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

Against the Capitol I met a lion,

Who glazed upon me and went surly by

Without annoying me. And there were drawn

Upon a heap a hundred ghastly women,

Transformd with their fear, who swore they saw

Men all in fire walk up and down the streets.

And yesterday the bird of night did sit

Even at noonday upon the marketplace,

Hooting and shrieking. When these prodigies

Do so conjointly meet, let not men say

These are their reasons, they are natural,

For I believe they are portentous things

Unto the climate that they point upon.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act 1, scene 3

I am a playwright. My professional life has been dedicated to the depiction of conflict.

If the drama is not a conflict, it can only be a lesson. The dramas antagonists are called characters; our knowledge of their character is limited to their actions: they made this or that choice, and it resulted in this or that outcome. The outcome was determined not by their past lives, or race, or social position, or sex, but by their choices.

Those of a religious disposition know that our free will comes from God and that free will only means the power to choose. A moral choice may or may not lead to an acceptable or good outcome. It need not; it is an outcome. It is a holy act, because it is moralthat is, in accord with divine will. If we were all good, we would not need free will, which is, finally, the possibility of courage. But we are not all good, neither is any of us good all of the time; in fact, one might say that the essence of human nature is that far from being flawed, we are not very damned good at all. And we know it.

The repression of this knowledge is an engine of human wickedness. And weve seen, in this last year, that once begun, it must escalate, like a fire searching for air. For, in a convocation of the wicked, sinners contending for acceptance quickly find that safety in the company of savagery can easily be sought in acquiescence, but status only in elaboration.

If restrooms must be redesignated to accommodate differing genders, how much more worthy to assert that sexes do not, in fact, exist and then that men can give birth?

If Donald Trump is evil, must not anyone who questions the proposition be evil also? And, if evil, must it not be worthy that they be destroyed? And then that those who wont proclaim it share their fate? If speech should be limited to avoid offense to college students, how much more worthy to expunge the books, thoughts, and electronic footprints of any defending not only the offending matter but free speech itself?

We know that the side which sets the rules will not eventually win, but, on their assertions acceptance, has in fact just won the contest.

Now we are engaged in a prodromal civil war, and American constitutional democracy is the contests prize. The universities, and the media, always diseased, have progressed from mischief into depravity. Various states are attempting to mandate that their schools teach critical race theorythat is, racismand elected leaders on the coasts have resigned their cities to thuggery and ruin.

The Left challenges the enraged, astonished, or grieving to give it a nameits name is incipient dictatorshipand should the Left be allowed to steal another election, they will not be put to the task of doing it again.

Savagery appeased can only grow. As any know whove been involved in an abusive home, a vicious divorce, or the dissolution of a toxic partnership. There are two sides to the story only in those in which we are not directly concerned. Then there is only one; and that the truth must always lie somewhere in between was disproved by Solomon himself. Sometimes it does and sometimes it does not. Which is why we have rules for debate, one of them our Constitution.

But how may a debate (a discussion, a trial, an election) take place in which one side rejects not its opponents position but his right to exist?

When there is no answer to the question, the rational being must learn to ask a different question.

My question, watching my beloved American democracy and culture dissolve, was, What can I do? I found no answer. But I realize, a year on, that a different question has brought me closer to peace. That question is this: How might I achieve clarity?

These essays, written during that terrible year, are a record of that attempt.

Parsons in pulpits, tax-payers in pews,

Kings on your thrones, you know as well as me,

Weve only one virginity to lose,

And where we lost it there our hearts will be!

Kipling, The Virginity (1914)

I write with a fountain pen. I bought it on Lexington Avenue in New York, December 31, 2000.

Ive had ink on my hands most of my life. I grew up with ink on my hands. The oak and iron desks in the 1950s Chicago public schools still held the glass inkwell, and there was then a debate about allowing students to hand in assignments written with the newly invented ballpoint pen.

I was the editor of my high school newspaper. I wrote the whole thing and set it in type on a wooden compositors stick. The type came out of a California Box, so named because it was the basic, portable set of characters carried by the pioneers who headed west to find a likely spot and set up a newspaper. Mark Twain set type out of a California Box, a process not at all different from that used by Johannes Gutenberg.

I portrayed Gutenberg for the West German Pavilion at Expo 67, the Montreal worlds fair. I was dressed in what I suppose was fifteenth-century fashion and worked an 1800 model of his 1439 invention, inking a block and pulling sheets from the press, happily covered in ink.

The Park Forest Star in Illinois took notice of my sports articles in the high school paper and hired me to cover high school sports in the area. I was paid four dollars an article, my first income as a writer. Sixty years ago.

Chicagos literary tradition derives from journalism. Dreiser was a newspaperman, as were Carl Sandburg, Eugene Field, Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery and dedicated her life to the eradication of racism, Frank Norris, who called out the trading pit and the railroads, and, of course, Ben Hecht.

He and Charles MacArthur wrote the greatestin any case, the most transformativeAmerican play, The Front Page. Do read his sketches of city life, A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922), dashed off and perfect; and see also his contemporary Finley Peter Dunne and his comic creation Mr. Dooley, the great Irish sage and bartender.

There was no better school for a writer than journalism. One learned on the instant, or got out: to get it right, get it fast, keep it simple, and pay it off. Damon Runyon (18801946) wrote sports for Hearst and took his wry genius with him into covering news (in addition to playwriting, screen writing, short stories, and novels). He covered the Lindbergh trial for Hearst, as did its other ace crime reporters, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Dorothy Kilgallen.

Kilgallen became Americas most famous journalist. She had a daily column, The Voice of Broadway, in 140 papers. She had a daily radio program and a weekly appearance on the television show Whats My Line.

She was the only reporter to interview Jack Ruby; the information she gained sent her to New Orleans on the trail of Kennedys actual assassins, and she returned to New York announcing she was going to print the truth and was discovered dead the next morning from an overdose of You got too close.

Martha Gellhorn (19081998) worked, out of college, for the Federal Writers Project with the photographer Dorothea Lange, documenting the Depression and the dust bowl. She was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, herself one of the most influential journalists of the twentieth century. Roosevelts My Day was a nationally syndicated column. From 1935 to 1962, she wrote as an advocate for civil rights, the rights of women, the UN, and the New Deal.