David Mamet's "Redbelt"

David Mamet was America’s best dramatist and moviemaker when he was a shmuck liberal, and remains such now that he has become a shmuck conservative. His best movie is “Redbelt,” his last. (His second best was “The Spartan,” which he made just before “Redbelt,” but this is much better.)

Every time I watch “Redbelt” I see stuff in it that maybe even Mamet didn’t notice. Here is a list.

1.       Most precious moment: “Don’t stand there.” (I’m sure Mamet intended this, I just wanted to note it.)

2.       The main character, a martial arts instructor, never objects to the essential unfairness of the blackball technique for handicapping a contestant. We all feel this unfairness intensely. But of course we all miss the point that the unfairness penalizes the unhandicapped contestant. Why?

3.       After discovering that the blackball technique has been compromised, he leaves the contest in protest. As he is exiting the arena, he encounters his female attorney in a stark scene of concrete support (Temple) columns. Actually, she has been shadowed in one of the columns, actually has been the column. When she steps forward, she is no longer a lawyer, but a goddess.

4.       She slaps his face. Why? Because he is not dead. He thinks he is protesting against the “contest” framework, but actually he has accepted it, for winning and losing are the terms of all contests. (Her slap asks, “For this I had to become mortal?”)

5.       The Greek tragic heroes died because of their hubris. Mamet has created the first such hero who wins because of his hubris.

Hiss and Hoover

Alger Hiss and J. Edgar Hoover:

American Heroes

By Tom Milstein

            When Harry Truman became President of the United States, little did he know that he had a Russian spy, Alger Hiss, looking over his shoulder as he tried to conduct the nation’s foreign policy. Hiss was only the most prominent in a long list of WASP traitors who have indulged in this nefarious activity, a few of whom were sent to prison while their less ethnically favored tools, like the Rosenbergs, went to the electric chair. Was justice was served? After serving a short term for perjury, Hiss had to spend the rest of his life selling ladies’ girdles and office stationery. You decide.

            Secretary of State Acheson raised a lot of eyebrows when he “refus[ed] to turn his back on Alger Hiss” and quoted the New Testament: “I was a Stranger and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me, I was in prison and ye came unto me."

            The Hiss case opened the floodgates to a swelling tide of revelations about Communist infiltration of the government under the auspices of FDR’s New Deal. Americans were shocked to learn how their mighty government had been turned into an agency of Stalin’s foreign policy by trusted paragons of the Establishment. An entire generation was shamed. These men were not mere careerists; they were dedicated Communist ideologues, prepared to rationalize Stalin’s bloodiest crimes on behalf of a totalitarian America.

            How could this have happened? Hiss and his comrades were not “sell-outs.” They were ideologues, sincerely committed to their utopian vision of a Communist America and a united world order. They were in no sense “premature anti-Fascists.” Those who from careerist motivations or genuine moral revulsion repudiated their previous Communist convictions, were shocked to find themselves the object of loathing by their own children who, instead of adopting their parent’s new democratic idealism, embraced Mao’s crusade to restore Stalinist purism.

            But the question of totalitarian psychology is of minor interest. The real issue is why America tolerated this red fifth column for so long. Hoover’s FBI conducted a well-publicized struggle against the Communist menace throughout this period. Even during times of apparent Soviet-American amity the Agency kept itself well-apprised of Communist activity. Few Americans were fooled by “Uncle Joe’s” smiles.

            It therefore cannot be said that the U.S. tolerated Communist subversion out of ignorance or delusion. The obvious explanation is that the government was conducting a deeply secret policy behind the backs of its own people, and that the Communist Party was a tool of this policy. The manager of this tool had to have been the FBI. Of course, Hoover didn’t keep his Party card in his bra. FDR kept it in his desk drawer.

            The secret policy on behalf of which Hoover wielded his Communist apparat is even more obvious than its mechanism: the Soviet-American alliance which eventually brought America to world power. 20^th Century history gives us all the answers we need. Without this alliance, America might well have become the world’s dominant power, but it would have taken much longer to become the world’s only dominant power.

            Nations guard their secret alliances with all the powers they command. German complicity in the Bolshevik rise to power is widely denied to this day, both in Germany and in post-Communist Russia. Americans will not accept that their government engaged in intense collaboration with Soviet Russia, except to defeat fascist Germany. Everything that appears to be collaboration is attributed to coincidence. The pattern of mutual benefit, at the expense of all other nations, is dismissed as European anti-Americanism.

Occasionally, though, a ray of truth makes its way through the blanket of disinformation. An Alger Hiss is caught red-handed transmitting State Department secrets to Soviet military intelligence. A Soviet defector falls from a hotel window while under FBI protection. Whittaker Chambers exposes the entire Soviet intelligence network and finds himself under investigation. But these leaks are rare. The real test of the system occurs when the entire “bodyguard of lies” collapses, as it did when Richard Nixon arranged the momentous confrontation between Hiss and Chambers. Then the subversive and the patriot exchange identities in full view of the people. Americans rise up in indignation. But it is they, the people, who are exposed. The charade is being conducted for their benefit, and they have been cheated out of their ignorance.