"Recessional," by David Mamet - A Review

 Memorial Day is a favorite. One can feel patriotic without looking over one’s shoulder. My wife and I plan to attend Monday’s parade in Old Lyme for the first time since 2019. While it is a far cry from the parades I remember in Peterborough in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when dozens of veterans of both World Wars and Korea marched, it is fun to see the people, hear the music and to reminisce, when taps are played at Duck River Cemetery.

 

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT 06426

 

Burrowing into Books

Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch

David Mamet

May 28, 2022

 

“Our American covenant, like any covenant, is aspirational.

It is a reduction of biblical wisdom to practical political language like the Constitution.”

                                                                                                                                Recessional, 2022

                                                                                                                                David Mamet (1947-)

 

David Mamet is an American script writer and playwright who won Pulitzers for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and The Cryptogram (1995). He is also that rare individual – a conservative who labors in the world of letters. More surprisingly, he is a defender of Donald Trump, at least in some instances: “Trump was vilified with greater vehemence than anyone in Western memory.” He [Trump] refused “to speak in hieratic language…He speaks American.” Mamet describes himself as one who would like to conserve love of family, community, service, country and God. 

 

This is a short book – 215 pages – with 38 essays on myriad subjects. “The Fountain Pen,” leads to musings on newspapers, Damon Runyon, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and others; “Moby Dick,” “The quest reveals the object ever receding.” In “A Message from Schpershevski,” he writes about the difference between justice and social justice, where justice is “…a dispassionate, considerate, supportable, and moralresolution of differences…” while “…social justice is the negation of that ideal. Here ‘feelings’ are insisted upon as superior to order and process.” In “Grief and Wisdom,” he writes of robber barons, both past and present: “Why would the oligarchs of Silicon Valley, the richest individuals ever on earth, want more power…Does the possession of money exempt one from human vanity, acquisitiveness, arrogance, and pride?” Elsewhere, in the same essay, he writes of the use of fear to control the electorate: “The lockdown (Covid) was the manipulation by those in power of the response to a natural phenomenon. In this it resembles the Left’s insistence on global warming; fear gives power to the governments who are, as always, the tools of the plutocrats.”

 

In an essay, “What’s in a Name,” Mr. Mamet writes of how fashions change: “Derelicts become vagrants, then the homeless. The people are the same, but the social problem has been inverted into a political solution: rename and worship them.” In “Disons le Mot,” he writes of charter schools: “Of course the Left is opposed to charter schools. They are opposed to education. Teachers are, to the Left, a protected class, which is only common sense: they are a money machine, kicking back fortunes to the party, and a purveyor of the essential service of indoctrination.” In “Some Linguistic Curiosities,” he writes of his objection to the word “homeland” in the Department of Homeland Security: “The word reeks, of… the Teutonic das Heimat”, a word that reminds him of Nazi German. He concedes, though, “It obscures no nefarious purpose; it is merely a fatuity.”

 

Mr. Mamet writes from the perspective of a man who tries to make sense of a nation knocked off its rails by the politically correct, those for whom appearance is more important than reality: “Conservatives shake their heads in sad wonder at the idiocies of liberals,” he writes in “Chelm; or, No Arrest for the Wicked,” “But we do not wish them dead, shamed into poverty, or jailed; we simply find them stupid.”

 

This is a literate and wise kaleidoscopic collection of essays, destined to be unpopular with the woke.