First off, reading this book is like reading someone's private journal; the thoughts are broken up, there are incongruous jumps between what are laid out as sections of the same chapter; ideas are just thrown out with minimal or no argument or development. Not what one is looking for in an argumentative or persuasive book. On the other hand, if you want to get a peek inside Mamet's head, this is for you.

Okay, now on to the review of the content.

He comes right out and identifies himself in the first three pages: a Liberal who, in late mid-life, discovered that life is made of trade-offs and therefore became a conservative. Immediately, for me, the alarms are going off: here is a guy who claims that only in his 50's or 60's did it occurred to him that, “surprise!” life is made of trade-offs and we can't have everything; by extension, we're left to believe that as a “Liberal” he must have believed was that there were no trade-offs and we could indeed have everything.

Next follow a slew of “musings with titles” that we are to take, apparently, as chapters or essays. He fills this with many curious assertions that will sound familiar if you've listened to Fox or Limbaugh.
1. “Liberals hate capitalism.” Full stop.
2. A running screed, spread across a few of his titled musings, that can be summed up as, “Young Liberals suck. Liberal Arts degrees suck. FILM SCHOOLS SUCK.” (He really, really, really does not like film schools.)
3. In particular, “Young Liberals” (he capitalizes that repeatedly) have been, and are now, ruining our country because they hate (economic) freedom, America (-ness..?), and Israel. He softens this here and there by downgrading, “hate freedom,” to something along the lines of, “liberals want the same things conservatives want, but are just hopelessly confused about how to get them.”

Who precisely are these people he hates/pities/dismisses? Apparently they are uneducated and lazy, naïve and clueless, busy doing their yoga, getting their houses feng shui'd, and standing around watching their immigrant gardeners sweat under the Sun while moaning about how it is so unfair they don't get paid more, while faithfully recycling their cans and bottles in a desperate attempt to fill the void left by their rejection of responsibility/authority/God. This is not hyperbole (on my part). Mamet actually writes this.

Do these people even exist? What “Young” person owns a house, complete with gardeners and interior decorators, while going to school and being unemployed and, presumable, otherwise living a life of dissipation? Perhaps in David Mamet's world, this is a reality; but in that case he is not impugning liberalism or Liberalism, but some Mamet construction that simply shares the name Liberalism. Perhaps in the circles he runs in, this is happening (*cough* *cough* looking at the Mamet kids and their friends.) But not anywhere I've been.

In any case, these 20 and 30-somethings have been exerting their terrible power by... actually, that is also not clear. They way he describes them they would seem to unable to even feed themselves. But, as it would seem he has particularly singled out people that have become adults only in the last decade or, at the most two decades, one must assume they not only overcame their obvious disabilities, but also have access to a time machine... or that these people formed a cabal while still in diapers... or something. It's almost like Mamet is blaming today's “Young Liberals” as a way of not blaming... I dunno, just to make up some random numbers, people who at this point, roughly 50, 60, 70?

Moving on a bit, we also find out that liberals are all God hating, but Nature loving because Nature is the new God; as is, confusingly, Government, Equality, and -yet more confusingly- Liberalism itself. Unless Liberalism is just a new religion. I forget. At times his paragraphs are koan-like... or simply nonsense.

Next, we move on to finding out that Mamet hates bureaucracies. A lot. (When Mamet doesn't like something, he really goes all in.) Government, management, labor (presumably organized labor?), safety inspectors, and I'm sure more that I am forgetting; in any case, all of them are leeches, all only existing to perpetuate their own existence. I'm not sure who, in broad strokes, this leaves, but apparently engineers (but only good ones), writers (of course) and set designers are okay. Again, I'm not making this up, that's his list. Also, students who are NOT LIBERAL ARTS MAJORS maybe get a pass.

I suspect he really means to give a pass to some “Rand-ian” class of creators. And he really does seem to mean this in a Randian way; the innovator, the creator, the unfettered striver is the pinnacle of human development, etc.. Of course, he several times tells us that, yes, we need government for roads, police, military, and a handful of other activities; presumably these people would not belong to any bureaucracy, and the above mentioned strivers would not either.

In other words, we will all exist as small, autonomous teams and individuals. Roads, military, police and a few other functions are still to be provided by the (nonexistent) (non-bureaucratic) government (run on, as we later find out many pages later, a 0% tax rate: since lower taxes raise earnings, and higher earnings raise tax revenues, having no taxes at all will generate the most tax rev... wait... hrmm. Oh, wait, nevermind. My 3rd grade arithmetic was bothering me, but I'm all better now.) Unfettered growth and prosperity will be provided by entrepreneurs; in teams of 4 or less, of course, since management and labor are THE HATED BUREAUCRACY.

And of course, it goes without saying, no one will have heard of David Mamet because *?*$ {@&*! LIBERAL ART MAJORS.

Sigh. I wish I was making this up (well, the last bit I did.)

To recapitulate, since I'm letting loose with a bit of stream-of-consciousness myself:
1. Mamet only just now discovered that life is trade-offs and this SHOCK! has shown him the error of his “liberal” ways.
2. Needless to say, having defined Liberalism to be the kind of doe-eyed naivete that would embarrass a Care Bear, Mamet finds tearing it apart is fairly easy.
3. Then, foisting this belief onto others, Mamet invents from whole cloth an entire generation whiling away their time in film school making art pornos, with barely enough time left to split between complaining to their interior decorators, eating ice-cream, and spitting on the grave of Jefferson while writing checks to Hezbollah (presumably from their trust funds.)
4. One wonders, given this, why anyone under the age of 45 is complaining at all, what with the feng shui and peeled grapes and all: David Mamet doesn't deign to address this.
5. Clearly, David Mamet needs to get out more.

Mamet is really angry at the 1960's and 70's, the excesses and absurdities of some strains of Liberalism of these decades. Mamet is angry at the Roosevelts and Taft (and maybe Freud.) And he is angry at film school, and, at this point is so angry he is making the Hulk jealous. David Mamet wants the kids to get off the goddamned lawn.

That said, I am a bit sad: he does broach, in moments of clarity, some issues that deserve to be discussed. Some larger issues like, “What exactly is meant by Equality? How much is enough? How do we know when we've gotten there, and what do we measure in order to know that we've gotten there?” These, and questions like these, are real, difficult, and worthy of serious consideration; and I don't think they are often approached by people of a more leftist leaning; there is a presumption that “equality” is worth whatever it takes, whatever that might mean, and whatever exactly equality means. I think that is a fair point.

But those questions are all buried in a angry prose of a guy who -again- only just now figured out that life is made of trade-offs. This is from a guy who lauds plumbers and farmers, but who apparently doesn't get out enough to realize that there might be more to Liberals than his daughter's “heiress” classmates and his friends' “doyen” dinner circles, and that there might be more to the “Liberal Young” than evidenced by the 40 or going-on-50 year old snapshot he has in his head.

This from guy who hates social studies because it is indoctrination, which the schools should not be doing, because culture can only be learned in the family, because only in the family can we learn morals, moral reasoning, and the application of justice... which you have no right to apply in law because games would suck without rules, which is why if you cheat in business maybe you can get a pass, but you should be ostracize anyone who would cheat in a game of poker. Oh, and despite all those platitudes, families are really truly valuable because of their economic impact. Which is why you can't have gay marriage. (Is your head spinning yet?)

The amount of illogic deployed in this book is, literally, dizzying.

Ignoring all that, the book, for me can be paraphrased, emotionally at least, in one passage: Mamet is enjoying a visit to an art gallery and is Disgusted! Angered! Revolted! to see a lady not throw out her paper plate, but instead fold it up and put it in her purse, presumably to reuse. Obviously, he concludes, she is a Liberal desperately placating her untenable nihilism. (Again, that is not sarcasm on my part; this is paraphrasing what Mamet writes.)

Think about this. Run through this yourself. Really ponder what kind of person (a) even notices someone else doing something like this, (b) has any kind of emotional reaction whatsoever to it, much less a reaction of being disgusted and angered, (c) concludes that this is yet more proof of the vast conspiracy against righteousness, and (d) writes about it in a book and publishes it.

That's who wrote this book, and that's what, God help me, I just spent a part of my life reading. ( )

In David Mamet 19s 1CThe Secret Knowledge, 1D the secret knowledge of his title refers to the notion that those in the public sector hold some special knowledge that allows them to regulate society. However, as the epigram at the beginning of the book suggests, the only secret is that there is no secret. Put another way, those initiated into the secret find out that there isn 19t one.

Mamet , who is 64, did not read or knowingly speak to a conservative until he was 60. A life long liberal Democrat and son of a labor lawyer, he was an educated yet unquestioning liberal for most of his life. Then, in 2004, a rabbi made an interesting suggestion to a congregation to which Mamet belonged: before two sides can deal with each other, they must be able to understand each other's pont of view. Mamet realized that he could not say what a conservative believes. As he says in the middle of this book, at best liberals think that conservatives are those who were dropped ontheir heads as infants; for this or no otherwise discernable reason, they are less caring than liberals because they do not want the government to provide the necessities of life to everyone for free.

Mamet began to study conservatism and found out that the secret knowldege that government and its advocates are supposed to have that allows them to be experts on everything does not exist.

In some passages, Mamet 19s writing is so philosophical that it is difficult to follow, but the reader 19s attempt will be rewarded because Mamet explains the same thing in different ways. Some of his analogies are bound to hit home.

Many of his descriptions of the boomer generation in its youth hit home because I am a product of that generation's cultural innovations that taught so many of us to slack our way through life. I am sure that many of those of us who feel that Mamet is describing us will be put off if we are not ready to examine ourselves honestly.

I am impressed with this book. Mamet reminds me of Paul Goodman in that they both consider what our culture does to our youth; except that, whereas Goodman critiqued the way the earlier culture of conformity, more than half a century ago, crushed individuality, Mamet 19s critique argues that there is and has been harm done to youth by the liberal ethos since the 1960s that was influenced by Goodman. (Though it would be unfair to say that the New Left of the sixties followed Goodman without picking and choosing and corrupting his message.) The counterculture that grew up around the New Left and that has crept into so many of our institutions today has created normlessness until, by kicking over the traces of traditional values, it has simultaneously left us STILL conforming to the herd and becoming a confused and directionless collection of socially overlapping mobs. Political liberalism as defined over the past several decades has come to be a justification for escaping responsibility. Where many other conservative social critics have focused on how modern liberalism has imposed normlessness on the underclass, Mamet spends much of his time looking at what it has done to the elites, turning them into slackers and faux elites whose disbelief in work leads them (I should own this and say 1Cus 1D) to lumpen status and, as Mamet puts it, M.A.s in English bagging groceries for a living.

Mamet quotes some books I have read. 1CThe Road to Serfdom 1D by Friedrich Hayek, 1CEthnic America 1D by Thomas Sowell (a really terrific book, BTW), and many I have not. Mamet was never an ignorant liberal; he was always thoughtful, and this led him to be at odds with liberalism long before he jumped ship. (See my review of Mamet 19s book 1CSouth of the Northeast Kingdom. 1D)

Mamet has picked up, digested and re-explained some ideas from those he has read. The elites think that they are unconstrained in their ability to shape society into something new. They defy tradition because they think they can transcend it. In reality, they just muck up society because their 1Creforms 1D have unintended consequences of catastrophic proportions even aside from the fact that the reforms don 19t work as intended. They kick over thousands of years of culture that has been worked out and developed through experimentation. They replace it with their fantasies of fairness that cannot be quantified and that take away from one person or group and give to another arbitrarily, while they destroy true justice that can be administered equally for all.

There is a reason for culture. It provides us with ways of relating to each other and understanding each other. Mamet offers the analogy of a person who moves into a new place and must learn where everything is; in his old place, he knew where everything was even in the dark; he didn 19t have to think about it. Knowing where the guardrails are smoothes social interaction, and over the millennia that it took to create culture, it has been honed into something more and more salubrious. Throwing the whole thing out at once and replacing it is ill-advised. When there are established rules, there is security in that order. When, on the other hand, a new order is being created by a herd of benevolent would-be dictators, then no one knows what the rules are except, if they are wise in the flawed ways of man, they know that the dictators will always rig the new rules in their own favor. The political class becomes the new privileged elite. (President Barack Obama criticizes corporate executives for having jet planes at their personal disposal; meanwhile, the President and First Lady whimsically jet all over the world on the taxpayers' dime.)

To paraphrase John Stuart Mill in his essay 1COn Socialism, 1D it is one thing to try socialism as an experiment on a limited basis to see how it works and then to adopt it more widely if it does; it is quite another to overturn the society of an entire country based on the guess that socialism will work on that scale. To do this would be to make the French Revolution look like a picnic, Mill predicted almost sixty years before the Russian Revolution proved him right.

Mamet, a noted playwright, screenwriter and director and executive producer of the television series "The Unit," quotes another writer as saying that if you know Latin it will inevitably get into your writing. Mamet's plays and movies have often dealt with confidence men, and he knows a lot about grifters and sleight-of-hand artists and all of this provides an illuminating analogy to politicians and ideologues who would influence the direction of our politics from the outside.

Another concern of Mamet is his Jewishness. Like many American Jews, he was for many years not particularly devout, but became more involved in his heritage as he grew older. It was in listening to a rabbi's sermon about understanding the views of those on the other side of a dispute that first persuaded Mamet to study consevatism--only to discover that he found it more true and less inconsistent than the liberalism in which he had believed his whole life up to middle of this century's first decade.

The fact that many of his fellow liberal Jews are taking the side of Hamas against Israel sticks in Mamet's craw, and this undoubtedly provided a cornerstone in his conservative conversion.

Not to say that that is all there is to it; Mamet also looks at the history of the Boomer generation (of which I and he are both part) with its arrogance and its pretence that judgments can be made based on feelings rather than real-life experiences and reason; its ethos of everybody can have everything they want and be a winner, that conflicts can simply be avoided. He reflects on the legacy of our generation for education and politics and finds us wanting. (I agree.)

It amazes me (and makes me jealous) that after being a liberal for 57 years of his life, Mamet set about reading and thinking for only six years and came up with this thoughful book. I was only a fullfledged liberal for 29 years, and spent the next thirty years transitioning to conservatism via libertarianism, but I could not have written such a book as this. Mamet has described himself as lazy; but no, I am lazy; that is why I have only read a few of the many books that he read in only six years. (Mamet includes an extensive bibliography.) ( )

After reading the other reviews, I realized that that the average reader doesn't understand Jewish thought processes. We are taught to question our beliefs and challenge any dogma. So that is what David Mamet is doing. It is not a liberal or a conservative process. Those who label people as liberals or conservatives are not thinking clearly. We are intelligent people, and being so we must question what we read and see in the media. That does not make as a libtard or a snowflake, and if we question what the president says and does that makes us a traitor. It makes us a thinking person. I agree with some liberal concepts and some conservative concepts, so put your stupid labels on me. I enjoyed the book, and I am glad that he expressed opinions whether you think that an artist has a right to his opinions or not. ( )

CX03

Very good, draws a lot from Hayek, Friedman, and Sowell. ( )