Saturday, June 18, 2011

Quote of the Weekend

Christopher Hitchens, reviewing David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge: "It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic."
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13 comments:

PG said...

I'd be surprised that someone who departed The Nation with an essay titled "Goodbye to All That" in which he excoriates his former ideological allies, mainly for failing to support neverending war in Afghanistan and Iraq, couldn't produce a more empathetic review of Mamet's book, except this is Hitchens we're talking about. And old Hitchian sympathies still manifest: "Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin..." I'm not sure by what metric Marx can be deemed "more industrious" than Palin, other than perhaps by number of words published (and she'll probably Twitter and Facebook Note her way past him before she dies). Certainly she's been more industrious in the sense of things rather than ideas; so far as I know, the only work Marx ever did was as a writer, and not one who got many people to buy his work during his lifetime. In contrast, Palin at least can point to various odd jobs during her college career as well as working on her husband's fishing boat. She certainly has a stronger background as a Worker in the sense Marx himself probably would recognize than did Marx, with his father putting him through school and his wife a baroness.

11:56 AM
Anonymous said...

Wow, PG is really overthinking this. Hitchens is a writer... of course he counts writing as industriousness! How many history papers will cite to Going Rogue 150 years.

For all his faults, Hitchens has been known to have an original idea about politics pop into his head. I see no indication that the same can be said of Mamet.

11:59 PM
PG said...

A lot of history papers will be citing Mein Kampf 100 years from now, when Going Rogue and all Palin's tweets and FB notes are forgotten. So what? What does it have to do with industriousness, especially from any genuinely leftist position that takes a critical view of bourgeois assumptions about whose words count and whose don't? As I noted, Palin's lifetime output of words most likely will surpass Marx's.

7:47 AM
Christopher Meyer said...

My mother bought Mamet's book for me, with the sincere belief that it might convert me to her tea party views.

4:38 PM
Anonymous said...

Having not read Mamet's book but having seen movies in which his screen plays, etc., have be employed and having read his essays, I would think that Hitchens ought employ a bit more humility. So, I agree with PG.

One thing I have noticed in our society, the left and the right inhabit different idea planets. There is nearly no debate between them, except for staged political events for political office, events that sound more like press conferences than debates. And, it is standard fare for the left and the right to make fun of each other, to call each other names, etc., etc. That, on reading Mamet's essays, at least, seems to be his biggest point. One's political opponents are not usually evil, or at least no more evil than those on one's political friends.

8:49 AM
PG said...

That, on reading Mamet's essays, at least, seems to be his biggest point. One's political opponents are not usually evil, or at least no more evil than those on one's political friends.

I've only seen "Oleanna" performed (the Bill Pullman-Julia Stiles revival), and while I think it's clearly "siding" with the professor regarding allegations of sexual harassment, it also looks at his character very critically and begins with the female student as the character for whom we have sympathy. So Mamet's belief that the dramas worth writing have good arguments on both sides was on display at least in that play. (And indeed the reason that the Hepburn-Tracy comedy "Adam's Rib" is my favorite movie about law is that the opposing leads each has a good point: Hepburn's character about justice as fairness and Tracy's about justice as the rule of law. Most law movies are so obvious about which side is right, the only dramatic tension is whether good will triumph, which it almost certainly will if it's a Hollywood studio feature film.)

Unfortunately, as Hitchens notes, Mamet seems to have abandoned any prior belief that his political opponents are not evil.

4:58 PM
Anonymous said...

PG,

Others who have written about the book do not agree with Hitchens' assessment.

I did read, with some interest, a short chapter of the book, which is about feminism and, in particular, about Gloria Steinem's critique of Marilyn Monroe. If that discussion is typical of what appears in the book, Hitchens is playing games.

His argument is that feminists need to focus on the lives of the actually living even when it means criticizing one's own - e.g., Bill Clinton's dealings with numerous women or the accusations against Julian Assuange - when such is hardest to do. He uses Monroe, the target of Steinem's critique, to argue that the issue, as he sees the matter, is the status of women in the eyes of some on the left part of the political spectrum.

I do not know if Mamet is right. But, frankly, he is a lot fairer than Hitchens tends to be. And, I think, Hitchens is upset because Mamet is such a strong supporter of Israel, a country for which Hitchens has little sympathy and because Mamet is not a lover of Marx.

10:02 AM
PG said...

Based on the review I've seen, the book is essentially a lengthier version of Mamet's 2008 essay, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" Since that essay indicated that Mamet put almost no thought into being a liberal (his description of his former views sounds like a parody of a college freshman, complete with The Corporations and Bad Bad Military -- yet he "revered" JFK, a WWII vet whose daddy could buy votes thanks to The Corporations), I'm skeptical that he's putting substantially more into being a conservative.

3:52 PM
Anonymous said...

Pretty funny to see PG shift gears from FedSoc 'tarianism to IngSoc leftism, especially in the span of a single thread.

5:59 PM
PG said...

Thanks! I've always liked F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of a "first-rate intelligence," though I find the phrase pretentious.

7:09 AM
Anonymous said...

PG,

As I said, Hitchens' does not appear to have devoted himself to addressing the book, which is, according to Amazon.com, a series of essays on a variety of topics. All of them, apparently, are directed to alleged shibboleths of the Left. The only essay from it that I have read concerns Ms. Steinem. And, as I said, the essay was measured and moderate in tone and content. That is not an endorsement of his point of view; only a statement about how it was written and the clear-headedness of his mind.

I allow the possibility that one can hold views I disagree with without believing that such person has not thought his or her views out fully. And, in that regard, the essay I noted is rather well considered, whether or not correct. He might be correct. I am not sure.

7:56 AM
PG said...

"I allow the possibility that one can hold views I disagree with without believing that such person has not thought his or her views out fully."

Doesn't that make you special! It's not like any of the rest of us have done things like joined the Federalist Society or participated in debates with people who present opposing views with logic and evidence. However, if someone has exhibited a lack of thinking when he held one set of views, there's little reason to believe that he's suddenly become a thoughtful person now that he holds an opposing set. If someone was fool enough to think everything the government did was right yet think the military (which some of us had always known to be directed by the government) to be unambiguously Bad, unless he had some sort of Flowers for Algernon brain surgery, I doubt he's suddenly become a reasoned and coherent political thinker.

By the way, David, you may just need to ban that IP. Some folks don't get your hints. And by hints, I mean open insults. (I find this so weird. There are literally millions of places to argue with people being wrong on the internet. Why keep coming back to one that doesn't want you? Masochism? Martyrism in the sense of self-sacrifice in order to save others from intellectual hell?)

2:41 PM
Anonymous said...

Looks to me like one variety of open insult is being traded for another, and if people don't like being told they are wrong on the internet they can always just start a locked livejournal and cry about their issues there. If one sets up a soapbox to brag about one's supposed intellectualism, however, folk'll heckle from time to time.

7:01 PM

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