The Secret Knowledge That Doesn't Exist

Local book person points out that Mamet is a ninny.

His critique of affirmative action relies on a dismissal of race — "When," he asks, "was the last time you heard a racist remark or saw racial discrimination at school or work?" — that is so divorced from the reality of many Americans you have to wonder where he lives.

Perhaps inside the rarefied atmosphere of "The Westside of Los Angeles," where decadent Euro-Americans are at least decent enough to keep overt & shallow racism under wraps. If Mr. "Now I Blindly Accept Anything I've Heard on Reactionary Talk Radio" Mamet had worked at some of the dumps where this reporter (blue-eyed blond who some might consider sympathetic to their crap) has, he would've heard plenty of it, from customers & fellow wage-slaves.

The problem with these positions isn't that they are conservative, it's that they're so easy to refute. "[T]hough much has been made of the necessity of a college education," Mamet writes, seeking to connect the rise of school shootings to what he sees as the aimlessness of liberal arts curricula, "the extended study of the Liberal Arts actually trains one for nothing. And the terrified adolescent, abandoned by society, coddled by society, may, if unbalanced, turn to rage and (a) kill; or, if merely clueless, (b) hide in college, as he does not possess the strength to grow up and leave." Really? And here, I've always thought that school shootings were the responsibility of the shooter, not of the system. I guess I ought to thank him for clearing that up.

Maybe we should enroll Mamet at L.A. Trade Tech & force him to be a plumber instead of a liberal arts dilletante who, by his own admission, produces literal nothing.

And which is it? Is society coddling or abandoning the "terrified adolescent?" In all fairness, Mamet might be on to something there, but admitting (or even realizing) that whether one is coddled or abandoned is mostly determined by skin-tone & economic circumstance would burst his fucking bubble. Much as we'd like to pop his head. (W/ truth. It's a metaphor, not a threat. Or is it?)

And now we are done:

Here, however, he continues in the shrill, strident vein that marked his 2006 book "The Wicked Son." That work traced his return to (or perhaps more accurately, his adoption of) a form of socially conservative Judaism; "The Secret Knowledge" takes this shift into a purely political realm.

"The bifurcation of Humanity (as opposed to acts) into two identifiable camps, Evil and Good, is, essentially, a childish act," Mamet writes in his new book. The idea that "one may gain merit from this division, and that this merit makes one the superior of the unenlightened, is the act of an adolescent." It's a valid point, but in the end, it makes for yet another irony, as such a bifurcation is the essential condition on which this book depends.