The Secret Knowledge

It used to be called “passing out tracts.”

Actors, thriving on publicity, have historically claimed for themselves the right to champion “causes,” the term of art being “Their” disease. This hucksterism may, in fact, have done somebody good, and more probably, did harm to nothing save the actor’s understanding of his place in the world. But it is the nature and profession of the actor to see himself as the Hero. Without this capacity and inclination, the actor cannot act. His professional indulgence in fantasy is a boon to the community, its elaboration into do-gooderism is, perhaps, inevitable.

We writers, similarly, are professional fantasists. But, rather than imagining ourselves as heroes, we live through delineating the struggle between Good and Bad. We are, essentially, Zoroastrians—for, if we can’t adequately differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys, how will we know when to end the story?

Writers have traditionally been the dupes of totalitarian propaganda, as the visions we have been shown and the tales we have been told sound, to us, like the products of our own imagination.

And actors, as above, are easily manipulated, similarly, by the unconscious appeal of a universe resembling their own (in which they are the hero).

No wonder, then, that these two subgroups of my particular racket, show business, have been trotting the globe for a hundred years, petted by and championing the causes of Tyrants.

No wonder that the Hollywood enclaves of today coalesce around Good Causes, and that these Good Causes seem to be reducible to “saving the world.”

But I will note that the brave groups protecting the rights of the Palestinians to destroy the Jews, the rights of Iraqis and Cubans to live under dictatorship, and protesting the American military’s mission to protect their lives, that these disaffected are taken, in my business, in the main, from the ranks of actors and writers, and interestingly, contain only a very small number of directors.

Why? A director cannot deal in fantasy. His job is to take the delineation of a fantasy (a script) and transform it into film-in-the-can. He has a certain amount of time and money with which to do so, and no amount of fantasy will stop the sun going down on a day on which he has not completed his assigned filming.

More importantly, a director (I speak as one who has directed ten features, and quite a bit of television), is exposed to something of which the actors and writers may not have taken notice: the genius of America, and the American system of Free Enterprise.

The director sees, on the set, one or two hundred people of all walks of life, races, incomes, political persuasions and religions, and ages, men and women, involved, indeed dedicated to doing their jobs as well as possible (indeed the ethos of the film set could, without overstatement, be described as “doing it better that it’s ever been done”), in aid of the mutual endeavor (the film). Each brings not only his or her particular expertise and craft, but an understanding of and dedication to the culture of filmmaking: work hard, pitch in, never complain, admire and reward accomplishment.

Travel posters of the postwar era proclaimed “See America First.” I would recommend this as an anodyne to the Adventure Tourist’s Weltschmerz: look around you.

20

CABINET SPIRITUALISM AND THE CAR CZAR

I am very willing to recognize the good in many men of these two classes, but a politician or a civil servant is still to me an arrogant fool’til he is proved otherwise.

—Nevil Shute, Slide Rule: Autobiography of an Engineer, 1954

A czar is an absolute ruler. The wish to appoint a bureaucrat and name him Czar is an example of magical thinking, for, if government is inefficient, how may it be improved by making it omnipotent?

But perhaps Government is unsatisfactory because it is made of bureaucrats. This “czar,” then, will be but another. He will have to deal not only with the bureaucracy he inherits, but with that which he creates—the attempts to amalgamate the two, resulting in an organization inevitably worse than either.

The new group dedicated to the streamlining of Government will be paced by a corresponding group of incumbents ensuring that this takes place within the existing rules (which is to say that its jobs are not threatened), and the net results will be an unavoidable increase in the infighting which is the main occupation of all bureaucrats, and a concomitant increase in the power of the State. The inefficiency of Government cannot be addressed through an elaboration of Government.

The delusion that it can calls to mind the Cabinet Spiritualists of the late nineteenth century. These assured the public that they possessed supernatural powers. Locked in a cabinet and bound, they could, for example, cause musical instruments to play, cause writing to appear upon slates, cause objects to fall from the sky, and so on.

But these feats, they explained, could only be performed under those special circumstances necessary for the intercession of the Spirits. The Spirit World demanded privacy. So, the cabinet in which the acts were performed must be closed. To still the doubts of the unbelievers, however, the Spiritualists would be bound, and the cabinet investigated by an impartial committee of the audience.

Here we have a charming example of codependent thinking on the part of the audience, who, in this figure, represent our Electorate. Their will to believe is in direct conflict with their understanding. They may enjoy the demonstration only if it is believable, but they know it to be a hoax—what are they to do?

The spiritualist and the politician are essentially magicians, one offering diversion, the other security, in exchange for a suspension of common sense.

For, if the spiritualist could actually cause the instruments to play without his intervention, let him do it in the light—he cannot.

Neither can the politician suspend the natural processes of bureaucracy by expanding them. He can at best, and only under special circumstances, perform the illusion of doing so—these special circumstances being that period prior to his inauguration, or a time of emergency sufficient to distract the populace or otherwise stay any outside power of verification.⁴⁶

How, for example, may a new agency, named Homeland Security, offer improvement over that security previously provided by various diverse government agencies, each of which itself originated as an amalgamation of its predecessors in the name of efficiency?

This tendency toward elaboration is, of course, the way of the world. In the mobile society of our Democracy each new stage of elaboration is inaugurated by the selfsame vision: that what is needed is a centralized power, and a revision of laws to allow this efficiency. This is called a return to common sense.