The Secret Knowledge

There is a telling anecdote about the American playwright Arthur Miller, who was taken to see Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet's breakout play about white-collar deceit, on Broadway in 1984. After the curtain call, Miller walked out disgusted and threw the playbill in the nearest garbage can, saying Mamet had "a lot to learn."

Any reader with a modicum of critical thinking or the basest familiarity with American politics will feel the same way about Mamet's latest effort, the self-congratulating receptacle of hot air that is The Secret Knowledge, a rambling non-fiction account of Mamet's recent conversion to conservatism, which expands on his March 2008 essay in the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.' " The result is a rambling, rabidly pedestrian, muddle-headed mix of fatherly advice, brotherly cajoling and grandfatherly nonsense.

The bulk of the "ideas" Mamet spouts are secondhand political cant passed down as wisdom among conservatives. You've heard the arguments before: Big government is bad; liberals base their ideas on emotion rather than intellect; affirmative action is a failure; the proliferation of liberal arts education has rendered American youths lazy, unskilled individuals; global warming doesn't exist; and the exportation of jobs, high taxes and an unwillingness to exploit natural resources is leading the United States to the poor house. Any of these could be fine topics for debate, but Mamet, like a star pupil, is more interested in hearing his own voice as he regurgitates concepts by rote than engaging in a true exchange of ideas.

Red flags begin to fly on the first pages of the book, in which Mamet refers to "the Black Youth," the first of many generalizations that are so flagrant they should be tongue-in-cheek. But the true weakness of this book is Mamet's insistence on combining such generalizations with astounding brevity, which makes this little more than a collection of false starts.

The rapid-fire chapters of The Secret Knowledge - 39 in a book of 241 pages - are one of the most shockingly problematic elements of the author's method. Consider the conceptual swath he sets out to cover in the chapter "The Red Sea," which purports to investigate the question of the State of Israel - perhaps the largest of many chips on Mamet's shoulder - in a mere three pages.

Yet this seeming inability or unwillingness to engage concepts for the length of time required to do them justice might be forgivable if Mamet's rants - it would be misleading to call them arguments - weren't so riddled with conflations, like "School shootings and the increased enrollment in postgraduate Liberal Arts studies may be seen as two unconscious attempts at adaptation of a culture evolving away from the exigencies of staffing a trained workforce."

However, even a cursory glance at recent school shootings disproves this assertion. One of the deadliest in recent memory, the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007, was perpetrated by Seung-Hui Cho, a business information technology student.

Later, when discussing the Civil War, Mamet decries Michelle Obama's declaration that "America is a 'mean, mean country," a quote for which the writer provides absolutely no context, but uses a grade-school explanation of the North's motives in the Civil War to prove wrong: "But this 'mean, mean country' sent soldiers from the North to eradicate slavery (an action, I believe, unique in the history of the world), in a war fought at shocking cost, which would confer upon those who willingly risked their lives no benefit other than their participation in a cause they knew to be right."

Such nostalgic logic ignores the political complexities behind the Civil War - in which slavery was only one of many issues - and proves that Mamet is willing and able to commit the same acts for which he excoriates liberals: self-serving, skewed logic.

Ideology aside, even if one agrees with Mamet's conservative views, the quality of his writing in this book is indefensible. The Secret Knowledge is repetitive, with several concepts and phrases appearing in consecutive chapters, which are written in rigid, paltry prose. Mamet is best when discussing his youth in a Chicago that no longer exists, and his experiences trying to make it, and finally succeeding, in the film industry. These well-crafted, insightful passages only prove that the writer should stick to what he knows.

In his last years, Arthur Miller became more and more a fallen symbol of his erstwhile genius, his best plays decades behind him and his final plays ignored or reviled by critics, as gradually the playwright let himself be used as a figurehead of the PEN club, globetrotting with other once-famous writers. Could David Mamet face the same fate? If he continues to write in this vein, yes.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com