport van to get out of town, and there was Ben (as he was then), standing, forlorn, waiting for some transport. They invited him to ride with them. The van was silent with respect for some time, until somebody said, “Hey, I can’t help it. We’re in the van with the fookin’ Diaper.”

I think of the story often when I am down. Or happy.

I believe it was my inspiration to put the G in my book Diary of a Porn Star, by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger. She related the “inside baseball” known among her coterie: that Gandhi’s “lost year” was spent under the name George Borthy, pursuing a barmaid in Leeds.

I went to the well once again, with my cartoon poster for Gandhi Two: there he is, sitting cross-legged, and fighting fit. The film’s tagline: “He’s back, and he’s more at peace with himself than ever!”

Finally, in my favorite of all my works, we have the Funny or Die sketch “Inside the Actor’s Workshop.” Here Martin Jarvis, as a Brit “presenter,” interviews the star of Gandhi Two on the set. Gandhi is played by Danny DeVito. He is sitting in a director’s chair, dressed only in the go-to diaper and trying on various mustaches while being painted brown by an intern with a four-inch brush and a bucket of paint.

*  *  *

My reaction to the Democrats’ defeat was not relief, but incomprehension. It took me two days to realize that the Leftist-Islamist thugs, their coalition of anti-Semites, and their souteneurs in the press and academia had been repudiated—that one actually could not fool all of the people all of the time. At least this people. At least this time.

My daughter has a home near the beach in Sarasota, Florida. Her house, miraculously, survived the recent hurricane. Our country has survived the crisis of a disease that presaged our death. All conservatives saw it, and many of us who decried or denounced the regime could not quite believe that the Constitution and our freedom under the law would survive the seemingly inevitable Democratic victory.

One week on, I feel like Dickens’s Dr. Morrell in A Tale of Two Cities, “Returned to Life.”

Both political moieties have suffered four grueling years of repression: the liberals, denying their party was in chaos, captained by nullities, chargeable with the decline and decay of the country they’d sworn to protect.

The conservatives had to repress not only outrage, but defeatism.

President Trump influenced Americans as much by his attitude as by his policies. He had no time for outrage—he was fighting vicious opponents, and it was a waste of energy to keep reminding himself of their crimes—and his answer for defeatism was that his enemies could do whatever they wished, but he would never back down. He was not afraid of them, their lawfare, suits, slanders, or assassins. He’d thrown down his sash, and he was going to win or die, and either was acceptable.

That message inspired those who had been hopeless, persecuted, shamed, uncertain—in effect, ordinary Americans, or, as we now understood ourselves, Americans. Pundits say he created a coalition. But it isn’t a coalition, it’s a constituency. For his supporters didn’t vote as Blacks, Gays, Hispanics, etc., but as citizens.

One week after the election, I was one happy Jew—enjoying not the “win” or the “humiliation of the Democrats” (who are, after all, my neighbors) but the end of a nightmare.

Barry Goldwater said that tyranny is always just one generation away, and by God, he was right. Our country, like any other organism, ages and must periodically be renewed in response not only to various natural decays, but to technological and world-political developments.

*  *  *

President Trump and eighty million fellow citizens stepped up grateful for the chance to defend our home. And we did so.

The Harris signs pockmarking my neighborhood are gone. The residents who displayed the bold calls for Joy may maunder and kvetch, assigning blame and miming fear over predicted Republican outrages.* They will also benefit—each of them—from the decrease in crime and inflation, a happy stock market, the end of the broken border, peace in the Middle East, low gas prices, the ability of their daughters to compete in sports, and so on. We all know the list.

The new, improved Democratic Party will of course describe these accomplishments as late-appearing benefits of the Biden-Harris administration.

That’s how it goes, but for the moment I am happy to recall the words of my muse, Mohandas Gandhi, who told off the British thus: “You have been guests in our house a long while. It is time for you to leave.”

Inherit the Wind

How many very bad things are there that we do! But if we were to attempt to reform all our bad ways at once, we should never do any good thing. I am not strong enough to put the world right, and I doubt if you are.

—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875)

There are enormities incident to growth and those incident to decay, and they are not dissimilar. In both cases, the afflicted society seems to function by tropism understood as right reason. This, when challenged, is defended by the fallback position of right feeling: in growth, boosterism; in decline, justice.

The positions feel so obvious to those holding them at the time that to question them is not understood as legitimate debate, but rather as madness, ethnocentrism—or today, racism or demonic possession.

Film is mass entertainment. Why would producers distribute that which they did not intend to appeal to the mass? Would a manufacturer of soap do so, or those of breakfast cereals? All merchants appeal to prejudice. This is, in fact, the meaning of merchandising. Watching old films, we are amazed at the folly of the ancient hairstyles and automobiles, and the squeamish are as shocked by the old racial epithets as would our predecessors have been by our contemporary obscenities and blasphemies.

The philosopher, then, might be one capable of assessment of his time as if a stranger, not from a far-off land, but from another time, or from no time at all—independent, as it were, of the influence of the mass.

Current mass entertainment promotes extraordinary theories, inviting the consumers to applaud the filmmakers and themselves for the courage to go against the mob. This is recognizable as the universal phenomenon of preadolescent rebellion. Rebellion against an implacable, irrational foe (parents or society) is felt as heroism. But heroism, of course, can only be individual. The adolescent, then, celebrates independence by another act of submission to the group. Only the group’s identity is changed.

Rebel Without a Cause (1955) is the story of a troubled youth, played by James Dean, who rebels against his parents in various ways that we today would find puerile. At the end of the film, he tearfully confronts his parents, explaining that he is upset because they do not understand him.

Today’s audience would see his antics as those of a thwarted toddler. The right thinking of 1955 nodded sagely at his sad plight, but, pressed, they could not name it. They were moved not by the script or performance’s verity, but by its attraction as a newfound engine of inclusion: the invitation to a shared sententiousness. The compound, mass entertainment, must be understood as homage not to the noun but to the modifier. This is revealed by its industry name: product.

But what of a simple, lighthearted comedy? Can this not be free of appeal to contemporary prejudice? One does not see how.

Television and film comedies of the 1950s portrayed Dad as a buffoon and Mom as a patient solon, just a-waiting the final interchange, which would reveal her wisdom. The Left, having long considered “housewife” objectionable, now advances beyond indictment of “wife” to that of “woman.”*

Contemporary comedies can no more be free of the form’s inherent menu of courtship, incompatibility, adultery, misunderstanding, than could Plautus. The form remains, but the characters—those indicted and those applauded—wear contemporary clothes.*

The bad king of Elizabethan melodrama becomes the wicked lord of Victorian fiction, and the corporation of today. A 1950 dad, upset because Junior didn’t do his homework, becomes today’s “nonbirthing” parent, misunderstanding his teenager’s demand to be addressed as “they.” Courtship comedies, then and now, are identical save for the gender identity or assigned sex of the characters. The popular endorsement of this froth comes, again both then and now, from immersion in the community of the like-minded.

In 1950, boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl with the ancient dodges and gags was a community celebration of the shared truths of marriage and parenthood; today they appeal to a mass endorsement of dissolution. Sex change, abortion, and homosexuality, whatever else they may be, are not a celebration of the nuclear family—its raison d’être the preservation of the parents’ gene pool, and thus the integrity of the tribe. To assert that they are not interrelated is a sign not of social disintegration, but of the mass preference for social disintegration.

We are herd creatures and fear the Other and the night, which is to say powerlessness. We are so conditioned to seek group protection that, in the absence of the threat of the Other, the group must confect one (of myth) in order to function. See global warming, systemic racism, white supremacy.

With all the goodwill in the world (and who possesses it?) we can seek but cannot find protection in globalism, one-worldism, environmentalism and so on. These are attractively rational motives, but their practices so demonstrably absurd that the so-constituted group must confect ever new and exaggerated threats and practices, or else fear disunity.

A society cannot devolve into globalism without prosperity, since the nuclear family can’t be found objectionable or absurd prior to its success in producing prosperity.* The prosperity, in both cases, diminishes the cohesive threat (racism, poverty, invasion) and replaces it with a notional one.

Energy devoted to this moot threat, though, weakens the society, inviting aggression and hastening an eventual dissolution. The cycle is immutable. The Hindus call it the wheel.

The New Zealander

The 1968 film Planet of the Apes ends with the then-shocking shot of a half-submerged Statue of Liberty, revealing that the future dystopian world was none other than our own. The revelation has been part of Western consciousness for quite some time. The Bible continuously warns that if the land does not have its Sabbaths the Lord will impose them. It is a fixture of Western consciousness that someday the West, like every other civilization, will die.

Every Victorian reader understood allusions to The New Zealander, a rhetorical figure in Thomas Macaulay’s 1840 essay. He is a traveler to a long-vanished civilization and gazes uncomprehendingly on the ruins of St. Paul’s Cathedral. See also Shelley’s “Traveler in an Antique Land,” at the pediment of the statue of the Great Ozymandias, King of Kings, of which “Nothing beside remains,” etc. “The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Marx believed that capitalism was a necessary stage of decay, from which communism could come into being. We see his prediction proved correct, in Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, and now in the United States. But his vision was of decay-into-perfection, rather than into chaos, savagery, and dissolution, which we see to be the case.

*  *  *

It may seem a boon to have “all knowledge” at our disposal. But culturally, we so assured, then have no need to refer to it, and if knowledge is to be found only as a commercial offering, it is inevitable that it will be finessed in commercial interests and their conjunctions with political defenders.

The universality of the computer is eliminating the bookstore, the library, the newspaper, and the book itself. Censorship is the inevitable, but not final, threat. If we, unlike Marx, extend our progression, we may see that having put all information (however and by whomever that is defined) on one destructible device, its destruction will mean that of All Information. Here the two genius technologies of the twentieth century must eventually combine to eradicate Western civilization—the computer to do away with books, and nuclear war to destroy the computer.

Marx stopped too soon in his equation, for if force was necessary to replace capitalism with communism, it would be necessary to ensure its continuation, which is to say that his objection to the distribution of goods by the Strong would again put the Strong—though in different costumes—in power. Tsar Nicholas was replaced by Stalin, and Batista by Castro. The Philosopher King was not on the ballots as there were no ballots. The people were “saved” through the imposition of a force—still necessary after their unconvinced salvation.

In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 book, Fahrenheit 451, the firemen of the future exist to set fire to books, the reading or possession of which is a crime. Books are today being censored and banned by protocommunist forces, and soon these will take to their burning, just as today they burn flags. The joy of their licensed rage is augmented by their unity with a zeitgeist, or time-spirit.

We might understand this as an era-specific fashion (for example, bureaucrats replacing elected officials) of behavior and thought, one that is capable of elaborating or negating a previous state (short skirts/long skirts/short skirts), in effect a cycle. But from a greater remove, the zeitgeist can be seen as a progression. Here, however, the quiddities of politics or fashion appear as the result of human reason, or indeed genius. Civilization, being an organism, evolves at length through growth toward its own death and dissolution.

Someday we will be gone, and the monuments we have built will be one with those we have desecrated. Even those books that might remain will share the fate of the little plastic phones. How are we to behave while we’re here? It’s no wonder that our operating manual, or quick-start guide, the Bible, is denigrated by anarchists and dismissed as absurd by intellectuals. They are both on the same team, unconsciously in the service of acceleration.

Sir Walter Scott wrote that the sword outwears the sheath, as the heart outwears the breast, and all that lives must breathe, and love itself take rest. Our contemporary Tom Ropelewski similarly concluded his 1990 film, Madhouse, with Kirstie Alley saying that “after the nuclear war, only two things will remain, cockroaches and houseguests.” A Talmudic interpretation: the houseguest here metaphorically stands in for the final remnants of human kind, and had Ropelewski filmed a sequel, they would be dead, and the cockroach, the true New Zealander, would exclaim, “I thought they’d never leave.”

Civilizations age and die. It’s acknowledged in one of the most beloved charades of wokeism: apologies to (selected) preliterate civilizations that once were based in the area now inhabited by the apologists.

What, however, would the enlightened have happen? Their 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.

Do homo sapiens seek out descendants of Neanderthals and apologize? At some point any claim to primogeniture must be subject to some law—which is to say, a template for the settlement of disputes.

The common-law Rule Against Perpetuities forbids the creation of future interests in a property that would vest beyond twenty-one years after the lifetimes of those living at the creation of the interest (Wikipedia).

The seventeenth-century rule was created to limit the ability of those drawing wills to control by “dead hand” (mortmain) the actions of those inheriting, and to offset the passage by inheritance of large estates beyond one generation or two. If, that is, the Haida Indians specified that no one in what eventually became Seattle could live other than by seining salmon, the Rule Against Perpetuities would free the Seattleites from the restriction.

*  *  *

The call for “reparations” is thuggery. It’s the suggestion that those in power be free to strong-arm wealth and redistribute it according to the Paper Bag Test. The apologists want to add a ceremony at the beginning of a meeting, to replace the once-traditional prayer. The apology, then, must be a prayer, and I believe it is. Why would the woke pray to a vanished people for forgiveness? As they intuit a solidarity with them. A more sanguine writer might suggest they pray not for forgiveness but for guidance.

Seattle is now distributing hard drugs and paraphernalia gratis, to any requesting them. New York is importing illegals and housing them in hotels, and the governor of California wants to pay “unemployment benefits” to illegal immigrants. The country has been dying. It is no mere coincidence that, in Biden, it elected and abided a leader in the last stages of senility, and devoted time and treasure to denying the fact, and savaging the observant.

Future generations, with a kibbitzer’s interest in our history, will opine we were as foolish, brutal, wrong, and intermittently fortunate as any other lost civilization. We will be understood as one not only with Nineveh and Tyre, but with the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific Northwest, doing the best we could while contending not only with natural depredations, but with our own nature.

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?

However, something must remain, and the prayers of the woke candlemakers that appeal to ancestors may be understood as the wish that the remnant Be Worthy (if only of its own right to self-respect, if not of generational continuation).

The Left’s ferocious proclamation of the primacy of abortion, of transsexualism, and of nonprocreation is the propitiatory prayer: “I will forgo my right to progeny: but spare me.” Their prayer is the acknowledgment that Something Is Terribly Wrong.

People in a state of panic (as opposed to mere “fear”) will choose any possible proximate cause. To Leftist Israelis it is not the savagery of Iran and the world’s rediscovery of Jew hatred; it’s Netanyahu. To the American liberal, it’s not the decay of the cities, but Trump. To the world at large, it’s the Jews.

The abused child always sides with the abuser against the innocent parent, as the innocent parent has proved him or herself too weak or unwilling to offer protection.

The dying civilization, like the dying individual, must display symptoms consistent with those of its predecessors in decline. Machiavelli writes that the cure of a disease in its preliminary stages would be simple if a diagnosis could be correctly made, but when the disease progresses sufficiently to have “declared itself,” the cure is difficult.

The New Zealander might endorse the ancient wisdom that wars are fought over geography and inspired by changes in climate. He might observe that the twenty-first century’s distribution of national geography was, for a moment, fairly fixed, and that battles over Land were then enjoyed to a large extent as nostalgia (see Israel and Ukraine), leaving climate as excuse and catalyst for human derangement.

Chicken Little screamed, “The sky is falling, run for your lives.” All schoolchildren delighted in the idiocy of her claim, inspired by a pinecone falling on her head. More adult appreciation is that if in fact it were falling, there would be no point in flight.

We are not witnessing but in fact participating in a millennial, civilizational reorganization. We are too close to understand it easily, save as the interplay of comprehensible forces: Left versus Right, Islam versus Christianity, Communism versus Capitalism. The attendant allegiances and enthusiasms will be as puzzling to future scholars as the internecine wars of Christianity over points of doctrine, and Greta Thunberg’s historic truancy as a “response to climate change” understood as analgesic: treating intellectual challenges by curtailing education.

What is the “cure” for our civilizational decline? There is no “cure,” for it is an organic progression, and we can no more return to the Healthy Unionized Working Class of American Industry of the Fifties than we can to the slash-and-burn cultivation techniques of the Australian Aboriginals. But we may, rationally, choose to order our government and our lives according to basic, moral principles. Why not?

The Long Way Around the Barn

Artists are few among many; that I understand. But bear in mind, Speusippus: while you, sitting in front, are watching our illusion, we are looking at reality. While you see four men, we see fifteen thousand. Twenty years I’ve played to them. One learns a little.

—Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo (1966)

The revelers on a transatlantic crossing are divided by class, but all classes are provided for, clothed, fed, and offered amusements, those even of the lowest class in what might be considered comfort, if not luxury, in situations less curated than that of shipboard.

Each group, among itself, will extemporize internal status, and the award of positions. All will discover the jester, the wit, the proud beauty, the arbiter of games, the recently bereaved for whom a match must be found, the wise man, the enigma, the boor.

First class will award special points for great wealth, and steerage, for military virtue; second class, perhaps, for fraternal, professional, or religious affiliation. Each will create in-jokes, passwords, and instant memories of the first night on board, the time X got so drunk, the funny thing the old woman said, and so on.

Should the ship founder, the three passenger clans will instantly unite in the tribe of survivors. All previous awards of position, status, and exemption will be revoked as the new order, necessary for group survival, supervenes. The jokester will not be needed in the lifeboat; vast wealth will no longer be deferred to, its very status enjoyed by its lifelong possessor likely unfitting him for the harsh realities of either service or command in the boat. Ship’s sailors or officers will take charge of the lifeboats—and in their absence, an ex-sailor; admiration for the capable rower will displace that once given to the now-useless wit.

Wrecked on a deserted coral atoll, the group will again reorganize around those talents useful for hunting, building, and defense.

Those thus skilled may be unfit for group direction, and so a command structure will coalesce around one whose particular talent—perhaps only now discovered—is for direction. Should the group flourish under him, his children may inherit command and the newly stable civilization employ its leisure in extemporizing the farmer, the fisher, the fighter, then the storyteller, the wit, the wise fool, and so on.

If the new civilization prospers, it expands. New clans will form in the newly subdued areas, evolving around the various geographical necessities—the farmers’ needs differ from those of the fishers and the hunters—and trade and other rivalries develop. Meanwhile, the tribe as a whole will be weakened by the decreased, foolish, or, indeed, absent direction of its now-hereditary rulers, and the inevitable formation of both political parties and cabals.

*  *  *

I’ve always understood that I am something of a fool. This is not to disparage my various accomplishments, attributable to talent—which was free—or a work ethic, which was largely just a horror of poverty.

I inherited this last from my father, a first-generation American raised during the Depression by a single mother. He got out of the Army after the war, went to law school on the GI Bill, and was successful in the one-horse law practice he built.

Celebration of a golden age, or a “greatest generation,” identifies an organism’s senescence, that is, its approaching death. These glorious periods do, of course, appear in any healthy organism; it is not their appearance but rather their proud, contemporary acknowledgment that announces the decline.

I caught the wave at the top.

I was that generation’s beneficiary, as they fed me, clothed me, and housed me, and assumed that I was going to college to learn a trade (as they could conceive of no other reason to make the trip) and learn to be independent. Further, after graduation, they would have fulfilled their obligations, and good luck to me.

Since I was not a cripple, I was free to learn a trade, get a job, or starve. It occurred to few of my generation that we would continue through life as a charge on our parents.

The bacillus of the liberal arts education, however, had spread into our newly bourgeois milieu. The successful at my excellent high school went in droves to the Ivy League to get into the professions. I was not of their number, as I never opened a schoolbook. But, lo, there were alternative colleges that did not require grades or test scores, and which promised an environment in which students could “grow,” “exchange ideas,” and “be exposed” to something or other not only the worth but the identity of which would be obvious to the right-thinking.

I got out of college a wreck, unskilled, and unemployable. Back in Chicago, neither camp of my split family wanted anything to do with me, and it never occurred to me that they would or should. I applied for a job with the Chicago Public Schools as a substitute teacher but was refused, as I did not have a degree in education.

However, ancient wisdom taught that if you can’t get work in Chicago, you can’t get work anywhere. I’d worked every summer through high school and college in a truck factory, in a canning plant, on a Great Lakes oreboat, in a summer camp kitchen, as a window washer, and so on—getting work was no mystery to me, and, as my lack of education barred me not only from the careers, but from any job offering advancement, I took menial jobs with thanks.

I worked nights as an office cleaner (two dollars an hour) and then, for a year, as a cabdriver, which I enjoyed very much. I was a waiter in a gay restaurant and taught a drama class in two state prisons (a waste of everyone’s time). In my mid-twenties I began earning a living as a writer and have been doing so for fifty years. I wrote for the magazines, for movies and television, and have written various books. But throughout, my preferred medium—and, I thought, the best use of my time—was the theater.

That form, closest to religious observance, offered the best opportunity to shock and awe, for the audience had suspended its judgment in exchange for the promise of a good time, a good cry, a laugh, or a gasp. This, to me, was the surprise train set under the orphan’s Christmas tree. The class clown’s life sentence, “You will never amount to anything,” was proved to be my ticket out: “You will never amount to anything, as everything to you is a joke.”

Well, everything, to the young writer, was not a joke. I wrote many comedies, and dramas, and a few tragedies—these last the dead opposite of the humorous. And though lacking the power to amuse, they had the potential to content, for they (exactly like the joke) conclusively solved a problem the audience hadn’t even known existed.

The problem was the riddle of human nature, the presence of evil, the possibility of good, and the exploitability of the repressive impulse. Uncovering the progression in drama, and especially in tragedy, freed the audience from its domination. Forever, no, but for the two hours’ progress of the play, their trip home, and occasionally, perhaps, when they recalled the experience.

My job was the formulation and then resolution of a near-mathematic equation. The unraveling of the progression: we think we do good, we try to do good, we do evil and call it good, we cease to call it anything at all, knowing ourselves good, and inevitably cause chaos.

Creating and solving a tragedy was, to me, like a problem in chess: once suggested, it must be worked out exactly, played to the conclusion, with no remainder.*

A lifetime working these equations might be called a therapy, if my particular spiritual or mental situation was considered a problem or pathology. But it was perhaps just being alive.

*  *  *

It may be, however, that I lived through an extraordinary resolution of long-forming social forces, like those of a tsunami, and I am no more capable of assessing them as separate from my own mortality than is the drowning man in his particular egoism.

A third explication, not exclusive of the other two, is that I was born with an exaggerated curiosity about human behavior, and my astonishment and chagrin incited me to first write drama and, much later, nonfiction, verging toward the political.

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.

The search for dispositive wisdom, we learn in Proverbs, will bring sorrow—Christ had it as “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” the tension between wisdom and sorrow underlies the Judeo-Christian culture that has been the West, and the popular attempts at the resolution that are the Western drama.

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.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to my assistant and editor, Pam Susemiehl; and to my agent and friend, David Vigliano.

About the Author

DAVID MAMET was born in Chicago in 1947. He worked there as a cabdriver, a shill in a telephone boiler room, and a contributing editor of Playboy’s Oui magazine.

In 1974, he, William H. Macy, Patricia Cox, and Steve Schachter formed Chicago’s St. Nicholas Theatre, which produced many of his early plays. In 1985, he and Mr. Macy founded New York’s Atlantic Theater Company.

He is the resident cartoonist of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Also by David Mamet

Nonfiction

Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood

Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

The Secret Knowledge

South of the Northeast Kingdom

Jafsie and John Henry

Make-Believe Town

A Whore’s Profession

On Directing Film

True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor

Three Uses of the Knife

Theatre

Bambi vs. Godzilla

The Wicked Son

Writing in Restaurants

The Cabin

Some Freaks

Fiction

The Village

The Old Religion

Three War Stories

Chicago

The Diary of a Porn Star

Some Recollections of St. Ives

Copyright

the disenlightenment. Copyright © 2025 by David Mamet. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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* Also see Marguerite Higgins, Martha Gellhorn, Ernie Pyle, and Vasily Grossman, reporting on the Soviet’s war for Red Star.

* Historically, the magician’s female assistant.

* Frederick Marryat, in A Diary in America (1837), brilliantly observes that there are no such things as countries, only governments.

* We accept that the owner of an NFL team will bequeath his ownership to his descendants, but even they, happy in their enjoyment of primogeniture, would not hire a quarterback solely because his father was a Heisman winner. (See also the Greatest Generation and its inevitable aftermath, announced by the popular acceptance of the name.)

* Kaiser Wilhelm ceremonially reviewed his troops when it was fine. His devotees referred to it as Kaiserwetter (Kaiser weather). Tolstoy reports in War and Peace that of Tsar Alexander the saying was “It never rains on the Tsar.” Ted Sorenson, in Dallas, on the morning of November 22, 1963, called the beautiful day “Kennedy Weather.” It is unfortunately human nature to ascribe to The Powerful superhuman abilities. The elect of Camelot’s offhand and unexamined phrase reveals their susceptibility to the delusion.

* See: “He beat him like a red-headed stepson who wet the bed.”

* Systemic racism, transphobia, white supremacy, and microagression are concepts as mythic as the Hammer of Thor: they may be alleged, but cannot be discovered.

* Ulysses S. Grant retired from office broke, in debt, and dying of cancer. He enlisted Mark Twain to market (and perhaps to write, certainly to edit) his memoirs.

* “It would have done him a great deal of good to go get killed.” Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915

* French partouze (orgy).

* The inspired emerging as art, the rest, as something quite other.

* It may occur to some readers—and certainly to all detractors—to ask who the hell I think I am. I am reasonably sure of the answer and of its accuracy, I’m a playwright. It’s been my job, for many years, to observe or imagine the unthinkable, wonder why it was taking place, and reason my way to a conclusion entertaining to an audience.

* Cf. the Tower of Babel.

* Consider: If a disturbed young adult came to us, as Wise Aunt Molly or Uncle Phil, we would ask what he was worried about. How would we react if he answered, “Global warming, police brutality, systemic racism, transphobia, and my fear I may be the wrong sex.” What good counselor would not then say, “I’m going to get you a cup of chamomile tea, and then tell me what’s really troubling you”?

* As there is vast money in higher numbers, it is impossible that someone is not cooking the books, through bribery, computer manipulation, or outright lying for financial or political effect. Why not? Who checks the numbers? See, as per taste, the Oscars and the 2020 presidential election.

* Both for the direct object and for the group itself.

* In 2002 the federal government established the Department of Homeland Security. No American previously had ever referred to or thought of his country as the homeland. We heard the foreign concept in the German Das Heimat, and the Russian Rodina (motherland).

“Homeland” was the prettifying of a concept that previously was not understood to require decoration.

On July 17, 2024, Sergeant William Pekrul, a ninety-eight-year-old D-Day veteran, spoke at the Republican National Convention. “They say America is an idea,” he said, “but America is more than an idea. . . .” He paused, and I tried to anticipate the upcoming platitude that would mar his beautiful speech.

“It’s more than an idea,” he said.” “It’s our home.”

With profound gratitude to Sergeant Pekrul for a semantic corrective.

* Those, effectively, holding their children in thrall —a situation once known as kidnapping.

* Psychoanalysis holds that the analysand suffers because of some repressed (forgotten) instance of abuse, the trauma of which will vanish when the individual and instance are named. We must note the stunning resemblance to voodoo.

* Ultra-liberal wealthy Californians voted for environmental protections (for the Delta smelt, for the untrimmed parklands, etc.); for fiscal policies leaching money for fire department operations, and spending it on DEI, for hiring practices for first responders, prioritizing race and gender over merit and competence; and in January 2025 the reservoirs were empty, the combustible parkland blazed, the fire departments were water-starved, and the $17+ million stripped from the L.A.F.D. for operations was spent on DEI. “Creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the community are (Fire) Chief Crowley’s priorities.” (From the L.A.F.D. website.) The ultra-liberal voters of coastal California, many of their homes and businesses destroyed, received a demonstration of Milton Friedman’s “Whenever told that some government program is going to help this or that person or group, we must ask, ‘Whom is it going to hurt?’” Their votes for protecting coyote habitat and the snail darter destroyed their communities.

* Kamala Harris’s slogan “Joy” was the pathetic reductio ad nauseam of the tactic.

* “In Unity Is Strength” seems to be strength’s endorsement. It is actually an appeal to the mass understanding of the corollary: individuality is weakness. The seemingly anodyne slogan functions through awakening the individual’s fear of isolation—that is, through suggestion of his powerlessness.

* “We are the change,” “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Wisdom from the Obama era.

* I do not mention the contemporary rediscovery of racism, and its perpetual use, ostensibly as a means of control of the hated Other, but actually for manipulation of the incited. Screaming “Palestine Must Be Free” is the delight of immunity from the oppression of the Sixth Commandment.

* Cf. the New York courts’ show trial of President Trump, a menace so dangerous that suspension of due process was presented as an act of common sense.

* The citizen, here, is in the position of a tenant farmer or sharecropper: he is permitted to work and retain a portion of his income as long as he does not offend the landowner.

* An example of the first: “I have a dream,” Dr. King. Of the second: “We are ten days away from the fundamental transformation of the United States,” said Barack Obama.

* Who sent her to France for the pilot’s license denied to American Blacks.

* Nonparents do not realize that their responsibility is coupled with fear. The early years are occupied by fear of accidental death: the pot left boiling on the stove, the corkscrew on the kitchen table, the pill bottle cap on the nightstand are all potential sources of tragedy.

The parent asks: Why is the kid invariably drawn to the most dangerous objects?

Answer: Because he senses the parents’ interest in them.

* How did the teacher learn it? Through a book.

* See also the internet’s delight of famous contemporary sitcoms screened without the laff-track. They just aren’t funny.

* Teachers unions view math curricula denigrating “the correct answer” as white supremacy, thus no longer merely lessening but eliminating their workload.

* We are all animals, and whatever we may profess, learn, and practice those things that allow us to survive, a dog given table scraps will beg continually. Why would it not?

* Drama seems to be the presentation of conflicting ideas by antagonists for the entertainment of an audience. It is not. It is actually the depiction of opposed divisions, misapprehensions, or incomprehension on the part of folks as flawed and foolish as ourselves.

* There is a raft of writers: Ken Anderson, Perce Pearce, Homer Brightman, Winston Hibler, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Harry Reeves, Joe Rinaldi, Ted Sears, Maurice Rapf. I will not conflate the effort with those suffering from a paucity of creators, for example War and Peace, the Bible, and so on, but merely comment that while a camel may be a horse put together by a committee, I sincerely doubt that Tolstoy unaided could have written “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.”

* We are entitled to and require defense against our own biddability. California has modernized its legislature through “ballot initiatives”—that is, plebiscites, allowing wealth or political power to incite the voters to vote on any old thing right now, winner-take-all. And one may see the result.

* Alger Hiss, a Roosevelt Democrat, was one of the founding leaders of the United Nations. He was convicted in 1950 of lying to Congress about his career as a communist spy.

* Transsexual rights activists explain that human beings have always been born into the wrong sex, and it is the greatest boon that medical science is finally able to address their predicament.

* Children, blind from birth, teach each other that pressing the eyeballs can produce a sort of pattern in the brain, allowing the child to say, “I can see!”

* This is, in fact, the definition of an airplane.

* Hoary theatrical story. The play flops, and the playwright blames the audience, calling them stupid and uneducated. The director says, “Call in the audience tomorrow for a ten a.m. rehearsal.”

* The Film Sense (1943) and The Film Form (1949) by Sergei Eisenstein; Film Technique and Film Acting (1929) by Vsevolod Pudovkin; The Theatre in Life (1927) by Nikolai Evreinov.

* Some might award that statuette to Greek drama, but it was only an outgrowth of the Story Around the Campfire. The primal hunter returned and embellished his triumph to entertain the clan. Perhaps, from time to time, he pressed his listeners into service. “Now you, Jim, stand up, and you’re going to be the lion . . . Growl when I nod.” There you have it.

* September 13, 2023.

* See the particularly delightful Night of the Lepus, where giant mutant rabbits terrorize Arizona.

* A prime article of liberal faith is the crime of colonialism—a horror so bad, centuries of cessation cannot cleanse it. But what are the exploration of space sagas but reiterations of the human desire for expansion, the same swell bushwah Columbus told Isabella?

* I mention the liberal exodus from the failed blue states to red, which they then vote blue.

* The ability to make a rational determination of cause and effect free from propaganda and doctrinal exigencies was denounced by the communists as “mechanistic thinking.”

* Rebecca West pointed out that periods demanding sexual continence and those promoting promiscuity contain the same amount of sexual intercourse.

* Near universal among adolescents is the daydream of persecution.

The practitioner here dramatizes himself as alone, and overlooked by all forces save those who want his destruction. In youth these are, of course, his parents.

The fantasy’s persistence into later life identifies the dreamer as unwilling to attempt maturity—that is, the abandonment of belief in an overriding control. Racism, sexism, and capitalism here act in loco parentis, allowing for the self-award of status as martyr or champion—enjoyed alternatively, or in concert.

See Les Misérables, The Count Of Monte Cristo, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, the horrific art of Kafka’s The Trial, and, in politics, the sad, concerned kvetching of the ACLU and the less-ruly champions of social justice.

It is not only paranoids who may have enemies; their enemies may have them too. Their identity: the paranoids.

* A procedure historically known as a coup.

* Eugene Debs ran for president in 1912. He ran again in 1920 while a prisoner in the Atlanta penitentiary. Current political parallels will no doubt suggest themselves.

* Race, Broadway, 2009.

* Eve was seduced into eating the apple in defiance of God’s command, but the true Original Sin was Adam’s. God asks why he is hiding. Adam lies and says it’s because he is naked. God asks who told him so, and Adam says, “The woman you gave me. She gave me what I ate from the tree.” These are the first recorded words of human speech. Adam lies to God, blames Him for creating a Woman, and then denounces her.

* What sane eighteen-year-old would indenture himself to repay hundreds of thousands of dollars to universities, which did not enlarge his ability to make a living? What sane middle-class family would do so?

* The American Medical Association has recommended that doctors no longer include the designation “male or female” on birth certificates. In the sixties, affronted adults said of longhair males, “You can’t tell the girls from the boys.” I would reply, “Funny. I didn’t have that problem.”

* This is why Milton Friedman reduces the problem of government to that of taxes. Government can only spend that which it collects, and its only constitutional (rational) operations are expense in those things the taxpayer needs but for which he cannot pay (roads, sewers, defense, streetlights). All other expenses must be on that which nobody needs. If a need were present, somebody in this entrepreneurial land would fill it.

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.

Government officials forced to describe their expenditures in cost-benefit terms will be unable to allege “good works” or “global salvation” as the catalyst transforming theft or nonsense into public service. Donald Trump was the sole president since Reagan to treat government with the same approach we employ around the kitchen table; it was his refusal to indulge in alchemy that was so compelling that his opponents were reduced to denouncing him as a witch.

* Seventeenth-century sick young girls screamed “witchcraft.” Their like today shriek “microaggression.” What is the difference? There is none. They are both allegations that cannot be disproved. They are alleged by those claiming a supernatural ability to detect that hidden to the unawakened mind.

They cannot be disproved as they are imaginary; the accused explaining themselves are, in the mind of the convinced populace, only indicting themselves, for who but a tool of the Devil (a white supremacist) would deny the existence of this profound evil (microaggression)? Once accused, there is no defense, for the populace, which accepted the existence of the crime, is and knows itself to be complicit. Their shame must be suppressed. It is suppressed by righteousness.

* The sports bettor here is in the same position as the snakebit liberal—self-reduced to biddability by his knowledge of his intellectual superiority. In the bettor, his conviction of analytic ability, or inside dope; in the liberal, the superadded accelerant of assurance induced by academic certification—which is to say he considers himself superior to mechanic wisdom because he’s paid to have been told that is the case. Here he is, curiously, one with the racetrack bettor who paid a tout for a tip.

* Pearl White’s serial The Perils of Pauline cashed in on her ability to hang on to them (the derivation of the term cliffhanger).

* The film studios at first bought the independent film product and, with the coming of the dawn, created their own in-house, “independent” operations (Focus, Fox Searchlight, etc.).

* A film budgeted at $4 million and presold to distributors for $5 million has just made a 25 percent profit for its investors—before a frame of film has been exposed.

* A laudable outlier among unions is the Teamsters, who allege nothing at all—their position, “Pay up, or buy a donkey, baby, cause your gear ain’t moving by truck.”

* Please note that a scab is a nonunion worker who violates a picket line, agreeing to a salary cut. The industrial union is also unable to tolerate the opposite: an individual worker who prizes his contribution sufficiently to demand higher pay than his coworkers.

* Conversation with a Liberal Chicagoan: D.M. How can you support the government of a city where children are slaughtering each other every day? Answer: Don’t worry, it’s contained. See also the Pacific Palisades.

* 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.

As liberals derive a benefit from sympathy, and all benefits must have a cost, we may ask: What is the cost of sympathy? If, to the individual, it is not sorrow, and inducement either to action or to wise acceptance, it must be repression. That repressed may be knowledge of hypocrisy (in that one does not actually care) or cowardice (in that he will not act). 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 Left’s control of its co-opted mass is Pavlovian. The liberal is informed that Something Is Wrong Somewhere (a safe assertion), that the new, exciting threat is the work of evil folk, and that he may enjoy his moral superiority with no exertion further than supplying those who brought the treat with votes, money, or compliance. Having once accepted and enjoyed the treat, his subsequent reactions to its presentation will be automatic and independent of any assertions worth, or indeed probability. The liberal is as unlikely to question his inducements to rage as Pavlov’s salivating dog is to ask, “What’s for dinner?”

* In his July 11, 2024, press conference, President Biden alluded to his support of unions and stressed, “Unions, not labor. Unions.”

Q. What is the purpose of unions, rather than the protection and welfare of labor?

A. Unions are organizations which support the Democratic Party, and labor can do the other thing, as it has, during his term.

The president also proudly announced (several times) that during the Trump administration corporate profits had risen and during his own they had declined thus indicting the profit motive. “From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

* See the Left’s unexampled horror of Trump.

* Although it is possible to force their repression, which is another thing altogether.

* It’s called codependence.

* Could it be done with decency and compassion? Of course, but in the absence of a concrete, accomplishable goal, there can be neither compassion nor decency—only their simulacrum.

* American films, until the 1960s, showed married couples in twin beds. Married couples do not sleep in twin beds, as we know. What, then, was the farce in support of? The Breen Office administered the Motion Picture Production Code (1934–68). The industry’s adoption of the code was a move to placate a supposed middle-American outrage at sex in films. The shift to good clean fun produced thirty years of drivel.

* William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia, Kansas, wrote that the saddest phrase was that which followed the confession of all Liberalism’s failures: “and yet” Indeed. But accepting the tragedy that the phrase ends there is political maturity.

* The process here is exactly that of the computer projection. We ask the computer for an answer. The computer, however, is observing nothing, and prognosticates only in response to inputs, which can only have been chosen according to the understandings and prejudices of the programmers. Here, as in the survey, the questions suggest, if they do not actually determine, the response.

* 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.

* First proposed by Samuel Butler in the dystopian comedy Erewhon (1872).

* “He felt a kind of solid impassivity he had not known before. There were unpleasant realities in the world, and previously he had averted his eyes from them, or changed the subject, or made excuses for what had occurred. He had imagined that his was an acceptable strategy in life—in fact, that it was a more humane strategy. He no longer believed that.” Michael Crichton, State of Fear, 2004.

* “The chief characteristic of pandemic psychosis is its tendency to spread like some physical plague. It flies from mind to mind, just as influenza or small-pox spreads in bodily infection, and shows itself as a dynamic mental contagion.

“There are two dominant characteristics of this type of mental contagion. The first is a complete surrender of the normal reasoning factor to the emotional or sentimental factor. This is typical of the thought processes of children, some types of criminals, savages, and the lower classes of certain races. In all these the reasoning factor is not sufficiently developed in its control of the faculties, and common-sense is superseded, or stampeded, by irrational sentimental or emotional impulses. The second characteristic is imitativeness, and this natural faculty of imitativeness, so strongly marked in certain criminal types, is one of the oldest, most primitive, attributes of mankind.

“The aberrations of pandemic psychosis amount to a reversal of the normal logical processes of thought, and this extends not only to the basic hysterical delusion, but to all the tactical methods by which the affected try to convince a critical world that they alone are right.” H. B. C. Pollard, The Secret Societies of Ireland, 1922.

* What do I mean, “to succeed”? The painter may frame a blank canvas and convince, fool, or bribe a curator into hanging it, under the handy theory that it exists to promote discourse. But a play can only succeed in pleasing an audience by holding their attention for the length of the performance, and then setting them free with a sense of completion. We who have spent the effort to go to a museum might possibly nod sagely at a blank canvas or icon floating in urine. But who, on leaving, ever discussed, or pondered, the experience?

* That is, one independent from institutional support.

* The blues and its stepchild, jazz, are purely improvisation. They have become, through Black America and then the American recording industry, the music of the world. Originally and in their thus perfect form, they are one with the music of Bach. His fugues, to a musician, are obviously improvisations transcribed. Like them, the blues reinvents the Western conception of music through freedom from the eight-tone scale. Bach and the blues still resolve according to the cycle of fifths but derive their beauty from the appearance of accidentals, largely conflating the major and the minor scale. Much like dramatic tragedy. Some genius said that anyone can laugh at an actor, dressed as a little old lady, falling down an open manhole, but to a comic, it’s got to be a real little old lady.

* My wife’s fellow musicians pointed out that Schoenberg wrote, not in the diatonic, but in the much more tony dodecaphonic scale, and then fell about, chortling at my ignorance.

* In 1949, Dr. Ernest Jones, a colleague of Freud, wrote Hamlet and Oedipus, a great read conflating the two ripping yarns. He walks the cat back to the primordial urge (perhaps) of the son to replace Dad in Mom’s bed. The Greek is voted deformed by his folks and abandoned on a mountaintop; the Dane is (similarly) cross-decked to college.

Old Hamlet’s Ghost can be understood as the nagging suspicion, in the kid, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It has been, in fact, often played by the Prince himself, speaking his father’s lines in a “stage-eerie” voice. The elements of the two tales can be scrambled, inverted, and differently stressed, but they’re all there: the parents wish to get shut of the unwanted child, the child’s derangement by his abandonment, the reenactment (viewed or achieved) of the primal scene.

History, unlike the movie business, has occasionally created the odd sequel more impressive than the original (e.g., World War II). World War III, however, being waged by history’s assigns, will not resort to the previously winning invasion of Poland or Belgium. History will have moved on to create, like Sophocles, and Shakespeare, out of the notions always ready-to-hand: hatred, fear, envy, lust, and the ever-popular anti-Semitism. This is, finally, just the go-to gag-of-resort of the lazy and clueless, just like the sex scene or shoot-out in the industry film.

* No one, given a choice, will elect an evening of sermons presented as entertainment. We go only faute-de-mieux, and then as rational beings may choose to explain our disappointment and boredom as a sacrifice to propriety.

* The awesome and terrible promise of artificial intelligence is its eradication of chance, which is to say of inspiration, which is a previously unimagined connection to the Divine.

* These are examples of progressed prosperity’s result in dissatisfaction, and the resultant expenditure of wealth and effort, attempting to restore some (perhaps imagined) previous peace. This is the same phenomenon known to us all as the Tourist Complaint.

He, or she, you, and I, spends time and money for the promise of an unusual, exciting, or restorative experience. We wish to escape from our so-complicated lives, into an offered simplicity.

But the experience is “curated” by trip advisers, travel agents, guides, translators, and so on. We are in their charge and suppress the irksomeness of control by reassuring ourselves they are our friends or are otherwise delighted to serve us. We pay them for the privilege of this charade and are entitled to enjoy it; as we do the overpriced “native crafts,” trinkets, souvenirs, luxury wear, and junk we may buy on the jaunt.

This is a surrender of autonomy, however, irritation at which we must disregard, suppress, or delay. Our feelings are deferred until our return home.

Asked about the trip, we may complain, “There were too many tourists there.”

* One did not return to the coffee corner or the back porch at any and all hours of the night and day to “keep in touch.” Had we done so, of course, our family and neighbors would have, correctly, understood that we were insane.

* All these and other attempts at rationalization are attempts of the individual to retain some sort of autonomy, which is to say protection from sacrifice—in this case, of pride in our intellect.

* We may need fortitude or resolution to deal with various difficulties, but we only require courage to deal with that which we fear.

* One announcing his refusal to participate in gender politics—the gotcha game of pronouns, DEI, and so on, will be subject to the wrath of the convinced. He may be at risk of loss of community, income, or indeed, of physical assault.

Why? To the woke, he is wrong about the most basic fact of life. Not that God erred in creating two sexes, but that the individual must submerge himself in the group. His apostasy will not be tolerated. But suppose he proclaimed that the world was flat. The Galileans might engage him in a short debate, for entertainment’s sake, but though he differed with them on the most basic of physical facts, an understanding without which nothing in the world made sense, they might think his ignorance comical or sad, but they would not want to kill him.

* 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.

* A thrill, “cheesecake,” a laugh, a tear, and now, salvation.

* This is the same process of courtship, seduction, commitment, and dissatisfaction we go through every time we buy a car. The salesfolk know that no one (whatever he thinks he’s doing) walks on the lot unless he want to buy a car (be taken). The salesman doesn’t actually have to “sell” the car—the mark came on the lot to buy—he merely has to refrain from breaking the spell, and he will be credited with salesmanship. Much like current politicians who are awarded points for not falling down.

* Criminally underexploited resource.

* The Left, and the legacy media, though unable to recant, simply pivoted, literally overnight, to call for Biden’s removal as the candidate. The universal indicator of tyranny, whether on the world stage or at the dinner table, is the inability to admit error. The oppressive power’s acknowledgment of imperfection is a confession of its humanity–which is to say, its commonality with, and so responsibilities to, those it is oppressing. And those in its thrall are then free to assess its actions and their position by simple human standards. The playing cards, we recall, may be arranged in various positions, but there are only so many cards in the deck.

* The anesthesia, though it may be employed for mercantile or political effect, is not necessarily diabolical—those living by the Elevated tracks in Chicago quickly become unconscious of the racket.

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

* Characters in Victorian novels regularly complain to each other that things are warmer now—a half century before the use of fossil fuels.

* The overgrowth, the delta smelt, and the milkvetch (a weed around the power poles).

* Their outrage, perhaps, subject to moderation by the Democratic policies which destroyed their homes.

* The Cambridge Dictionary now defines a woman as “an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth”—surely a most hideous example of misogyny.

* And portray different affects, called “genders.”

* Our prosperity after World War II was so unsettling that we created, and continue to fund, an ultranational organization, existing to denounce us and our Allies.

* In tragedy, an unresolved remainder identifies the piece as mere drama, such as “Isn’t life like that?”