The Secret Knowledge

Here’s a brief extract from David Mamet’s amusing new book, The Secret Knowledge (p 137):

A writer’s life is lived, and, I think, must be lived, in solitude. For it is a dialog with one’s own thoughts, and often, a dialogue about one’s own thoughts; and the corrosive nature of this struggle is often unpleasant, devouring one’s time and weakening one’s capacity for simple human interaction. This is a minuscule price to pay for the privilege of earning one’s living as an artist; but the price, thought small (if it is a price, and not, rather an attribute), unfits the writer, or, at least, unfitted me, for participation in a wider society. I need to be alone. And am very grateful that this state has been not only ameliorated but beautified by the society of my wife and my children, many of whom are women.

___

Part of the Left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

The intellectual elite which is the Left can preserve neither its hegemony nor its pretensions in the light of facts, for the fact is that Governments cannot create wealth. Wealth, and prosperity, is creatable only by workers, which is to say, by those who are going to employ their gifts, their time, and their energy and intelligence to create something others might want. Every worker knows this: work hard, and get ahead. (May the hard-worker be overlooked, or gulled from his just reward? Of course; but the potential reward for his application is completely denied to his brother who will not work.)

Sarah Palin was a commercial fisherman. She actually worked with her hands, and, so, she like Harry Truman, was, to the Left, an object not only to be dismissed, but to be mocked. For the Left loves “the workers” only in the abstract; to find that they not only exist as individuals, but are willing to bet their subsistence upon their principles of hard work and thrift — this, to the Left, is an unanswerable indictment of Socialism, Globalism, and Statism. The enemy of the Intellectual is not the Capitalist, but the individual, which is to say the Worker.

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