The transcript of yesterday's interview with David Mamet:
HH: Special couple of hours ahead. David Mamet is one of the nation’s most influential playwrights, screenwriters, directors, and until recent years, an icon of the left. Then, in a 2008 article for the Village Voice, and most thoroughly and recently in a brand new book, The Secret Knowledge, Mamet has broken with the left, and has written a devastating critique of its intellectual shallowness, its impact of devastating quality on the culture, and he joins me now. David Mamet, welcome to the program, good to have you on.
DM: It’s great to be on, thank you.
HH: Let me ask at the beginning, do your old friends on the left think you are ill, or the victim of blackmail, or what?
DM: Well, I think I have some friends who roll their eyes. I don’t have that many friends. You know, I spend most of my time either at work or at home with my marvelous family. But I think I have some friends who roll their eyes, and I had some who read the book and said oh, you know what, I agree with many of the things you say, which coming from a liberal, is like a road to Damascus moment, you know?
HH: But they don’t accept the conclusion, do they?
DM: I don’t think so, because I think they can’t. I think that’s the essence of liberalism, is that one can’t change one’s mind. It’s just like being a neurotic. One doesn’t know that one is making a false vision of the world. If one were aware of that, then the neurosis would be over.
HH: In The Secret Knowledge, you’re very kind to me and to my colleagues, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, as well as to Glenn Beck as sources for some of your news and information flow. And I have noted in many of the reviews of the book, this fact drives your critics crazy, that you actually listen to talk radio. Have you noticed how the great snarl unfolds when you reveal that?
DM: Well no, because I really don’t, I don’t read criticism. I stopped doing that years ago. And when we were going to do this book, people said oh, you know, you’re going to go on the right and the left. And I said no, I’m not going to go on the left. There’s no point to it. I don’t want to go up there, and the other guy’s got the microphone, and I don’t want to be the ventriloquist’s dummy for him to get over points on me. If anyone wants to discuss the book, I’ll be happy to, but no one’s going to do that on the left.
HH: That’s actually very perceptive. They don’t even read it on the left is generally my experience.
DM: Yeah.
HH: If you’ve been listening to this show for a while, you’ve heard people like Mark Steyn and James Lileks, Hitch before he was ill, Victor Davis Hanson. And as I read The Secret Knowledge, it occurred to me that the people who work best in words right now, in 2011, like those four, like you and many others, they’re all on the right. And is that a coincidence, David Mamet? Or is it because the vapidity of the left is just so, you can’t support it with words, it can’t be worked in words?
DM: Well, there’s something else, too. I mean, the great joy of being a writer, and the great genius of the 1st Amendment is you get to write, sit down and write whatever is in your head. But if you’re…if whatever’s in your head has to be limited to me and my tractor, you’re not going to have very much fun being a writer. And no writer who’s really any good is going to put up with a maybe. So I mean, who wants to write Stalinist tracts?
HH: But that’s where they’re left now. Is there anyone working on the left who you read and enjoy, or whose work you look forward to seeing?
.
DM: Well, I mean, there are people on the left whose work I look forward to seeing. The people whose work I look forward to seeing, I don’t know whether on the left or not, I thought John Patrick Shanley’s play, Doubt, was a masterpiece, one of the great additions to the American canon. It was a wonderful, wonderful movie. But you know, on the airplane, looking at movies, and they’re all the same stupid movie. And enough already.
HH: It is clear that you have read pretty much everything Thomas Sowell has written. In fact, I think he is the most cited individual, maybe Hayek, but certainly Sowell, in The Secret Knowledge. Is there anyone, any intellectual on the left who is writing right now, or works whose books you look forward to, or even a magazine like The New Republic or The Nation that you regularly take, David Mamet?
DM: No. (laughing)
HH: (laughing)
DM: And this may be over insular on my part, and it probably is, but it’s like being a Jew. You know, you read Victorian literature, and they always bring in the stock Jew character. They drag him in by his heels, you know, much in the same way that American movies, comedies in the 30s and 40s had to have the stock African-American character in a Mantan Moreland, or Willie Best, or Hattie McDaniel, or Butterfly McQueen. In the scene, they had no purpose in the movie except to remind the viewers remember now, we white people all hate blacks now, let’s keep that in mind.
HH: So predictability…now…
DM: Yeah, so the same thing is true in writings on the left, that they’re going to bring in the stock jibe at whomever – Sarah Palin, me, for example, Ron Paul. And you think well why…I get it. Can’t we take the ad hominem out of it?
HH: In the book, in the middle, you write that a play is basically an exercise in raising, lowering and altering of expectations. So are interviews. And so I kind of want to start by raising the expectation of the audience as to how clear you are in this by talking about Sarah Palin. On Page 137, you write, “Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a conservative, but as a Worker.” That is, I think, 100% correct. Would you explain that to people?
DM: Yeah, the left of today is not the left of my father’s day when it was made up of workers and factory workers and housewives, and veterans of World War II, and people who fix the lawnmowers, and the Republicans were the guys in the plaid pants who didn’t let the Jews in. The left of today is, it’s very much the cheese and white wine guy sitting around and talking about the greed, how greedy the world is, and how the dumb Americans have ruined this beautiful, beautiful world. And it’s kind of Malthusian. It’s saying don’t those people realize there are just too many folks on the highway, in the national forest, and they’re getting in my way? That would be, now tell me the question again. I got carried away with my own rhetoric.
HH: Sarah Palin, how Sarah Palin fits into that.
DM: Oh, sure. So Sarah Palin is a threat for several reasons. One is she’s a woman, and as I wrote an article in Misogyny, the left, if you look at it, really doesn’t like women. How do I know? Well, let’s look at Monica Lewinsky and Broadbent, and Mary Jo Kopechne, and all of these people who were in various ways vastly abused, and in one place, killed by liberal men and the left said nothing about it. They never mentioned it.
HH: Right.
DM: …because they weren’t, because as much as they’re “feminists,” it was more important to be a member of…is attacked as a woman, as attacked as an attractive woman, freed succubus, and attacked because she’s an actual worker, and because her story is part of the American myth.
HH: Yeah, she was a commercial fisherman, and like Harry Truman, actually knew of which she speaks when she talks about hard work.
DM: Sure, and also it’s part of our myth of Hollywood, you know, Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, or The Farmer’s Daughter, The Candidate, Bulworth, The Contender. The myth is played out over and over and over again, Dave, the normal person who says well heck, I can do that, and in effect, can do it and rises to the highest office in the land. So when the left sees that in real life, of someone who is not on their side but on the other side, someone who has not been indoctrinated, someone who expresses herself well and is unusual and attractive and funny, it scares the hell out of them. So they say oh, you know, she’s stupid. I say I don’t get the joke. I don’t see what she’s stupid about. She seems to have succeeded wildly at everything that she ever did. All right, she’s just the governor of Alaska. Well hell, I’m not the governor of Alaska, and you aren’t. I doubt that either of us could be starting from zero. Well, it’s a small state. It just has a few people, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the left knows not why it hates Sarah Palin, but they’re still talking about her.
HH: Yeah.
DM: I mean, even before it became clear that she’s probably going to run for president, when they were still bitching about George Bush, and they’re still kvetching about Sarah Palin. They got scared so bad that they can’t stop complaining about her.
HH: How do you assess the character and the intelligence of George W. Bush, David Mamet?
DM: I have no idea. I really don’t…in looking back, I think he did a pretty damn good job. I think he certainly inherited the first attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, and kept the country, he and his people kept the country safe. He’s tried to do away with the travesty of Social Security, which I thought was a very, very brave move on his part, because he must have known it was damned near doomed to be a loser, but he threw himself into it. And he served his country. God bless him.
HH: David Mamet, the book is salted with biography, but it isn’t an autobiography. But I still want to start with these bits of biography that are through there. At one point, you quote someone as saying you were from the Midwest, and you challenge them, “I was not from the Midwest, I was from Chicago.” What’s the significance of that?
DM: Well, we don’t consider Chicago as part of the Midwest. We just consider it as part of…not that we have anything against the Midwest. It’s just like if you said to somebody from Manhattan, oh, you’re from New York State. They’d say well, yes, geographically, I’m from New York State, but I’m from Manhattan. And the same was true of Chicago.
HH: “The city,” you write, “was not the promise of snow removal and an absence of litter, but an amalgam of strivers and hucksters. And I found it, thus, either much like myself, or more likely I became schooled by its culture, just like the Mayors Daley and then State Senator Obama, and all the governors and councilmen who went to jail, and Hugh Hefner building whorehouses which sold everything but sex, and the inspired and depraved of that toddling town.” How do you put Rahm Emanuel into that list of icons of Chicago, David Mamet?
DM: Well, he’s the old-style Chicago pol, isn’t he? He’s the old machine pol, you know, going back in the style of the Daley’s and Big Bill Thompson, or right back to the beginning. That’s who he is, and we see in President Obama the add mixture of the worst of the Chicago machine politics and the worst of ideological politics. It’s a witches brew.
HH: But you seem to have a great admiration for the Chicago of your youth. You write, “I had a very interesting youth. This is how we did things there. One spiffed the mechanic at the cab garage if you wanted to get a working cab. One paid off the cop who pulled you over, as it was much cheaper than going down to 11th and State and paying the fine. The politicians were corrupt. Why else would they be politicians?” Was it better that way?
DM: I don’t know if it was better that way. Well, look, I don’t know that it was better. I don’t think that one should break the law. I think that people will break the laws, and people in power will bend the laws. And the more power you give them, the more they’re going to bend the laws. My step-sister worked for the state and the, what do you call it, the toll road system. And she came home after the first week and said do you know I have to kick back two weeks of my salary every year in addition to the various cans that they hold out for political candidates? And my step-father, her father, said I’m very well aware of that, and pause, pause, pause. That’s the way it was. And if you wanted to get in on the action, you know, you formed your own scam like Jesse Jackson, for example.
HH: David Mamet, you write, “The politicians have not changed, but it seems that the electorate cannot locate its ass with a guide dog.” Does that mean that the quality of corruption is declining in Chicago?
DM: No, I don’t think the quality…I hope, I don’t think the quality of corruption is declining anywhere. I just think that at some point that when we start to say I know how to run, I know I only have so much money this month for my household, I have to think what I’m going to save, what I’m going to spend, what I must have, what I can defer, and what I can alter. I know the same is true of my church when I worked for the church. You know, the same is true of the city council. But somehow, when we get to the national level, it’s all pie in the sky, and a fellow gets up there and says hope and change, waves a magic wand, tells me he’s going to lower the level of the seas, by God, I’m going to vote for that man. It’s an act of idiocy.
HH: You know, your contempt for President Obama, especially his faux sports affection for the Chicago White Sox, is pretty palpable. Do you have any hope that he’s going to turn this around?
DM: Turn what, turn what around, Hugh?
HH: The economy, his administration, his, well, he’s incompetent as can be. He’s a failed presidency already.
DM: Well, how can you turn the economy around? The only way to turn the economy around is to let the economy go. For God’s sake, I mean, how many times must this be proved, that the money you give to the government is waste. The best that they’re going to do is give some of it back to the people who support them.
HH: Right.
DM: They’re…what are they…and to buy off those people who are going to
support them. I mean, it’s no different than the 1
st Ward politics in Chicago. But it’s bankrupted the country, because we’re driving, we’ve driven most of our industrial base away. And the only industrial base that Obama has left is the tax structure. So what he’s doing is, in effect, colonialization, which is to say to go into a foreign country, for him, that would be America, to take the goods and services of that country for nothing, and sell them back trinkets at an inflated price.
HH: When you say a foreign country for him, you’re not a birther. You’re referring to the culture in which he came up with, and its opposition to the general culture of the country, I assume.
DM: That’s exactly correct. And I thank you for making that distinction. That’s exactly correct. What I say, I used to say he’s a guy who never stepped off the sidewalk.
HH: Right.
DM: You know, he never stood in line waiting for a job, he never got kicked out in the cold, he never had to say my industry has gone bankrupt, what do I do next? He’s always been a golden boy.
HH: What do you think of the years he spent as a “community organizer?” You write about Alinsky. You know this gang. You grew up with this gang.
DM: Yes, I did.
HH: Did this community organizer years that he writes about after Columbia, and after his brief tour on Wall Street, and after the private school in Hawaii, did it just teach him how to camouflage himself as a leftist? Or did he really believe it, in your view?
DM: Well, it’s…the essence of what he was doing was the essence of leftism, which is a shakedown. It’s, socialism is a shakedown. It’s selling a good idea to the insufficiently attentive, and the good idea is why don’t you give me all your money.
HH: You write a great deal about your family and how they got to Chicago. Your grandfather lost it all in the crash, your grandmother had to work at the department store downtown. But your dad talked his way into Northwestern, and succeeded in America. Now did they go left as well? Did your grandfather and your grandmother and your father, did they all head the conventional liberal drift?
DM: Well, my grandparents all came from Poland, and they didn’t speak English very, very well. But my dad grew up believing in Roosevelt, and was a kid of the Depression, and he believed very strongly in the G.I. bill, which just sent him to Northwestern. And he was a labor lawyer and was a liberal, but he voted for Reagan.
HH: Oh.
DM: And I said geez, Dad, why’d you vote for Reagan? And he said I thought it over, and he’s the better guy.
HH: So he was open…you went to the Francis Parker School, which is an emblem of all things left wing for people who know about it. And you don’t write about that much in The Secret Knowledge. Were those good years? Were they dedicated professionals? Or was it as they are today?
DM: Well, I went to the Francis Parker School for my last two of high school. I went there for two years. And it was not at that point a bastion of leftist thinking for several reasons, one of which was it was in the early 60s. It was before the onslaught of the school as the locus of social indoctrination.
HH: Yup.
DM: And the second was it had the greatest teachers I’d ever met. And the reason is that they were survivors of the Holocaust. They were mainly Jews, Francis Parker was a mainly Jewish school. And they were Jews who’d fled the Nazis, either got out in the 30s, or survived and came over in the 40s. And the board of the Francis Parker School found these people running elevators and scrubbing floors on their hands and knees, and people with multiple doctorates from the great universities of Europe, who couldn’t get accredited as a teacher in the Chicago public school system, and hired them. And so I was exposed to these genius teachers, these great, great teachers for two years.
HH: That, of course, a clip from The Untouchables, which David Mamet wrote the screenplay for. You were talking at the break about your teachers at Francis Parker School and their backgrounds. Did any of them have any dramatic impact on how you write, David Mamet? Did you learn to write from those teachers?
DM: No, I didn’t, but look, they were the first people in my life who ever told me I was smart, because I spent my life in the public schools before that, and they kept flunking me, and putting me in remedial classes. I think they thought I had a learning defect, because I was just bored to death. I just couldn’t force myself to open the books. So I got to the Francis Parker School, and these genius teachers changed my life by saying you know what? You’re very, very smart. And it is actually no big deal to get an A on this test. One guy said to me, he said a hole in French grammar is just a like a hole in your shoe. Just go fix it. And we had a wonderful teacher called Barr McCutcheon, and he still may be there. And he used to teach calculus to fourth graders, because he just didn’t tell them it was calculus.
HH: Did that continue at Goddard? You went to college in Vermont, and you went, I assume, in the late 50s, early 60s. Was it a revolutionary ethic? You’ve got quite a lot of hard words for the Tom Hayden’s, and the other radicals of the 60s. But what was your college life like?
DM: Well, there really wasn’t a college there. I mean, it had this wonderful brochure about learning in the Savin idyllic environment, and being free to choose your own classes. But when one got there, there was nothing there. There weren’t any classes, there weren’t any books. And if people don’t believe me, they think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. And so we students were left to our own devices, and some of us gravitated into the theater, and just stayed there for years, which was what I did, putting on plays. And some of us joined the SDS and the Weathermen, and ended up blowing up those buildings in New York City, and going underground for thirty years.
HH: Wow.
DM: And Goddard was kind of a locus on the underground railway of, looking back, of the Weathermen and the SDS, and the more radical elements of the 60s. And H. Rap Brown spoke there, and Stokely Carmichael spoke there, and everybody spoke there.
HH: And as you look back at this now, were you aware of how absolutely self-destructive the SDS Weathermen were, and the path on which they were going? Or were you just cheering them on?
DM: I wasn’t cheering them on. I didn’t know who they were. You know, I was interested in chasing girls and putting on plays.
HH: (laughing)
DM: What did I know, you know, fool that I was. But I had a…somebody burnt down the guard house of this school. They put up this guard house to see who was coming in and who was going out. And it wasn’t a gate, it was just a little guard house in the middle of the road. And some student burned it down. And then when it came time for graduation, my roommate submitted his thesis, and his thesis was on why he burned down the guard house, because he had been studying the works of Martin Heidegger, a noted Nazi, by the way, and saw that this was an expression of true freedom, an expression of the self, to have burnt down the guard house. And they awarded him a degree for burning down the guard house.
HH: (laughing) You obviously got a lot of your education in Chicago. There is a beautiful passage on your mob girlfriend. And I will read it some other time on the air just so people can enjoy it. Do you know what happened to her after your late night trips to Cicero, and your dalliance?
DM: No, I don’t know what happened. I’m sure she did well, because she was a good girl, a smart woman. I’m sure she did well.
HH: Do you spend any time back in Chicago now at all?
DM: No, very little. I go back once in a while. My step-mother’s still there. Everybody else is gone.
HH: And as a young man, you write, “I took every job I could get.” I gather, then, Chicago was open to young men on the make. There were things to do, there were jobs to be had, and experiences to accumulate?
DM: Well, yeah, they used to say in the old days, if you can’t get work in Chicago, you can’t get work anywhere. So I worked at everything, and that was, it was a real education, because you know, however liberal one’s feelings may be, and however young and foolish one may be, one still doesn’t come up to the boss and say you know, I need this job because I’m out of work, and it would suit my talents, but I’m not going to take it until after I’ve reviewed your environmental policy.
HH: (laughing) What was your first job, David Mamet?
DM: I think my first job was about 12, I was passing out leaflets for this guy on 71
st Street in Chicago. But I worked at everything. I worked in bookstores over there, I worked as a window washer, I worked as an office cleaner, I drove a cab. I used to service the films in the airplanes at O’Hare Airport when they actually had films. I did every damn thing.
(audio clip)
HH: That is, of course, Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. The man who wrote it, David Mamet, is my guest this hour and next. David Mamet, you write about your time at Camp Kawaga. Am I pronouncing that correctly?
DM: Yeah, that’s right.
HH: The Chicago Jewish summer camp, and one of the most amazing bits in this is you talk about how on Sundays you had chapel, and the day began with the Ave Maria and Taps each night. But at one point, the camp director reads a poem by Douglas MacArthur. And you found yourself able to recite it by memory. Can you still do that?
DM: Oh, let me see. It said "Build me a Son, Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, who will be brave enough to face himself when he is afraid." And then it goes onto this list, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, which I don’t remember, and I remembered the end. It said and "Then I, his father, may dare to breathe I have not lived in vain." So I always thought that poem was hot stuff until I read If by Kipling, and I realized the MacArthur poem, that If was Rudyard Kipling addressing God, and MacArthur’s poem was a request for expedited delivery.
HH: And you also have your own version of Polonius’ speech in charge, and so you’re quite obviously concerned with how you’re raising your son, and how boys are generally being raised. And you kind of dance around this, but do you worry that this society is not allowing its young men to be men, and as a result, what did you say, the land is going to lie fallow?
DM: Well, sure, I mean, especially in the liberal communities. But it’s one’s responsibility as a father to raise the son, because you know, Ms. Clinton’s book to the contrary, it doesn’t take a village to raise a kid, it takes a family.
HH: Where did you, did you educate your kids in public schools? Or did you have to, given you were in L.A. or New York or wherever, find them a private school? And in so choosing that private school, what did you look for, given all the, you know, just the crap that goes into liberal education these days?
DM: Well, we started them in L.A. in the public school for a couple of years, and I just couldn’t…private school for a couple of years, we couldn’t take them anymore, so they were all in the public schools now, which are…private schools.
HH: All right, now I want to switch over to some questions about the theater. My friend, Lee Habeeb, who’s the senior vice president for content here, was an actor, was very excited to hear when I was going to have you on the program. And he said to me immediately, when I said Mamet’s coming on, he said you know, he’s been a conservative for years. He just didn’t know it. No one could write about political correctness with the cynicism and insight that you had and not be a conservative in things like Speed The Plow. Do you think he’s right about that?
DM: Well, I don’t know. I’m flattered by the observation. I don’t know. They did an interview with me in the New Yorker about 13 years ago, and John Lahr was doing the interview. He said everyone in the office says you’re a neoconservative. And I said oh, that’s interesting, what is a neoconservative? So I’d never heard of the genus at that time.
HH: He also went to his bookshelf and pulled off True And False: Heresy and Common Sense For The Actor, which you wrote more than a decade ago.
DM: Yeah.
HH: In it, you called method acting a cult, and this is what Lee sent me, “Nothing in the world is less interesting than an actor on the stage involved in his or her own emotions. The very act of striving to create an emotional state in one’s self takes one out of the play.” And Lee said that’s a conservative teaching acting as a craft, not a therapy session.
DM: Yeah, it’s a shame that acting got hijacked in the 30s. And there’s a couple of good reasons for it. One is that the same people who were involved in acting were very, very much committed to psychoanalysis, so they were trying to cross-stack the ideas of psychoanalysis. And the other is that acting got hijacked, to a certain extent, by the left. And a lot of the people involved in the group theater, and later in the actors’ studio, were, more than the group theater, were communists, or were social statists, and they thought that the actor’s job was to convince through his acting, and through the choice of the place, to convince the audience about their own state, to wake them up to their own state so that they could revolt, a perfect example being Waiting For Lefty by Clifford Odets.
HH: You also, in that book, he sent this to me, this is echoed a great deal in The Secret Knowledge from the ’97 book you wrote. “Formal education for the player, the actor, is not only useless, but harmful. It stresses the academic model and denies the primus of the interchange with the audience. The audience will teach you how to act, and the audience will teach you how to write and direct. The classroom will teach you to obey, and obedience in the theater will get you nowhere.” That critique carries forward 15 years into The Secret Knowledge, David Mamet, so it’s clear you are kind of working this out over the course of fifteen years. This didn’t, you just didn’t wake up in 2008 and say I’m a conservative.
DM: No, you know, you’re right. But you know, I’ve always been a, I think, a little bit of a contrarian, because I never did well in school, and I kind of didn’t go to school. So I had to figure things out for myself. And I read a wonderful book the other day by a guy called Karl Langewiesche, and it was written, I believe, 1944. And he was a flight instructor for the United States Army Air Force. And he wrote a book, and he said you know, everything these kids are being taught is wrong. This is not how a wing works, this is not how a plane works, this is not the way they should be taught. Let’s start from zero. And so he did, and it’s the book that all beginning pilots are first given. It’s kind of brilliant, because he said I’m going to shed the theory, and I’m going to tell you what I understand. And P.S., I’m betting my life on it.
HH: Like R100 versus R101. I did not know that anecdote until I read it in The Secret Knowledge, and it’s very impactful on…tell people about building a dirigible.
DM: Yeah, there was this fellow called Neville Shute, who wrote a bunch of wonderful, wonderful books – No Highway In The Sky and Trustee From The Toolroom, and so a lot of them were made into huge movies. But he was actually an aircraft designer by day, and a very successful one. And one of his early jobs is he worked as a structural engineer for de Havilland, who was making, a British company that was building a dirigible, a rigid airship for cross-oceanic travel. But the ministry of aviation said well, we’re going to hedge our bets. We’re going to give the contract out to two people. We’ll give them out to de Havilland, and we’ll also give it out to the government. Off you go. So the two groups go to work, and they check back and forth with each other, and the de Havilland engineers kept saying wait a second, the government’s ship has a lot more redundancies than ours, and it’s heavier than ours, maybe we’re doing things wrong over here on the commercial side. And they kept rechecking their figures, and they said no, no, we’re right, they’re wrong. And then they started telling the government side you know, you guys are making that ship unairworthy. And the government said oh, pooh pooh. So the two ships took off, and Shute’s ship made a successful crossing east to west over the Atlantic, and the other ship went west to east, and crashed in 300 miles, killing everybody on board, including the minister of aviation.
HH: And that is all the story you need to know about the government. I’ll be back with David Mamet.
HH: David Mamet, I want to play for you a little clip from an interview you did with Charlie Rose in 2007. Again, my friend, Habeeb, sent this to me. He seems a little bit startled when this happens. Let’s listen to the exchange.
DM: People in Israel don’t want war, they want peace. It’s the Palestinians who have a marvelous P.R. campaign.
CR: What do you think of Jimmy Carter?
DM: Must we?
CR: Yes.
DM: I say he’s a champion of murder. He’s a champion of terrorism. That’s unfortunate, but I wish I could find some other way to interpret that...you know, Jimmy Carter is what he is. I feel like a fool for voting for him, and it makes me heartsick that a president of the United States would adopt a stance throughout the book that I understand, unfortunately, as anti-Semitism. Call me crazy.
HH: You know, you’re not crazy, David Mamet, and your whole, the emphasis in the book on the state of Israel, and this issue of the Arabs versus the Israelis, and the Palestinian demands on them, it is the moment of great clarity. I’m going to Israel for the first time this summer, and I don’t know how anyone can not agree with your analysis of this, but I’m sure you’ll be savaged on the left for those parts, if nothing else, in The Secret Knowledge.
DM: Well, you know, did you read my part about the two planes leaving the airport?
HH: Oh, yes. Syria and Israel, which one are you going to get on if you have to choose, you bet.
DM: Yeah, so however on the left one is, if World War III is broken out, and you have to choose and spend the rest of your life either in Syria or Israel, everybody on the left, on the West, Jew and Christian alike, is going to be pleading to get on the plane to Israel. And even Noam Chomsky, another champion of murder, is going to be educing his status as a Jew, and his status as an American, and saying I deserve a place on the plane. Because if he gets on a plane to Syria, the very people he’s been defending are going to kill him.
HH: Yup. It’s a beautiful, it’s a wonderful and immediately illustrative illustration. Let me ask you, did your path to conservatism have to do with your path back to orthodox Judaism?
DM: Sure. Well, I’m not at this point an orthodox Jew, although my observance has greatly, greatly increased. But I have a marvelous rabbi, and he teaches about…he doesn’t teach about the politics, but he teaches about Judaism and ethical behavior.
HH: How much time do you spend studying Torah and Talmud?
DM: Well, the Talmud, I haven’t got into yet, because I’ve got to get the Aramaic for the Talmud. But the Torah, we read the Torah fairly regularly at home, and then we read it in Shul every week, on Shabbos. And somebody said, I was listening to somebody, maybe it was on your program, a Christian minister said, he said it’s not that we believe in the Bible because it happened, but because it happens.
HH: Very well put. It’s also, it’s a myth, maybe, but it’s intended to be believed.
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HH: David Mamet, I am not familiar with how movies are made. I just consume them. And so the appreciation I took away from the book, your new book, about what a director does, indulge me. I want to read this for the audience so they understand, because I think it explains a lot about your conversion to conservatism. This is from Page 218-219, 219-220. “On the movie set, there is one person and one person only who need posses no quantifiable skills. That is the director. The actor must be able to act, the designer to design, the carpenter to build. The director needs to be conversant with the technicalities of none of these. His job is the move the project forward, allowing each of the workers involved to do his own job. That of the director is to listen to their suggestions, to propose a course of action, and to bring the entirety happily and simply to a shared devotion to the course. The rules of behavior on a movie set are largely the Unwritten Law. Who shows deference to whom, when one should speak, when one should be silent, how to deal with unpleasantness, with an excess of zeal, with shoddy work, how to evaluate that which falls short of perfect. The set is infused with a sense of commonality and dedication not only to the project at hand, but to training by example the new workers, by extending and protecting the precious lessons of the past.” At another place, you write about the fact that fantasy won’t help when you’ve got to get filming done by sundown. It’s a very practical job, and it seems to me that you’re explaining that the directors in life, the workers in life, can’t afford the fantasies that the role players and the actors and the left can.
DM: Yeah, well, I’m also saying this is kind of my model for a president.
HH: Yup.
DM: Does one need a president who knows how to do everything? Well, nobody knows how to do everything. What we need is a president who knows how to do one thing, which is to recognize that it’s his or her responsibility to move according to the laws of the oath that they’ve taken, to move the commonality toward shared goals.
HH: And on time, and efficiently, and to success. You also write, “More importantly, a director,” and you speak as one who’s directed ten features and quite a bit of television, “is exposed to something of which the actors and writers may not have taken notice – the genius of America, and the American system of free enterprise.” And you expend all these hundreds of people, wildly different backgrounds, coming together in an unplanned and basically unregulated exercise by the government, to produce not just art, hopefully much of it is art, most of it isn’t, but some of it is, but also profit and jobs and employment. It’s a profoundly conservative business.
DM: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely, in its execution, of course it is.
HH: Then why aren’t more directors conservative?
DM: Well, I think more directors are conservative than actors. And you know, it may be that a lot of people keep their political ideas to themselves, not because it would cause them trouble, but because it might cause them trouble. That’s their choice.
HH: Do you think The Secret Knowledge will limit your ability to make the movies, and stage the plays you want to do?
DM: I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. It may, but I don’t…and it’s moot anyway. You know, who’s to say why someone didn’t want to do your play, or didn’t want to do your movie?
HH: Page 223, as you come to the end of The Secret Knowledge, you write, “There is no secret knowledge. The federal government is merely the zoning board writ large.” Now I hate to give that away at the beginning, because when people work through the book to it, it’s much more rewarding. But do you think people understand what that means, that the federal government is just the zoning board writ large?
DM: I think when the Kool-Aid wears off, listen, we’ve all got to get off the used car lot, you know? Nobody comes onto the car lot unless…they used to teach us in the car business, they don’t come on a car lot unless they want to buy a car. Anybody who walks on that car lot, if you let them off that lot without buying a car, it’s your own silly fault, because whether they know it or not, that’s why they came there, to be seduced. You kick the tires, you buy the car, the salesman’s your best friend, he compliments you on your acumen. You drive once around the block, the car’s lost half its value, and it’s a hunk of junk. We know that. And we have to remember that when dealing with politicians, too. There isn’t any magic involved. Go ahead.
HH: And any expertise. But there are some who are better equipped. That’s the director. That’s the role of the director. So you’re not a cynic about the possibility of doing it better. You’re just completely clear-eyed about who’s been doing it recently, President Obama and his gang, and how badly they’ve been doing it.
DM: Well also, you’ve got to cut the money out of it. The only way to cut the, the only way to make the government more efficient is to cut the money out of it. And the only way to cut the money out of it is to slash taxes. So you’re not saying here, take a job as president of the United States, tell you what, why don’t you take all the money that we have, and in effect, inflate the money that’s left, and give it to the people who support you. And I tell you what, if these programs that you’re working on don’t work, please blame it on underfunding, and we’ll give you some more.
HH: Yeah, and again, repeat. Add water and repeat. Apart from the federal government, though, you have a much larger argument about what’s going on in the culture. And whether it’s a country, a family, a religion, a region, you say the culture is a compendium of those unwritten laws worked out over time through the preconscious adaptations of its members through trial and error. It is the way we do things here. It is born in the necessity of getting along. And I think you’re saying we mess with this at our peril, and we’ve been messing with it quite a bit. Am I right, David Mamet?
DM: That’s absolutely correct, yes.
HH: And so where does that trajectory take this culture?
DM: Well, it’s time to stop, and it’s time to turn it around, and it’s time to repeat. And it’s possible to go back. It’s possible to retreat to basics. The Christian community has done it, the aspects of the Jewish community has done it. Any organization can do it. You say wait a second, wait a second, let’s take the stars out of our eyes and say what exactly is our charter?
HH: That’s very interesting. I didn’t get that from the book, so this is very interesting to me. When I read about your first night in a new home experience, and your argument that the cultural cursor had been put back to zero, I thought to myself, well, you can’t unbreak the window. You can’t go backwards and start over. But you’re saying you can, you can rebuild a culture.
DM: Yes, you can, because Thomas Sowell said the country won’t survive a second Obama term. And I agree with him. It certainly won’t survive in a recognizable form. But it’s just, it’s not too late. It’s like the airplane has an engine out. You want to make some really good decisions while you still have altitude, because when you run out of altitude, you run out of decisions. While we still have some altitude, before we’ve sent all of our manufacturing overseas and enslaved everyone to huge government, we have the capacity to make some decisions and say we’re going to go back to the Constitution. Here’s what the government is good for – provide for the common sense, promote the general welfare, secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our prosperity, and that’s it. Now let’s talk about what that means, because we’re going to get a pencil and paper, and just like we do at the kitchen table, and we’re going to say is this thing really necessary? No? Bang, it goes. Is this thing really necessary? No. Bang, it goes.
HH: Boy, but the structural obstacles to doing that exercise are so enormous. We see it right now. We’re broke, David Mamet. You follow this like I follow this.
DM: Of course.
HH: And yet they won’t do anything about…
DM: Well yes, but here’s, there’s one obstacle that Friedman would say, and the obstacle is taxes, because it gives the government too much money to play around with, which means it gives them too much money to be bribed, whether directly or indirectly, by the people who want something done. And as Friedman teaches, you spend ten seconds every two years saying should I support the farm subsidies bill. The guy who wants a farm subsidies bill is spending 14 hours a day, every day for two years, to get you to buy it. We can’t go bit by bit as individuals, as Friedman teaches us, and say yes this, no that. All we can do is cut taxes, so that the money just isn’t there.
HH: That would require electing people committed to that, and that would require, you know, one of your damning segments, it recurs in the book, is about the higher education racket – skillless graduates, proliferating in liberal communities as counselors, advisors, life coaches, Feng Shui experts, energy therapists. The undereducated chickens come home to roost. You talk about the film school stampede. This is not an electorate being produced that is going to choose hard things done by dedicated people, David Mamet.
DM: Yeah, but you know, there’s a lot of people out there in that country between the two coasts that’s known as the United States of America. There’s a lot of people, and there’s a lot of brave people out there. There’s a lot of hard working people out there, and clear thinking people out there. And I never met a dumb audience. I’ve worked with every kind of audience in every kind of place in the world. I never met an audience that wasn’t smarter than I am. And I think the same thing is true of electorate. If we can stop saying we must and we shall and we will, and we’ll go forward, and you know, all of that garbage rhetoric that puts us into a trance, and get someone over there who’s going to speak the plain truth like Harry Truman, and say here it is, guys, okay, I’m going to draw it for you on a napkin. Do you want bankruptcy within five years? Or would you like prosperity within five years? If you want prosperity within five years, we’re going to have to give some stuff up. You know it when you sit around the kitchen table. It’s no different here. There’s no magic involved. You tell me who you want to vote for.
HH: David Mamet, an optimist. Who’da thunk it?
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HH: David Mamet, that’s a wonderful excerpt from The Edge, where Anthony Hopkins is giving this pep talk to Alec Baldwin. And what you just, I called for that after listening to you in the last segment saying we really can turn this mess around. You really are an optimist about this. Given that, what’s your job as a playwright, as a filmmaker? Obviously as an author, you’ve written The Secret Knowledge, which is a cri de coeur, but in your art, are you dedicated now to just writing plays? Or do you want them to communicate this core message?
DM: No, it’s not my job as a playwright to send a message. It’s my job as a playwright to entertain the people. And it would be an abuse of their trust to addend a message to an entertainment. It’s like…
HH: You say that in The Secret Knowledge quite a lot.
DM: Yeah.
HH: And so you live that, yeah.
DM: It’s like ending a wonderful fairy story that you tell your children, and saying and so, remember it’s always good to be kind to people and blah, blah, blah. No, you’ve just destroyed your kid, right? He thought that he was…he suspended his disbelief in order to have this wonderful moment with his father, where they both engage in this fantasy. And at the end, you’re saying but more important than that, son, let me misuse the gift of your attention to teach you a lesson.
HH: But most great art does teach virtue. I mean, you talk about Shakespeare in The Secret Knowledge, and you quote Polonius. And there is virtue at the heart of most great art, isn’t there?
DM: I don’t know if it teaches virtue. I think it is virtue. It’s an expression of, it’s an expression of the inevitable. People would say, like my rabbi said, you can’t say that the Torah is Heavenly inspired, or the Mona Lisa can be Heavenly inspired, and the 5th Symphony can be Heavenly inspired, Picasso can be Heavenly inspired, but the Torah can’t be Heavenly inspired. Hah.
HH: Yeah (laughing). I want to ask you a little bit about faith at this point. Do you believe there was a Moses, and that he walked up the mountain?
DM: I believe, well, look, as I was saying earlier, the guy said…I’ll tell you what my rabbi said. My rabbi wanted to study in orthodox Yeshiva, and he went, and he’s a very, very knowledgeable student, extraordinarily knowledgeable. And the guy says okay, do you believe that the Torah is literally written by the hand of God? And the rabbi thought a long time, and he said no. And the guy says is it possible? And the rabbi thought a long time, and he said yes. The guy said okay, you’re in.
HH: (laughing) Well, the reason I asked that is because you write about the fact that among the many crazy idiocies of the current administration is that they deny that there is a military threat to the West, and it has a name, and its name is Islamic fascism, and that this is just nuts to deny this.
DM: Yeah.
HH: But what that crazy, fanatic group has is certainty of belief. They really have faith. It’s misbegotten, it is tortured, it’s an abuse of a lot of what ordinary Muslims believe, but they’ve got belief. I don’t know that the West believes much anymore, David Mamet. Do you?
DM: Well, some of us do.
HH: Yeah, but enough of us?
DM: I’m sorry?
HH: Enough of us?
DM: Well, that’s going to be the test, isn’t it, in 2012? That’s going to be the test.
HH: Yeah, but so many goodies have been offered. You write a lot about Obamacare. That is offering an illusion, but it certainly is very tempting for people who don’t understand it can’t possibly work, as you write. It can’t possibly work. But it’s awfully tempting to have it offered to you.
DM: Well sure, but it’s like, you know, how different is it than the Chicago machine politics about get your kid a job on the Fire Department, I’ll bring you a turkey at Christmas?
HH: Yup.
DM: All you have to give me is kick back two weeks of your salary. Is that a good deal? No. I mean, it’s now coming out that 30% of all employers are saying they’re going to cancel their insurance if Obamacare comes in. Well, of course they are. You know, who knows anything about any business could have ever thought otherwise? Of course they are.
HH: Yeah, but again, do you believe that by 2012, enough Americans, as they did in 2010, will recognize, as you say again and again in The Secret Knowledge, this scheme cannot work, it’s a Ponzi scheme, that they will make the change necessary? Do you think that 2012 will see Obama’s defeat?
DM: I don’t know, but I know that it’s time to stop talking in political speak, and get behind candidates who’ll get up there on their hind legs and tell the people the truth, and stop trying to massage the American public, and tell them to truth, say here’s what I think, here are my facts, here are my proofs, here’s what I’m going to do, vote for me or not.
HH: There are a number of candidates in the field. You’ve obviously got Romney, Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman, you’ve got Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann, and you’ve got Ron Paul. Do any of these individuals impress you, David Mamet?
DM: Well, I don’t know enough about them, but as Karl Rove said, it’s a good thing we’re having the primary season. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing, because we’ll all get to know about them, and we’ll see them shake down under fire, and we’ll find out who’s who.
HH: Okay, part of what the problem is, and I spent a lot time on the Monty Hall problem, which I’ll let you explain to people, because I confessed to an audience of law students the other day, I can’t crack this, the math. I don’t know how long it took you to crack it. But you come to the conclusion we are a crazy bunch of monkeys after you considered this for a while. And that’s why I’m a little bit more of a pessimist. Actually, I’m a lot more of a pessimist than you. I don’t know that people think long enough about these issues to get there. Would you tell people what the Monty Hall problem is?
DM: Yeah, but let me jump in for one second. I was talking to a guy from the Financial Times, and he said is it possible, he asked the same question, is it possible that America can be saved from the road to serfdom? And my first, in my mouth, as I was about to say it’s too late, and then I said well you know, it was impossible that you guys defeated Hitler. It was absolutely impossible. There’s only one guy in the world who thought you could do it. That was Winston Churchill. Everyone else in the world had absolutely given up. And yet you did.
HH: Yup.
DM: And it was impossible that there would be a, you know, who would have thought in 1944 that there would be a Jewish state in 1948? It was impossible, or that the Jews would defeat the combined five Arab armies in the war of independence.
HH: But the difference, you point to the difference then and now in The Secret Knowledge. That generation that did that had lived through the Depression. They were the agony of the immigrants who had fled the pogroms. They were the frontiersmen. That’s very different from this great selfish generation that is being called on right now.
DM: Well, the selfish generation, I believe, is my own, my own failed baby boomer generation. But that’s okay, because in a little while, we’re going to shuffle off and have a nice time in Hell. But I think that the generation of our children, or their children, is going to have the capacity to look around and say wait a second, where are the jobs, why is the government stopping me from creating a job, there should be a change. I think that that’s possible.
HH: In terms of the theater, do you see any people coming in and writing plays that reflect a new approach that is much more realistic about matters political? Or is it still all the didactic left stuff?
DM: Well, there’s a bunch of didactic left stuff, because you know, the New York theaters become mainly tourists, and they want come in and make sure that they’ve had the experience. But people have always been writing didactic leftist stuff, and they give them prizes, and we walk out of the theater shaking your head at the evils of the world. And by the time you get to the car, you can’t remember what the play was about. That’s okay.
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HH: David Mamet, do you think we are always going to have a live theater? I’ve got friends who think that people cocoon more, and telecommute more, that they really need to get out to the public square, they really need the public performance of art. But I’m not sure that the infrastructure’s there. What do you think?
DM: Well, things change, I mean, don’t they? I mean, we’re in the entertainment business, and so we’re going from the Erie Canal to the railroads right now as we speak. And the Erie Canal is the broadcast television and the movie studios, and the railroads are whatever new is happening on the internet. And what that’s going to spawn, we don’t know. I read somewhere that one of the things that’s spawned is spontaneous dances or happening, or demonstrations, where people meet on the internet and they go and stage something in the public square. Kids love to put on plays. You know, they sit around and make the adults watch the plays, because they’re always going to love to put on plays. The question of where they’re going to put them on is always going to readjudicated. In Chicago, there was no place to put on plays until a Fire Department ordinance was repealed that dated from 1896, I believe, or ’93, the great Chicago Fire. And then we started putting on plays in garages. And as soon as we did that, the Chicago theater scene burst open, about 1970. And so maybe the equivalent is going to happen elsewhere.
HH: Do you think this explosion of platform, like YouTube, is going to produce more or less Godfathers? Because there’s so many more people with access to the basic tools, but it’s also just a waterfall of mediocrity. What will come of that?
DM: Well, you know, the movie business has really been a waterfall in mediocrity. You go onto Turner Classic Movies, as I like to do, and you see these great movies, but there really aren’t that many of them. And they recycle them, and you look back, they made a lot of movies back in the 30s and 40s and 50s. They made like 2,500 movies a year. How many of those movies do we remember? Very few.
HH: You also, and is that going to change, though, with the proliferation of the ability to get in and do it?
DM: I think it’s great. I mean, why not? To me, it’s the equivalent of garage theater when I was starting out with William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz and those guys. We’d put on plays in a garage, literally, and we worked day jobs in order to do them, because there wasn’t any technology involved. There was two actors and a bench for them to sit on. And the same thing is true for…I mean, my kid, my 12 year old makes movies on the internet. That’s great.
HH: David Mamet, which of your plays do you think is going to be most often produced 100 years hence?
DM: Oh, that’s a good question. I really don’t know. I mean, when I was coming up, Willa Cather was out of print. You couldn’t find her books in 1960, made a great genius of American literature. So things come and go. Terence Rattigan’s plays weren’t done in England for thirty years, and now he’s back in style.
HH: Is there one that you most hope will still be produced?
DM: No. Somerset Maugham at the end of his career looked back at the books on his shelf, and he said oh my God, who wrote all that. And that’s kind of how I feel about my stuff. You know, I got the great joy of writing it and having those adventures. And they’re on their own.
HH: Have any of your plays been better on film than they were on the stage, for example, Oleanna, was it better when you had the opportunity to craft it into a movie than it was on the stage?
DM: No, but I’ll tell you what, I think that Glengarry Glen Ross was absolutely as good on screen as it was on stage, because Jamie Foley directed it, and just did a spectacular job.
HH: Oleanna is the one, I think I wrote you this many years ago when we first began to correspond, that it changed, actually, how I lived, because I never thereafter met with a woman law student alone in a room with a door closed because of the power of that play. Is that the one that’s had the most reaction over time?
DM: I don’t know if it’s had the most reaction over time, but it had the most violent reaction at the time. I mean, there were physical manifestations of violence just about every night – people screaming at the stage, throwing things at the stage, or indeed fighting with each other, arguing. We’d come out and almost every night, there was a couple arguing with each other, screaming at each other, or pushing each other, saying how can you say that?
HH: What did that tell you about your play?
DM: It was a pretty damn good play.
HH: Yeah, very very raw. Anything else come close to that?
DM: I don’t think so. We got a lot of vocal response when we did my play, Race, on Broadway, but I think that that was more spontaneous appreciation of the play.
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HH: That is, of course, America, Paul Newman in The Verdict, written by David Mamet, my guest. His brand new book, The Secret Knowledge, out there. David Mamet, how long does it take to write a speech like that? How many rewrites, and in what conditions do you come up with something like that?
DM: Well sometimes, you can write a speech very, very quickly, and sometimes, the speech takes forever. And the more difficult thing is the plot. To get the plot to come out right, it takes a lot of work and a lot of self-loathing.
HH: Why self-loathing?
DM: Because you’re staring at this bare sheet of paper, and you’re thinking…it’s not like you’re making it up. It’s like I know it’s in there. Why am I incapable of seeing it?
HH: I interview a lot of novelists on this program, a lot of novelists. And they all have different approaches to this writing. Do you read fiction? Are you a thriller consumer, for example?
DM: Oh, I read everything.
HH: Do you have a favorite author?
DM: I think my favorite author is Patrick O’Brien.
HH: Of course. Have you also read Bernard Cornwell, by chance?
DM: Oh, yeah, I read those. All the Sharpe books? I love those books.
HH: I love the Sharpe books. I had him on for three hours once. He’s amazing. Now I want to talk about the Jews, because you write a lot about the Jews in The Secret Knowledge. Here is one excerpt. “The Torah is written in Hebrew, the Talmud in Aramaic, the Talmudic commentaries by Rashi in their own alphabet, the Chasidic masters taught in Yiddish, the Talmud Hocham, the person learned in the Talmud, is devoted to making connections between one part of the scripture and another, between one language and another, between one idea and another. He is celebrated for his ability to discover and cogently express his comparisons, regularizing the apparently disparate, and finding ambiguity in the supposedly unquestionable, the success of the few.” So why is that important for people to know as they consider the role of Jews in history, that they have done this work of translating, comparison and contradiction for hundreds and thousands of years?
DM: Well, because that’s what we Jews bred for, because that knowledge, the ability to take apart and understand a foreign situation was the only thing they couldn’t take from us at the border. And so that knowledge, so it was prized, because that was also prized, because the Jewish people has always prized the ability to be close to God, and to try to understand Divine will, both directly and as it affects the Divine intention for our lives among our fellows.
HH: Now obviously, you’ve listened to Dennis Prager and Michael Medved a lot, and you’ve read Norman Podhoretz and other books about why American Jews are liberal. Have American Jews become dislocated from that historic, that role, that mission, that skill set.
DM: Yes. (laughing) That’s the long answer.
HH: Okay (laughing). And so how does that manifest itself?
DM: Well, it manifests itself by stripping Judaism down into, until there’s nothing left but ethical behavior, because it’s like Rabbi Larry Kushner said. The Ten Commandments aren’t the end of the story. They’re let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing here before we begin. You don’t have to be a Jew to believe in ethical behavior. And so the people who only believe in ethical behavior, the Jews would say well, in effect, I don’t have to be a Jew. So that rather than saying there are these marvelous things about being a Jew, it may be my responsibility, but it’s certainly my inheritance. And it’s a magnificent, beautiful tradition, and it opens me up to both vertically to the Divine will, and horizontally to all the Jews at all times. They say you know what? As I understand it, it just means do a good job, be nice to people, always come down on the side of the underdog, and the rest of it, then, seems to me a waste of time.
HH: Yeah, you quote Hillel. Have you been to Israel? Have you spent much time in Israel?
DM: I spent a couple of months there over a period of years. I’d love to spend more time there.
HH: Does it have any particular impact on you?
DM: I’m crazy about it. I mean, I got on the plane after my first trip weeping, because it’s like running into the girl who you absolutely loved but didn’t marry.
HH: Wow. Have you produced any plays there?
DM: They’ve done a lot of plays of mine there, and I’ve tried to get a couple of movies together to shoot there. I hope I will.
HH: Let me switch subjects on you to one of the more controversial parts of The Secret Knowledge. You write, “The decision to allow a 13 story Islamic center to be built in the vicinity of Ground Zero may be defensible under the rubric of law, but it is a cultural obscenity, allowable only if the state, the left, or the individual asserts that every decision must be adjudicated according to the new understanding of the anointed.”
DM: Yeah.
HH: At the same time, The Secret Knowledge is a long and passionate defense of the rule of law, and the necessity of choice in any justice system. So how can that be your centerpiece, the rule of law and the difficulty but necessity of choice, but then say the Islamic center, which is operating under the rules of the zoning world of New York, is not appropriate?
DM: Well, because things can happen under the rule of law which are not appropriate. The law exists to make, at best, one of two claimants unhappy. The law isn’t perfect. But underlying the law is the unwritten law, the culture from which it springs. So things may be perfectly legal, but may be unpleasant to the community as a whole.
HH: And so why is this Islamic center such an affront? I agree with you. I’m just curious as to how you articulate that.
DM: It’s…well, look, the American Civil Liberties Union represented a guy called George Lincoln Rockwell, who was the head of what he called the American Nazi Party. And the American Nazi Party in the late 60s, I guess, went to the city of Skokie, Illinois, for a permit to parade with the Nazi regalia, with Nazi flags. The city of Skokie, Illinois at that time had the highest percentage of Holocaust survivors in the United States. So the city of Skokie said no, you can’t have this permit. So George Lincoln Rockwell went to the ACLU, Jews one and all, who defended him, because they said that under the law, he had the right to the permit. Well, under the law, he may have, but that didn’t make it right, because they say law exists when morality has failed, and morality only comes into being when love has failed. And they both failed. So that something is legal doesn’t mean that it’s morally acceptable, legally acceptable.
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HH: I want to thank David Mamet for spending these two hours with me, and for The Secret Knowledge, and for the kind words you gave me in The Secret Knowledge. You listen to a lot of talk radio, David Mamet. How would you make it better?
DM: I would make it better, and the three guys I mentioned specifically in the book is you and Michael Medved and Dennis, and, oh, and Glenn Beck, the four guys. I would take out the interlocutor. You guys don’t have them, but a lot of the other guys do, the second banana guy to laugh at your jokes and so forth.
HH: Well, and so that’s all? I don’t think actually Medved for Prager, well, Beck has a lot of people. Duane doesn’t really do much of that on this program.
DM: Yeah.
HH: But in terms of the kind of conversations that are going on right now, I think that you can only find sustained conversation on talk radio anymore.
DM: I agree.
HH: I don’t think you find it anywhere else.
DM: I think that that’s true. I think you guys are doing a great job. I know you are. I mean, you got me listening and thinking.
HH: That always amazes me. Let me close by talking about marriage. You know, recently a judge ruled that there’s no rational basis for society to prefer marriage between one man and one woman over that of two men and two women. That’s actually, no rational basis. You provide a complete response to that, not directly, by talking about what marriage accomplishes. Just give a summary for the audience about how the culture’s got to take care of marriage.
DM: Well yeah, the kid learns in the family, the kid learns by watching the way two adults respond to each other, how two adults under stress are going to deal with each other, how they’re going to deal with the outside community, how they’re going to deal with questions of religion and finance. The kids are always watching, and that’s their indoctrination into the world. The state always wants to destroy the family. And that was the great triumph of the Hitler youth when they got, they taught the Hitler youth kids to inform on their parents. And there was a famous boy in Communist Russia, I’ve forgotten his name, they built a statue to him, who informed on his parents for being insufficiently Stalinist, and they were taken out and shot. So the family is the basic unit of the country, which is why the Torah is about a family. We start with a family, and the family grows wider, and the family eventually becomes a group and a state and a clan and a nation. But it starts with a family, because everything starts with the family. And we’ve got to keep the state out of the family.
HH: And when confusion arises, you write, the results – angry feminists, lonely, aging males, full divorce courts, broken families, grieving children. But I close by asking you, like I did earlier, you think that marriage can be turned around in the United States?
DM: Well, marriage can be good or bad. Marriage can be good or bad. It has to be committed, you know, because it isn’t going to be really good unless it’s committed, and you’re not going to find out if it’s really bad unless you’re committed. We’ve had a history of people, my generation specifically, screwing around and living with each other, blah, blah, blah, and we told each other that that trains us for marriage. But it basically trains you for divorce.
HH: It does. David Mamet, congratulations. The Secret Knowledge is a wonderful book. It’s linked at HughHewitt.com, America.
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