Writes David Mamet, in "The Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror, and Entertainment" (p. 230)(commission earned).
June 17, 2025
"Civilizations age and die. It’s acknowledged in one of the most beloved charades of wokeism: apologies to (selected) preliterate civilizations..."
"... that once were based in the area now inhabited by the apologists. What, however, would the enlightened have happen? Their fantasy casts them as champions of the Stone Age folks who once enjoyed the real estate we currently inhabit. But stone axes and buffalo hunting could have continued only as behaviors protected by a civilization not only technologically superior but of sufficient surplus of goods and Christianity to still the westward American migration in service of an ideal. The fantasy, in effect, of a historical reenactment or theme park. The fantasy was attempted in 1870 when the U.S. Department of the Interior put the Quakers in charge of various Indian reservations for the maintenance and order and the distribution of government welfare. The results were malfeasance and theft greater than the previous administration’s crony capitalism, since the peaceful Quakers were laissez-faire fools. Do homo sapiens seek out descendants of Neanderthals and apologize?"
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36 comments:
Camille Paglia, please pick up the white courtesy phone...
Call me when the Left gives The Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard back to the descendants of the "native" Americans.
My h. sap. and Neanderthal genes have learned to get along. No apologies necessary.
They call themselves 'progressives', but their focus is stuck on the past.
My home is in the Rancho San Rafael land grant given to Corporal Jose Maria Verdugo by the Spanish government in 1784. He was a corporal in the Mexican army. Do I have to give my house back to Corporal Verdugo? Asking for friends living in everything between the western edge of the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena on past the cities of La Canada, Glendale and Burbank. Come to think of that, would that include the home of Adam Schiff?
Romancing the Stone Age
“Civilizations age and die. It’s acknowledged in one of the most beloved charades of wokeism: apologies to (selected) preliterate civilizations...”
Reading that far, I was thinking the author was writing about Western and European civilizations.
Every tribe's "ancestral homelands" were taken by force from some other tribe, often with the most cruel violence, rape, torture, enslavement, and even cannibalism.
Much is made of the Lakota Sioux's claim to the Black Hills of South Dakota, but they took it in a war with the Arikara just before the Civil War. Before that it was owned by other tribes including the Cheyenne, Crow, Kiowa, Mandan, Hiidatsa, and Arapaho, and undoubtedly other tribes we don't know, perhaps because they suffered complete genocidal extermination.
Those were the rules when the white man arrived. We played by those rules, and we won. It's ours now. We won't give it back.
My ancestors were not merely immigrants, they were settlers, pioneers, Indian fighters, and conquerors. I am proud of them and happy that they won this land for me.
Progressive processes amplify liberal defects.
Skeptical Voter said...
“My home is in the Rancho San Rafael land grant given to Corporal Jose Maria Verdugo by the Spanish government in 1784. He was a corporal in the Mexican army. Do I have to give my house back to Corporal Verdugo?”
Technically, he was a corporal in the Spanish army, as Mexico would not exist for another 3 and a half decades.
But shouldn’t Corporal Verdugo be required to turn the land over to the local Indians - if the tribe still exists? Otherwise, it would be just one person of European decent turning their land over to another person of European descent.
Narr said...
“My h. sap. and Neanderthal genes have learned to get along. No apologies necessary.”
We Métis of mixed H. sapiens and H. Neanderthalis ancestry are the global majority, being the indigenous people of everywhere outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the dominant culture is Sapiens-specific. I demand government programs and DEI to rectify this silencing of our people and our heritage!
"...Call me when the Left gives The Hamptons and Martha's Vineyard back to the descendants of the "native" Americans....."
They'd probably ask for their beads and blankets back.
Mamet is following Saul Bellow's path from son of the Chicago streets to bemoaner of contemporary civilization. But is it really Mamet? He should sprinkle in a few cusswords just to let us know it's still him.
Martha's Vineyard is certainly snobbish, but it actually does have a (small) tribal area. For a long time, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket weren't regarded as desirable places to live -- bad farming, savage storms, everything having to be shipped in from the mainland, too much damn sand -- so a few Indians hung on long enough to get a reservation of sorts in the 1980s or 1990s.
I would start with giving Kevin Costner back to the Lakota or Dakota or whatever tribe wants to put up with him.
Ah Spanish land grants in California. After the Bear Flag Revolt of 1845--and particularly after the Gold Rush, there was a cottage industry of savvy Yanqui lawyers (not all of them were from New England) who had a cottage industry of establishing proper title for the land in California. Those "Spanish Army Corporals" and their descendants got hornswoggled. You might call it stealing good and proper. But after all they'd only held the land for 60 years--and they'd stolen it from the indigenes.
Cheers to Mamet for this take. The romanticizing of whatever Indian tribe last held the land is absurd. They were brutal nasty people in a brutal nasty world. Current lefties of any ilk would not have enjoyed life among them or near them.
I would start with giving Kevin Costner back to the Lakota or Dakota or whatever tribe wants to put up with him
************
I never figured out why we were to think that Indians were inoffensive, smiling, happy people, when early in "Dancing with Wolves" a settler family, kids included, had multiple arrows pumped into them by feral Payutes, who burned their cottage burnt to the ground..
I guess the message was, "settlers bad, crazy Indian lovers good."
IIRC millions bought that stupid "message".
And to those fools standing in front of you screaming, "You are standing on stolen property!", the best retort is:
"Well, I'm 1/16 Indian, and you are a trespasser. Get off my land!"
See what happens.
Mamet promoted his book by appearing on Mike Rowe's "The Way I Heard It" podcast. It was a good listen.
Mamet's going to be on Gutfeld! tonight. Unless it's pre-empted by new developments in the wars.
JSM
"So, how did you acquire all this land?"
I inherited it from my father.
"How did he get it?"
He inherited it from his father.
"How did he get it?"
From his father.
"How did he get it?"
He fought Indians for it.
"I'll fight you for it."
Around here, property title searches end at some European empire as original legal owner.
"Around here, property title searches end at some European empire as original legal owner."
Are there property records available to search that go back further in time than that?
Lazarus--I grew up on Cape Cod. You are correct. My mom found a great book of photos of the Cape from the turn of the century period. No trees anywhere. All windswept dunes and sheep meadows. People used the few trees for fuel. The interior of the Cape is still pretty wide open--scrubby pines and oaks on sandy waste. Great for golf courses, though.
Mamet's book is a sprawling tirade against the ideas and legacies of the fools and knaves who dominate our politics and culture. His passion is that of an outnumbered pugilist flailing in all directions. It's not an easy book, though. He needed editors to structure the thing. I kept wondering why this or that observation, so similar to an earlier observation, was placed at that point in the book, how it added to what came before, and how the cumulation of his thoughts could be summarized as a "book" with a thesis capable of proof or disproof.
It's a work of great courage, full of angry, pithy, acerbic thoughts, most of which I agreed with.
In Los Angeles, my city councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, an organized labor hack and closet Mexican nationalist, has stated that my neighborhood is in some sense poisoned by the fact that deeds issued from 1920-48 had restrictions against persons of color, obliging us 77 years later to now submit to absurd schemes to put 70 apartment units on a 7000 sf lot adjacent to a single family home on a 7000 square foot lot. Land acknowledgments are intended to destabilize and delegitimize our rights to our property and community.
Cheers to Mamet for this take. The romanticizing of whatever Indian tribe last held the land is absurd.
My hands-down favorite college class was History of the American West, which had zero to do with either of my majors - just a general education requirement. The prof was a consummate storyteller. When we were talking about the relationship between settlers of European descent and Indians, he explicitly derided both stereotypes about Indians - the "rapacious barbarians" one and the "noble savages" one. But, to my ear, he particularly wanted us to reject the latter. There was, he insisted, no romance about any of it - it was the usual course of things in human affairs.
Read the story of Quanah Parker, or more importantly, of his mother Cynthia Ann Parker, if you want the accurate picture of life for the settlers and Indians both. Every day was potentially a life-changing event, including life-ending.
You get it, Mason.
If you want well-informed storytelling about Euros and Indians--where the latter are both rapacious (and worse) and nobly savage, you could do worse than read the not-well-enough-known Thomas Berger.
Ampersand, when I was in residential real estate in the early '80s, some of the pre-printed contract forms still included restrictive covenants, which we were advised should be stricken and were of no legal force anyway.
Wasn't an attempt made to embarrass one of the Bushes with an old contract like that?
Tin deposits in North America were not (to my knowledge) anywhere close to North American copper deposits, or the Spanish Conquistadores and early English colonists might have been met by more serious armaments
Pedantic footnote for Hassayamper (12:55pm):
"Every tribe's "ancestral homelands" were taken by force from some other tribe" - if you mean every Indian tribe in North America, you're surely right, but there are a few places in the world where we know who the very first inhabitants were, and in some cases they still own them. One is Iceland: discovered by Vikings and still inhabited by their descendants. It's conceivable that a non-Viking sailor or two blown far off-course by the winds landed there before, but I think the Vikings settled it first. Bermuda and St. Helena and Tristan da Cunha are other islands whose first settlers are probably known: too far from any continent to be reached before naval technology was quite advanced. And I'm pretty sure the Polynesians got to a lot of places first, like Hawaii and New Zealand and Easter Island, though it's possible that a second boatload of Polynesians got to some of these places second and killed the first arrivals. There may also be a few mountains so steep, or deserts so dry, or swamps so dank, that no one lived there until fairly recently, recently enough to be recorded as first settlers.
@Dr Weevil - yes, I was referring specifically to North America, but your other points are well taken.
You're right about the second boatload of Polynesians; that's where the ali'i noblemen of Hawaii came from, after slaughtering and enslaving those from the first boat. And the Maori killed and ate almost all of the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands.
The "King of the Hill" animated TV series addressed this with the Native American "John Redcorn" character and the unpleasantness of pre-Columbian tribal life. Every tribal history is full of dirt and messes and raw survival, be they Inuit, Australian Aborinies, or Anglo-Saxons.
Some people hate tribal "winners" who figure out ways to run circles around other tribes. This includes the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, etc.
See the UK jokes about hating the Romans for invading Britain. What did they ever do for the natives, except bring in roads, writing, construction methods, land surveying, weapons and tactics, aquaducts, sewers, central heating, books, calendars, apartments, concrete, and much more?
Enigma: "the Native American "John Redcorn" character and the unpleasantness of pre-Columbian tribal life."
Ironically, the actor voicing him was shot to death earlier this month in some sort of anti-gay incident. Post-Columbian life is pretty bad, too.
JSM
effinayright said...
I never figured out why we were to think that Indians were inoffensive, smiling, happy people...
I think much of it had to do with a certain amount of guilt in Hollywood about portraying Indians as brutal savages for years and they wanted to make up for it.
But there was a strong strain of romantic primitivism in academia, especially from the late 19th century onwards (the whole Noble Savage myth). They very much romanticized early civilizations as peaceful despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Mayan rulers, for example, were portrayed as Astronomer Priests, despite graphic depictions of violence on some of their paintings and stelae. At least for the Maya, that all blew up once the texts were deciphered.
There was a scene from a 2007 film that did a fine job of addressing the so-called moral superiority of our North American predecessors:
https://youtu.be/MN90wZRnyM0?si=z4lieRNwq3Rjmac7
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