21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Disenlightenment' Review: The Rules According to Mamet
There are many ways to describe the style in which David Mamet addresses life in America in 'The Disenlightenment,' his collection of political essays. He's mordant; unsparing; rollickingly intemperate; laugh-out-loud funny; belligerent; unapologetically Jewish and Zionist; and adamantly conservative, in a way befitting an ideological convert who was once a self-described 'brain-dead liberal.'
Mr. Mamet is an American dramatist of renown, still celebrated after all these years for 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' his 1983 play currently enjoying a lively revival on Broadway. Since the later stages of the first Obama administration, he's been known as much for his political essays as for his drama. The first of these books was 'The Secret Knowledge' (2011), in which he laid bare the extent of his rejection of liberalism (his original apostasy having been revealed three years earlier in a brief essay in the Village Voice). 'Recessional' (2022)—its title taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem—came next. In this, Mr. Mamet observed, among other things, that the Miss America pageant is 'the reenactment of a slave auction.' It was a book designed to jolt.
'The Disenlightenment' is his latest assemblage of heat-seeking thought, made up of 44 short and razor-sharp essays, some as brief as three pages. They're a stream, not so much of consciousness as of deliberate, concentrated reasoning, distilled into conclusions of almost rabbinical finality. 'My political writing, over the last twenty years,' he tells us, 'has been of the genre 'Hold on a second. . . '.' He's a hunter-gatherer of cant—and its destroyer. You can dip into any essay in the book at random, and still enjoy (or wince at) a self-contained argument that lays bare some form of American humbug. His name for America's 'political pseudodrama' is Wokelahoma.
Mr. Mamet is a passionate devotee of President Trump, whom he regards as America's rescuer from unhinged, godless progressives. 'Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment.' Mr. Mamet loathes Barack Obama and Joe Biden with undisguised venom. President Obama, he writes, 'was a Marxist and Islamist opportunist.' And Mr. Biden, in his view, embodied all that was moribund in America. The country 'has been dying,' Mr. Mamet writes, and 'it is no mere coincidence that, in Biden,' the country 'elected and abided a leader in the last stages of senility, and devoted time and treasure to denying the fact, and savaging the observant.'
