“We Can’t Stop Talking About Race in America”
September 13, 2009
By DAVID MAMET

PRESIDENT OBAMA, like his predecessor President Bill Clinton, has suggested that this country engage in a dialogue about race. But what has our 230-year national experience been but a dialogue about race? Our earliest drama on the subject, “Metamora,” by John Stone (1829), concerns the relations between the Massachusetts settlers and Prince Philip of the Wampanoags. So does the novel “Hope Leslie” by Catherine Sedgwick (1827). Much of the contentiousness that characterized the First Continental Congress centered on the subject of slavery. Since then the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 14th Amendment and so on, down to the Voting Rights Act and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the internment of the Japanese, busing, affirmative action and the 2008 election, have kept the subject alive in the national discourse.

My current play, “Race,” is intended to be an addition to that dialogue. As a Jew, I will relate that there is nothing a non-Jew can say to a Jew on the subject of Jewishness that is not patronizing, upsetting or simply wrong. I assume that the same holds true among African-Americans. In my play a firm made up of three lawyers, two black and one white, is offered the chance to defend a white man charged with a crime against a black young woman. It is a play about lies.

All drama is about lies. When the lie is exposed, the play is over. Race, like sex, is a subject on which it is near impossible to tell the truth. In each, desire, self-interest and self-image make the truth inconvenient to share not only with strangers (who may, legitimately or not, be viewed as opponents) but also with members of one’s own group, and, indeed, with oneself.

For just as personal advantage was derived by whites from the defense of slavery and its continuation as Jim Crow and segregation, so too personal advantage, political advantage and indeed expression of deeply held belief may lead nonwhites to defense of positions that, though they may be momentarily acceptable, will eventually be revealed as untenable. (Though its acceptability may be understandable, the notion that a wise Latina woman is better qualified to dispense justice than a white man is no less tragic or absurd than the opposite assertion.)

Drama may be used to buttress popular beliefs (see agitprop, the Soviet apotheosis of the tractor, and issue plays generally), but tragedy, like psychoanalysis, must strive to uncover those beliefs so unacceptable that their existence has been unconsciously repressed and would be consciously denounced. Tragedy’s end is their resolution. Here, as Aristotle teaches, heroes realize their previously repressed knowledge and are, by the revelation, freed from repression and transformed.

Most contemporary debate on race is nothing but sanctimony — efforts at exploitation and efforts at restitution seeking, equally, to enlarge and prolong dissent and rancor. The question of the poor drama is “What is the truth?” but of the better drama, and particularly of tragedy, “What are the lies?”

I have never spent much time thinking about the themes of my plays, as, I have noticed, when an audience begins to talk about the play’s theme, it means the plot was no good. But my current play does have a theme, and that theme is race and the lies we tell each other on the subject.

Chris Rock, in his last tour, addressed the subject of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and asked, rhetorically and on behalf of the whites in the audience: Is it possible that a 70-year-old black man hates the whites? Let me enlighten you. You cannot find a 70-year-old black man who does not hate the whites. This made sense to me. (I apologize to the esteemed Mr. Rock for what I am sure is a clunky paraphrase.)

There has always been, at the very least, a little bit of hate between blacks and whites in this country, with each side, in its turn, taking advantage of its political strength (as who does not?). But that relationship is also perhaps like a marriage. Both sides at different times are bitching, and both at different times are bailing, but we’re all in the same boat.

We are bound to each other, as are all Americans. Bound though subdivided, not only by race, but by religion, politics, age, region and culture. And we not only seem to be but are working it out. Contemporary considerations of diversity, multiculturalism, affirmative action, reparations and so on are, I believe, the beginning of the final wave of the exceptionalism of the black American experience.

These difficult, divisive questions, like those of abortion, gun control, gay rights and illegal immigration, are and will continue to be adjudicated in the legislatures, the courts and the public consensus — until the dialogue is done. When will it be over? It will be over, like any marital fight, at an unforeseeable time, when it has run its natural course. The length and tenor of that course are unknown to the participants, who, as in a marital fight, are each convinced, above all things, that the fight will be prolonged until his or her own side has triumphed. But as in a marriage the dialogue will take its own course until fatigue, remorse and finally forgiveness bring resolution.

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The following remark in this unsettling little essay struck me. And troubled me. And I think I know why. Here it is again:

When will it be over? It will be over, like any marital fight, at an unforeseeable time, when it has run its natural course. The length and tenor of that course are unknown to the participants, who, as in a marital fight, are each convinced, above all things, that the fight will be prolonged until his or her own side has triumphed. But as in a marriage the dialogue will take its own course until fatigue, remorse and finally forgiveness bring resolution.

Frederick Douglass, photograph by George Warren (ca. 1879).

Well, David Mamet, there are marital fights, and then there are marital fights. There are “difficult” marriages, and then there are marriages whose whole enterprise is abuse and terror. It all takes me back. I remember one time bringing up, in conversation with a man whose former spouse had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, the fugitive slave, abolitionist, and autobiographer nonpareil Frederick Douglass. Read “My Bondage and My Freedom,” my friend told me (for he knew Douglass), and you can conclude (if you wish) that black folk have been “married” unwillingly to a nation of white Borderlines.

For what have black folk had to endure in the “marriage” Mamet speaks of? 1) Bizarre unexpected outbursts of rage, on the part of their white “spouses,” even to the point of lynching—for no discernible reason whatsoever, and out of all proportion to any conceivable context. 2) A shocking sense of overweening entitlement; fantasies of grandiosity; threats; bullying; contemptuous and degrading aspersions. 3) Incredible objections that they, black folk, were somehow the beneficiaries of the “marriage,” whilst it was nothing but a woebegone misunderstood ordeal for the “ever-patient” white “spouse.” 4) Paranoid delusions of conspiracy in their white “spouses,” which have their validity solely in the sense that, yes, white folk have put themselves in a position to be conspired against.

And Meanwhile black folk have lived for three hundred years in a state of hyper-vigilance: “Why do these white people act this way? What the f*ck is wrong with them? And all we can do is watch our step, watch our step. And fear them.”

John Brown

Affirmative Action, say what you will for it—and I’ll certainly say good things for it when asked—is not adequate treatment for a kind of broadly socialized Post Traumatic Stress Disorder induced by 250 years of bondage, on the Borderline, to white desires, white compulsions, white imperatives. Time may be. Let’s wait a few more decades, Mr. Mamet—say, a century or so.

You can run out the analogy in close detail, my aforementioned friend suggested to me, through all 9 of the diagnostic criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder—on the part of white-folk, in what they have undertaken to do to their “betrothed.” So in reply to Mamet and Clinton et al, I’d say it hasn’t ever been a “discussion,” let alone a “lover’s quarrel,” or a marital spat. It has been a pathological shotgun wedding, with all that follows in the train of such sorry affairs.

Or rather say: John Brown got it right. Our “marriage” in slavery was a “state of war,” in which one part of the population (white) made war daily on the other (black). That is, until 1964-65, when peace talks finally began, and a kind of DMZ was set up. No treaty of which I am aware has been signed and fully executed as yet. And the borders are still mined.

But Mamet has one point: this “marriage” is also a “tragedy” in the sense in which he means it. It won’t be consummated until all the white lies and self-delusions have been exposed. And yet it is odd that Mamet doesn’t mention this: tragedies as we have known them, always end with dead bodies on the stage. There has been, there must have must been, blood. And of course there was.

The How-To of an Admission in the Steroid Era
By RICHARD SANDOMIR

The strategy that Mark McGwire used Monday to lay out his admission to using steroids demonstrated that lessons were learned from other baseball stars who preceded him in making mea culpa about their drug use. He did it all in one afternoon, starting with a statement that was distributed widely to the news media, and that came across the Associated Press wire at 3 p.m. The A.P. followed quickly with a story that featured an interview with McGwire, who subsequently spoke to numerous other news media outlets—including USA Today and The St. Louis Post-Dispatch; Tim Kurkjian and John Kruk of ESPN (both by telephone, not on the air); KTRS Radio in St. Louis; and The New York Times, before talking to Bob Costas live at 7 p.m. Eastern on MLB Network.

Ari Fleischer, in the White House Press Room.

The one-day plan—coordinated over the past month by Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary who runs a crisis-communications company, and the St. Louis Cardinals, who recently hired McGwire as their batting coach—contrasts with last year’s roll-out of Alex Rodriguez’s steroid admission. Last February, Rodriguez’s steroid use was first reported by Selena Roberts on SI.com; three days later, he confessed to ESPN in an interview with Peter Gammons that lacked adequate follow-up questions; eight days later, Rodriguez responded to questions at a news conference at the Yankees’ spring training camp as his teammates looked on. That all came more than a year after Rodriguez denied using steroids to Katie Couric of CBS News. Rodriguez lacked any arrogance in his confession, unlike Roger Clemens, whose drug-use denials have been defiant and angry. The genial Andy Pettitte took two months to speak about his use of human growth hormone after it was revealed in late 2007 in the Mitchell report that investigated drug use in baseball. McGwire had been silent since his embarrassing refusal to discuss his steroid use during a Congressional hearing nearly five years ago. His strategy back then, concocted with avoiding prosecution on his mind, made him appear hapless and as guilty as if he had confessed. This time, McGwire and his handlers surely knew his credibility would be enhanced if he confessed before spring training and made himself widely available, not only on Monday but Tuesday. An interview with ESPN is to be scheduled, but because it’s not exclusive, its thunder will be muted. McGwire’s personality has usually been low key, and he has not always been comfortable with the news media. In his repeated confessions Monday, he had no defiance or anger, just sadness and tears.

Kevin Sullivan, with former President G.W. Bush

“I like the door-to-door strategy, in that he is telling his story in long form and in less confrontational settings,” said Kevin Sullivan, a former White House communications director who runs a strategic-communications company. “He needed to rip the Band-Aid off before heading to spring training.” Sullivan added: “I suspect McGwire will soon have some form of a press availability where he takes questions. He won’t be able to completely turn the page until he satisfies the pent-up demand and takes some questions.” The McGwire interview was a coup for the year-old MLB Network and justifies what the channel is paying Costas. It provided McGwire with a stage for acceptance on a channel that is majority-owned by the league that has, after a long goodbye, welcomed him back to his old team. MLB has a little more than half the subscribers ESPN has. But MLB had an edge in Costas if, indeed, McGwire wanted to be interviewed at length by a smart interrogator. (A corporate connection should be noted: Costas is represented by IMG, which owns half of Fleischer’s company.) Before he sat down to talk to McGwire, Costas said in a telephone interview, “Yes, they decided this was the place for Mark to tell the story, but not because it was the place where they’d get the easiest ride.” Costas said he talked to Cardinals Manager Tony La Russa last year about interviewing McGwire. “I said to Tony that if Mark hopes to be able to proceed from opening day on, he has to address this forthrightly, to answer all legitimate questions and all secondary ones,” Costas said. Tony Petitti, the president of the MLB Network, said that although talks with McGwire’s camp made it clear that McGwire was going to say something significant, he and Costas did not know until the release of McGwire’s statement exactly what it would be. “We didn’t see the release ahead of time and we had to react to what he was going to say,” Petitti said. Whatever it was, the channel was guaranteed the exclusive interview.

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Commentary:

I’m embarrassed for my language, for my country. This article is rife with material: a former White House press secretary (Fleischer) and communications director (Sullivan) both heading “communication companies,” the one “crisis,” the other “strategic,” now pimping “roll-outs” for degraded professional athletes—the one in question here turned batting coach?

How high can they stoop?—to steal a line from Oscar Levant.

And Sandomir, conspiring with them all on the pages of the New York Times, in a gigantic apologia for each “player,” including himself, to make it all seem vaguely newsworthy. One wouldn’t have believed it, this sideshow. But that’s it: there’s no big tent anymore, only the ghost or ghost “footprint” of one, and it’s all sideshows, from pole to pole.

—by psymart

What the market "wanted" during the "first many decades" of the nation's history.

I would file this entry under the heading: “Bad Prose: Platitudes and Simplification.” For today, pundit David Brooks writes as follows: “During the first many decades of this nation’s existence, the United States was a wide-open, dynamic country with a rapidly expanding economy. It was also a country that tolerated a large amount of cruelty and pain—poor people living in misery, workers suffering from exploitation.”

Now, I want to suppose our man Brooks an educated man, even though he sat at the foot of W.F. Buckley. But in its “first many decades,” the U.S. “tolerated” not merely “misery” and “exploitation” of labor, but hereditary bond-slavery. Perhaps Mr. Brooks thinks slavery falls under the general heading of “workers suffering from exploitation.” But if he does, he has never read an honest account of the development of wealth in the “first many decades” of this nation’s existence. In 1860, one commodity alone accounted for 53% of revenues derived from exports: cotton. Which cotton, of course, was cultivated by laborers numbering in the millions (slaves), who were beaten, murdered, sold off, and raped with perfect impunity. Add to the revenues from cotton those from rice, sugar, and tobacco (all grown with slave labor) and you begin to get a clearer picture than the one our man Brooks would paint. And what did it take to resolve that problem of this peculiar form of “worker exploitation”? More than 600,000 dead in a Civil War. And then, after the Reconstruction was destroyed by white-supremacists, many more thousands dead black folk during the nations “many decades” of lynching terror. And then, finally, in 1964-65, America began to have a right to call itself a democracy.

Has David Brooks every opened a book by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Richard Wright, or James Baldwin? Or by James McPherson? or by George Frederickson? Or by Winthrop Jordan? Or by Philip Dray? Or Rayford Logan? If he has, it availed him nothing.

David Brooks, pundit.

Next our man Brooks writes: “The unregulated market wants to direct capital to the productive and the young. Welfare policies usually direct resources to the vulnerable and the elderly. Most social welfare legislation, even successful legislation, siphons money from the former to the latter.”

Now, insofar as an abstraction like “the unregulated market” can “want” to do something, it “wants” to find the cheapest labor and resources and the least regulation it possibly can. So, it “siphons” capital from U.S. labor markets to China, Mexico, Indonesia, and so on.

I suggest that Mr. Brooks visit Detroit, unescorted, and that he ask the impoverished people there what the market seems to “want.” I suggest that he visit Iowa to see what the market “wants” “Agri-business” (so-called) to do there in its unholy name: turn an entire state into a cornfield to produce not food, but raw materials for industrial production of chemicals that are then fabricated into “food”; and to use not the sun to grow that corn, but “fertilizers” derived from the energy of the sun as stored billions of years ago in petroleum. What the market “wants” in Iowa, if we are to know it by its fruits, as the Bible hath it, is this: depopulation & destruction of communities; one of the largest underground economies of methamphetamine in the U.S.; wash-out pollution into the rivers that winds up in the Gulf, where the “market” has apparently decided that it “wants” a dead-zone the size of thirty or forty counties. As Milton puts it in “Comus“:

“If every just man, that now pines with want,
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper’d luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed
In un-superfluous even proportion,
And she no whit incumber’d with her store;
And then the giver would be better thank’d,
His praise due paid; for swinish gluttony
Ne’er looks to heav’n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Crams, and blasphemes his feeder.
Shall I go on? Or have I said enough?”

After 9/11 half of America went to war and the rest went shopping. Wall Street coined newfangled financial instruments to leverage the universe and Main Street fell for them. Division grew, fellowship withered. Everyone knew money could not really rain from the sky in the American dream factory but they went on playing their own versions of online solitaire.

Really? “Division grew, fellowship withered.” Breathtaking. I love it and I hate it, this biting off of the whole hog. Half did this, half that. Wall Street and Main Street as good-enough abbreviations for—well, it’s a stark 50/50, either-or enterprise, all the way through, isn’t it? Before 9/11, after 9/11. You, in your column, step up to the mound the opposing pitcher’s just vacated and scratch the dirt a couple of times with your foot. Now it’s your mound again. You have no time to do more than that. “Everyone knows” you have to start working, just as “everyone knew” that money doesn’t “really rain from the sky in the American Dream Factory.” So why not let the usual habits do their work? Why not take the nearest way?

Jacques Derrida, father of "deconstruction," enemy of "phallogocentrism."

Cohen is serious as he can be right here. He’s having no qualms. Louis Menand in the pages of The New Yorker is Hegelian in comparison. And then there are the clichès, “dichotomous thinking” being one example (in an infrastructural way); Main Street and Wall Street deployed as summary epithets being another; the “American Dream Factory” being a third.

Robert Putnam, lecturing to students (and to columnists).

And doesn’t the idea of “everyone playing their own versions of online solitaire” derive, unacknowledged, from another favored commonplace amongst columnists, which Robert Putnam bestowed on us all: “Bowling alone.” That’s what Americans do: they do the same things together alone.

And as for the “dichotomous thinking” we were so be-warned about in graduate school, the thinking that Deconstruction was to have taken care of, that we were all to have gotten beyond? Nothing doing. It’s the bedrock; any other kind of thinking in print or in speech is a waste of ink or breath.

But Cohen is right, isn’t he? On the whole, I mean—”Krugman-right,” so to speak. Right in a paltry, nude fashion. In a hard-headed, spit-it-out fashion. But it hurts. It makes me feel all the “invidious distinction” of my nine years in graduate school. The otioseness of me. And so I absolve myself after Groucho Marx, and say I wouldn’t want to do what Cohen does—could, but wouldn’t even if.

—by psymart

Martin Hiedegger

The following appears in the 8 November 2009 issue of The New York Times.

In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of his own beliefs. While he doesn’t dispute Heidegger’s place in the intellectual pantheon, Mr. Faye reviews his unpublished lectures and concludes his philosophy was based on the same ideas as National Socialism.

Note that the phrases highlighted in bold are essentially parallel—or so one assumes on first reading the passage. And yet that second “his,” the “his” highlighted in red, seems rather to have lost its mooring. Shouldn’t the sentence read as follows? “In Mr. Faye’s eyes Heidegger’s philosophy cannot be separated from his politics in the way, say, T.S. Eliot’s poetic skills or D. W. Griffith’s cinematic technique might be appraised independently of their own beliefs.” Almost certainly the reference, here, is to the Anti-Semitic “beliefs” of Eliot and to the white-supremacist bearing of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (based on Thomas Dixon‘s The Clansmen). Whereas “his,” as it works in the paragraph published in the NYT, floats in reference, almost as if its antecedent were, in fact, “Mr. Faye,” which simply cannot be the case, as I read the paragraph. I run across such solecisms in the NYT fairly regularly these days.