“America will never be the same again”. The great playwright David Mamet gives up

“In Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel, Futility, a super-ocean liner on its maiden voyage strikes an iceberg and sinks; everyone on board drowns except for thirteen. His fictional ship is called the Titan. As it leaves the harbour, it strikes and sinks a smaller vessel, just as the Titanic did fourteen years later. In Nevil Shute’s 1948 novel, No Highway, flights on the revolutionary Reindeer airliner keep crashing. No one can determine the cause. Then an eccentric scientist, Dr Scott, suggests a completely new theory: metal fatigue at a subatomic level causes the tailplane to detach. Everyone thought he was mad, until his theory was proven and he was exonerated. In ’48, metal fatigue was a fictional device invented by Shute. Three years after the book’s publication, de Havilland began flying the world’s first commercial jet airliner, the Comet. And they began to fall from the sky. Three crashed for no apparent reason. Pilot error, sabotage, bad fuel and so on: everything was suggested and ruled out. All the Comets were grounded and tested until a serious design flaw was discovered. There were cracks in the fuselage caused by a previously unsuspected phenomenon: metal fatigue.”

Thus begins a long essay by the renowned playwright David Mamet in the National Review. A Pulitzer Prize winner with a distinguished career as a Hollywood screenwriter (Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables and Danny DeVito’s Hoffa), Mamet is a figure who, moving between Broadway and Hollywood, has achieved worldwide fame. Mamet had been regarded by the American left-wing intelligentsia as one of ‘their own’, thanks to famous plays such as American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross, the crowning achievements of an extraordinary theatrical career. That was until Mamet’s ‘conversion’ to a form of visceral intolerance towards the respectability of the dominant culture. ‘Twenty years ago, a hard-hitting American wrote a play called November,’ Mamet continues. ‘On Broadway, Nathan Lane played the lead role, an inept American president running for re-election. He stands no chance, because “his poll ratings are lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol”. What’s more, he’s broke. An aide informs him that he can take home the 50,000 dollars that Big Turkey allocates to the president every year to pardon a turkey at Thanksgiving. He says: ‘Bloody hell, I’ll take the money.’ The aide continues: ‘Incidentally, this year the turkey people want a pardon for two turkeys — the main one and a spare, “just in case”.’ The president says: ‘At 50,000 each, that’s 100,000.’ The turkey bloke turns up and is told that the price of the pardons has just gone up. He refuses to pay, calls the president all sorts of losers and says the price is 50,000: take it or leave it. The president, now feeling insulted, fights back. He asks his aide if he really has the power to pardon the turkeys. He’s told he does. ‘In that case,’ he says to the turkey bloke, ‘I want 200,000,000 on my desk by breakfast, or I’ll pardon every bloody turkey in this country’. End of Act One. Act Two begins and the aide says: yes, you can pardon all the turkeys, but the Americans will eat them anyway. The President instructs his brilliant speechwriter, Bernstein, to explain to the electorate why they mustn’t eat the turkey. She begins to reflect and proposes that the public should not celebrate Thanksgiving at all—that the holiday enshrines patriarchy, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and conspicuous consumption, all under the guise of a supposedly non-governmental festival that is, in essence, a hymn to the power of the state. Does that sound familiar? My beloved Eric Hoffer, the docker-turned-philosopher, noted that the cliché ‘an artist sees the future’ is incorrect: an artist sees the present. And consider ‘Second Sight’. The Gaels and the Celts believe that the ability to see a disturbing future is a burden: it cannot be summoned or propitiated, and it heralds nothing but tragedy, inducing despair in the seer. We are also familiar with Cassandra, who had the power to foretell the future, but whose prophecies were always mocked. With the academic rewriting of history as a series of abuses and the accusations levelled against them, it is now difficult even to predict the past. In 1905, George Santayana wrote that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. After a long life, I must add: ‘as are those who do remember it’. For only those who are old enough to have lived through history can truly understand it. I do not mean that one must have suffered this or that calamity, reversal or historical outrage to understand it, but that age and intelligence — reasonably free from prejudice — can conclude, in a way that youth cannot, that perhaps ‘History’ is valuable in that it has taught us the following. As Rebecca West argued, governments are the most powerful entity, and the ‘Great Man’ theory is absurd, as Lev Tolstoy wrote. The peasant sees the smoke before he sees the locomotive and concludes that the former causes the latter; and five million Frenchmen did not march on Moscow because some chap from Corsica told them to. Yes, history will repeat itself — what else is it to do? The good-for-nothing brother-in-law, once he has borrowed money, will always come back asking for more; a Western world in turmoil will reliably massacre the Jews; and communism, promulgated by the intellectually arrogant, will always appeal to the bored rich. They will use their money to inform their ‘pets’, the working class, of their demands, and ride the wave until their moment of hegemony, when the vigilant thugs will do them in. There are only so many ways in which things can go wrong, and even a full awareness of them (and who could possibly have such an awareness?) gives one neither the power to avert catastrophe nor to convince others of its imminent arrival. Like Cassandra, the elderly observer will prophesy only to be disbelieved, for the world has moved on and his own inclination to persuade has waned, accompanied by an ever-growing conviction of the futility of debate. We grow old and die, and a population (that is, our own) does not change because people change, but because they die. Individuals who have suffered genuine childhood trauma tend to age with a distorted view of the world and its interactions. Conversely, young people raised with a delusional understanding of these interactions are likely to develop some form of psychological trauma as they confront a world whose observable truths conflict with the inescapable realisations of their upbringing. My father was an immigrant boy, raised by a single mother during the Depression. He would often reprimand me for various thoughtless behaviours by recounting stories of his own childhood poverty. But however moving they might be, they were merely stories. This is a time of terrifying change — let me correct that: a time of terrifying change for the elderly, and in particular for those of us who have retained sufficient strength both to face the challenges of action and to find solace in indignation. A contemporary has observed that, perhaps, ‘the pendulum will swing back’ and that reason, courtesy and patriotism will re-emerge. But he was mistaken. For he could only imagine their re-emergence in those (our contemporaries) who understood these attributes as essential to a functioning and prosperous society. But for young people, the American Century is a disgrace and the American Dream a scam. Histories may be debated, but the irreducible core must be a verifiable fact: and what if the Fact is determined solely by Big Brother? I do not know whether the United States will survive in a form recognisable to my generation. I cannot even describe its current form other than as a civilisation split into two factions, one denouncing and the other exploiting the chaos. I do not know whether prophecy as a form of prediction truly exists; but I know, like Cassandra, that if it does, it will serve no useful purpose. I do not know whether the sun can actually provide enough energy to power our cities, but I know that there is nothing new under the sun.”