By David Mamet
Thursday, November 09, 2023
I’ve always known words had 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, “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 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 are 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 pseudo-drama — 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 her response, though laudable, is uninteresting.
In the great drama the audience wonders what might happen next. (This is called “suspense.”) Audience members prognosticate possible reactions and outcomes and can’t wait to see if these are correct. If they 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 which 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.)
American liberals, and American Jews — but I repeat myself — are daily, perennially, and constantly exposed to propaganda. This is hawked as news or, even more sadly, as education. The horror of antisemitic, anti-American indoctrination in schools continues throughout the liberal adult’s life, in primary exposure to news, and in secondary reiteration as inter-clan gossip and reinforcement.
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 may 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 are slain, or he is terrified into either defending himself or indicting his brothers and sisters — in which case he determines that there is just one side, but 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” — this, 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 the 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 on AA ended with a commercial for beer.
Responsible journalists understand the power to sway readers and viewers with the assurance, “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, as 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.
Jews and non-Jewish Israelis massacred are caught on film, and the Left either is spared the spectacle or treated to its explication, viz: “Palestinian anguish and despair has unfortunately, but understandably, led to this . . .” Quite as if the rapist and the young girl he desecrated were both described as “involved in rape.”
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 Anatevka are told, at the play’s end, that they “will have to leave.” Not that they should kneel down as they are going to get shot.
Both these cultural icons are lies. They present an incomprehensible evil as comprehensible, which is to say, 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, a man murdered 18 people in Maine.
The media, right and left, show videos of him committing the acts. And yet he is 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 that has leached into reporting has degraded not only the capacity to tell but that to hear a simple story.
Similarly, news outlets fill dead airspace in “an unfolding story” with conjectures about “what gave rise to the murderer’s behavior.” First, how could one know? More important, why should one care? One should not; and the conjectural “filler” feeds an understandable but unhealthy interest in the aberrant.
The bumf about the shooter’s childhood, alcoholism, marital woes, and so on is, perhaps, an attempt to “humanize” atrocity. But atrocity should not be humanized. One must turn away. The Talmud teaches that one should avert one’s eyes from two animals copulating.
The desecration of Israelis, Jew and non-Jew, and the propaganda of the Marchers Against Israel are obscenities. Acceptance of them degrades our human condition. Works and pictorial coverage that do not assert, report, and decry these horrors add to and encourage violence. Those attacking our shared humanity are cowards. I’ll prove it to you: Instead of masking their faces, let them show them, and instead of “Free Palestine,” let their T-shirts proclaim, “Proud Antisemite.”
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