In my latest essay for Splice Today, I defend and celebrate human right hero, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and demonstrate how the American feminist betrayal of her reveals the shallowness, vapidity, and hypocrisy of too many white, upper class liberals.
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Tag Archives: Politics
New Essay at the Federalist – War Stories: An Interview with David Mamet
It is nearly impossible for me to measure the influence that the work of David Mamet – one of America’s greatest writers – has had on my thinking, my ideas, and, I hope, my writing.
Needless to say, I was thrilled and honored to spend 90 minutes with the literary genius and giant on the phone. The Federalist has published the result of that conversation – an essay that ranks among my best work, and one that I am very proud to have written.
The essay, because of Mamet’s brilliance and wit, contains so many gems of insight that it really becomes required reading.
I am particularly happy with the essay, because it truly gets to the essence of Mamet’s philosophy and personality. We spend time discussing his greatest work – Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Edmond, The Verdict – along with his newest book, Three War Stories.
We also spend time on his political conversion from liberalism to libertarianism, which is similar and influential on my own same ideological travel route, and on his early life on the streets and in the theaters of Chicago.
It is my hope that the large swath of people who will continually find Mamet’s work worthy of study will use my interview and profile as a source of knowledge for many years.
New Essay at The Daily Beast: Richard Hofstadter and America’s New Wave of Anti-Intellectualism
Twenty-first century philistines, suffering from a lack of imagination and curiosity, have seized upon understandable economic anxieties since the financial crash of 2008, to shepherd an increasingly large flock of American sheep into the livestock freight carrier Pulitzer prize winning historian, Richard Hofstadter, called “anti-intellectualism.
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life—one of Hofstadter’s best, among many great books – was a pile of dynamite in 1963, when it was first published and blew a sizable hole in the house of America’s self-comforting delusions of intellectual superiority. In 2014, one can only hope that some of its initial blast still reverberates, as media commentators, university administrators, and even the President, have exposed themselves as adherents to what Hofstadter indicted as the “lowest common denominator criterion” of thought and “technician conformity” of lifestyle. Suspicion, and often outright hatred, of ideas is making American culture as riveting as oatmeal. By reading Hofstadter, one learns that the resurgence of a new anti-intellectualism isn’t new, at all. In fact, Hofstadter identified the particularly poisonous strain of the virus that now infects the American mind and kills the imagination.
New Column for The Indianapolis Star: Marijuana Legalization Makes Sense for Indiana
I don’t like marijuana, and I don’t often socialize with people under its influence. But what separates me from most elected officials is that I am not so arrogant as to believe that my personal preferences function as divine mandates. Just because I don’t enjoy something, does not mean that you should not have the option of trying it, and if you do try it, you should face the risk of criminal penalty.
There are many practical reasons to legalize marijuana…
Read the rest of my column on legalizing marijuana at the Indianapolis Star.
New Essay at The Daily Beast: Books to Transform Your Sad Life
In my new essay for the Daily Beast, I offer a syllabus for self-transformation. From my introduction to the book list:
As the New Year dawns, let’s admit that the American psyche is a dilapidated maze of funhouse mirrors that leads nowhere. It should not shock even the most credulous patriot that many people who spend their internal lives within this maze of narcissism and dysfunction have major problems. One in five Americans suffers from some kind of mental illness, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The New York Times recently reported that suicide rates are rising so rapidly and steadily that more Americans now die of suicide than in car accidents. In a turn that vindicates Aldous Huxley, one in ten Americans ingests their daily Soma supplement in the form of antidepressants.
Many Americans are like Soren Kierkegaard’s allegorical corpse who did not realize he was alive until the morning he woke up dead—aimlessly wandering around in a drug addled haze, indulging smart phone addiction, disconnected from reality and community, while wondering why they feel unhappy and unfulfilled.
To worsen their condition of alienation and dejection, many Americans, in an attempt to feel better, read books that manipulatively sell mindless optimism and pathological hope. The cult of positive thinking turns out one hit after another, both secular—The Secret—and Christian—Joel Osteen’s prosperity gospel. The delusion that changing a life is as simple as believing it will change, and the poison that pretends God wants people who pray early and often to win the lottery, only raise expectations to unrealistic heights, and set desperate people up for a crushing fall with a crash landing.
Since Americans seem to love making New Years resolutions, now might be a sensible time for many to resolve to gain maturity and perspective in 2014. Such a process of self-education can and should begin with the close reading of books containing wisdom that will alleviate their anxiety, provide edifying purpose, and begin to transform their minds from circuses to cathedrals.
Check out my ten book recommendations, including Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, American history books, sexual advice, and a “loafer’s manifesto”, at the Daily Beast.
New Column for Indianapolis Star: State Has No Business Banning Gay Marriage
State Has No Business Banning Gay Marriage
Indianapolis Star: December 5, 2013
The Indiana State Constitution is based on the United States Constitution – perhaps the most important document in the history of humanity’s fight for freedom. Considering the legal brilliance, political empowerment, and spiritual hope that the Constitution embodies, it would set a dangerous precedent, and betray the meaning of America to amend the constitution – at the state or federal level – to limit liberty, rather than enlarge it.
The ink that the American founders used to write the Constitution doubled as the concrete that provided the foundation for Republican Democracy around the world. An essential part of its vision is the separation of church and state. While that actual phrase might not appear in the Constitution, the founders, especially Thomas Jefferson, made it clear in letters that they intended to keep bureaucrats out of the business of religion, and keep clerical bullies from imposing their dogmas on the duties of governance. The Supreme Court has upheld and validated the separation interpretation of the Establishment Clause in dozens of cases dating back hundreds of years.
It is for these reasons that any thoughtful, reasonable, and moral person must vehemently oppose the proposal to change the Indiana State Constitution to include an amendment banning gay marriage.
It is not the State’s role to make judgments on the consensual sex lives of adults. If America is to remain a friendly home for freedom, it must extend that freedom, and the equality of opportunity and dignity that goes along with it, to gay Americans – the majority of whom are law abiding, taxpaying citizens who conduct themselves with decency and responsibility.
Homosexuality is not only a form of sex. It is also a form of love. All Americans, but especially those who wear the label of “family values conservative,” should seek to honor that love in the maintenance of a society that values romantic commitment and familial care.
The entire debate surrounding gay marriage is cartoonishly absurd, given that there is no credible argument against it. One side uses legal precedent, philosophical argumentation in keeping with the American tradition of individual liberty, and simple kindness, while the other recites passages from a book written thousands of years ago.
The Bible, along with any other religious text, is to have no influence on the laws of our secular government. Any religious doctrine can influence the way people think and behave in a free country, but the Constitution clearly prohibits the exercise of religion during legislative activity or judicial decision-making.
When gay marriage opponents claim that their argument is The Bible, they are confessing that they have no argument.
American opinion is reaching a favorable consensus on gay marriage, and when legalization does inevitably occur, no church will have to marry a gay couple. The beauty of the separation of church and state is that it is mutually protective of religion and governmental autonomy and interest.
That being said, on the issue of religion, gay marriage opponents have yet to answer important questions.
The Bible prohibits adultery, divorce, eating shellfish, working on the Sabbath, wearing clothing of mixed fabrics, wearing gold, and touching a woman experiencing her period. For most of these crimes – including working on Sundays – the penalty is death.
Why are the loudest defenders of Biblical law, who so eagerly denounce gay marriage, not insisting that these injunctions also influence government legislation?
Might it be that they are not truly motivated by religion, but that they are using religion as a cover story for the exclusion and hurtful treatment of people they just don’t like?
David Masciotra is the author of All That We Learned About Living: The Art and Legacy of John Mellencamp (forthcoming, The University Press of Kentucky) and Against Traffic: Essays on Politics and Identity. For more information visit http://www.davidmasciotra.com.
New Column for the Indianapolis Star: Living Wage? It’s Often Missing On College Campuses
The worst labor practices in the country belong to the elite universities, and the most lucrative scam in American life, is the higher education hustle.
It is not difficult to find discussion in the mainstream media of the staggering and paralytic amounts of student debt that young Americans now struggle to pay after graduating college. It is easy to come across reports of rising tuition rates, but still hidden is a full expose of the higher education hustle.
That is, the big government and big education scam to create an administrative class at the universities, and increase government revenues through usury on student loans.
While colleges across the country increase tuition and hire more underpaid adjuncts to teach courses, they also hire a shameful amount of well-paid administrators. Three separate studies have confirmed that the number one cause of rising tuition rates is “administrative bloat.”
The higher education hustle story recently became even more important when the American left went into convulsions over the hourly wages of McDonald’s employees. Liberals insist that part time cashiers at fast food restaurants, most of whom are high school or college students, deserve a “living wage.” Yet, those same liberals are amazingly silent on the issue of poverty pay for adjunct instructors, who have Master’s Degrees or PhD’s, and according to a study from Northwestern University, are better at teaching that tenured faculty.
I issue a full indictment of the university system, and the higher education hustle, in my new column – “Living Wage? It’s Often Missing on College Campuses”.
New Column for The Indianapolis Star: Obama’s Policies in Conflict with King’s Legacy
I’m running late posting this one, but I will say that the most important point of my latest column for the Indianapolis Star – “Obama’s Policies in Conflict with King’s Legacy” – is not the obvious that the President is a lying fool whose war crimes and disastrous management of domestic affairs are shameful, but that race, as proven by scientific discover, no longer has any meaning. Identity politics are stupid and dangerous, and those who engage in them, deserve equally harsh and dismissive labeling.
All human beings are 99.9 identical in our DNA. In the post-genome age of human understanding, to stand against racism is to reject the separation of people according to race.
Read the rest of the column to see how I attempt to relate the sociologically relevant discoveries of biology to contemporary American politics.
New Column for Indianapolis Star: Authoritarianism Comes from the Left and Right
The major disagreement of the two major political parties in America, along with the two major strains of political thought they represent, is over what right, freedoms, and liberties the government should revoke and remove from the people.
Seeing through the frivolity, distortion, and false dichotomy of two groups of autocrats fighting for control is revelatory in that it leads the citizen to adopt a political position of intelligence, mutual respect for other citizens, and libertarian consistency.
My friend Tim Hall – who is also one of my favorite novelists – helped me formulate this important insight over lunch one afternoon when he said, “There is no real liberalism in this country. There is left authoritarian and right authoritarian.”
The Hall way of moving through the bullshit of political debate is where I enter my new column for the Indianapolis Star. I encourage everyone to read it in full.
New Column for The Indianapolis Star: Defending Howard Zinn Against Attack and Censorship
Howard Zinn was an immeasurably important historian who, in his work, activism, and life, persevered with tireless devotion and tough tenacity to expose the crimes of American Empire, honor the victims, and celebrate the heroes – both sung and unsung – who fought for humanity, freedom, and justice against destruction, bigotry, and aggression in their own place and time.
Zinn’s work was profoundly influential on me, and I still consider the education he gave me – even if only through his powerful books – essential to my formation as a writer and thinker.
A recent controversy cast Howard Zinn’s legacy against Mitch Daniels, former Governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University. As Governor, Daniels not only attacked Zinn’s work as “anti-American” (the usual slander) and “crap”, but also worked to remove Zinn’s books from history classroom in state colleges.
I’ve praised Daniels for his intelligence and excellence as manager of Indiana’s economy as Governor, and his implementation of a tuition freeze as president of Purdue. I was disappointed that Daniels decided not to run for President, under the Republican primary, in 2012. His track record of success and achievement in Indiana, along with his moderate positions on social issues and his willingness to cooperate with state Democrats, would have made him a worthy contender for the office of Presidency.
I cannot and will not, however, defend his narrow minded and autocratic move for book banning.
In my new column for the Indianapolis Star – “Mitch Daniels Should Have Been More Open about Howard Zinn’s Magnum Opus” – I explain the importance of Zinn’s work and I advocate that more Americans spend some time absorbing it.
Read the column for the rest of my take on Daniels, Zinn, education, and patriotism.
Additional Note: I’d like to thank Truthout for reprinting the article.
David Masciotra 