When I was a kid…
The 50s was a great time to be a kid. In recent interviews talking about his new book, David Mamet makes the case for the melting pot that America was and the patriotic belief we all had in the American Constitution and the American Dream.
The 60s brought a disaffected youth revolt against authority which demonized American culture, starting with the bourgeois suburbs. And yet, most people today, as then, would choose to live in a single family home in the suburbs - if they could afford to do so. Who destroyed the dream and why? It’s sad to see how thoroughly the destruction of our positive, optimistic society has progressed under the direction of successive generations of cynical, unhappy, angry, elitists and teachers and the waves of cynical, fearful and unhappy youngsters they produced.
I just started reading Recessional and can recommend it as a thoughtful treatise on freedoms lost and why we need to fight for what is - was the America we all can love and be proud of.
Listen to the Federalist Radio Hour podcast with David Mamet - link available in a previous post.
David Mamet Is a Defiant Scribe in the Age of Conformity
The playwright won’t play along with woke signaling, talismanic masking or deference to petty tyrants.
Santa Monica, Calif.
Back in the 1980s and ’90s, innumerable films, TV documentaries and history textbooks instructed us that the 1950s were years of conformity and conventionalism: “The Donna Reed Show,” McCarthyism, “The Organization Man,” TV dinners. In fact, the ’50s were a time of extraordinary artistic creativity, boundless technological innovation, original thinking in politics, intellectual diversity in journalism and higher education, new energy in religion, and enormous progress in race relations. What the ’80s and ’90s mistook for conformity was a naturally evolved cultural solidarity—something nearly everybody, on the left and the right, longs for now.
An informed observer of present-day America might reasonably conclude that our own decade—at least among the educated and advantaged classes—is far more imbued with the spirit of conformism than the ’50s were. Corporate managers and military leaders parrot nostrums about diversity, inclusion and sustainability that few of them believe. Museums and orchestras studiously avoid programming that might offend ideologues. Reporters and producers in the mainstream press seize on stories—or ignore them—solely because that’s what everybody else in the press is doing. Large majorities in wealthy cities dutifully comply with public-health restrictions they know to be largely ineffective, mainly because refusing to do so would invite the ire of friends and neighbors complying with those restrictions for the same reason.
Maybe America’s deciders and describers (to use Nicholas Eberstadt’s phrase) aren’t the independent-minded lot they think themselves to be.
These and related ironies were on my mind in February when I received a galley copy of the playwright David Mamet’s “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of Free Lunch,” published Tuesday. The book is a collection of essays written over the past two years on an array of cultural and political topics: pandemic zealotry, Donald Trump, terrorism, California’s punitive tax code, Christianity and Judaism, Broadway and the movies. The essays are by turns witty, insightful, affecting and cryptic. What struck me most about the book, though, was how superbly out of place its author must be in the eminent environs of his chosen industry.
He brings up the 1950s without prompting. “When I was a kid,” he says—Mr. Mamet was born in Chicago in 1947—“people went to different churches, they were from different ethnic backgrounds, their parents came from different countries, but somehow they managed to have a collective life. All of their self-worth didn’t come from belonging and staying connected to this one uber-group.”
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