Playwright David Mamet Supports Texas in Social Media Case with… a Short Story?

The briefs at issue in last month’s reporting were focused on the legal arguments in favor of overturning the two statutes, filed by amici representing a broad range of ideological perspectives, from the Goldwater Institute on the right to left-leaning groups like Public Knowledge and ‘digital rights’ groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Today, instead of looking at a sampling of the briefs filed in support of Texas and Florida, I want to consider a single amicus brief which is…. well, different than all the others, I’ll give it that.

Submitted by author and playwright David Mamet, the scribe behind works like The Postman Always Rings Twice, Glengarry Glen Ross and House of Games, to name just a few of his well-known and highly regarded works, the amicus brief makes not one legal argument of any kind. Other than a bare citation to Supreme Court Rule 37, which governs the submission of amicus curiae briefs to the high court and providing a statement about Mamet’s interest in the case, the brief doesn’t even reference anything remotely legalistic.

The entire brief, in fact, is a short story.

“Amicus Curiae, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, author and filmmaker, has prepared a metaphorical short story that will provide the Court with needed perspective on the issues in this case,” reads the Summary of Argument section.

The short story is titled “Lessons from Aerial Navigation,” and appears to be a cautionary tale which envisions social media platforms as such a crucial outlet for expression that the government ought not to let platforms decide which content they host – as though consumers, authors, and other creative entities are completely silenced if they get de-platformed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter (excuse me, “X”).

Mamet’s story presents us with a pilot who “wants to orient himself.” The pilot knows “approximately where he is,” knows the direction in which he has been flying and for how long. He also has a chart to which he can refer. But there’s a problem with the chart; it has been censored, presumably the woke liberal minds of Big Chart – which is like Big Pharma, only a lot less profitable.

Anyway, the pilot looks out the window and can’t find the objects the chart indicates should be there and “concludes that he is lost.”

“How can he determine his location?” Mamet frets. “He has a map, but he’s just misused it. How? The Map is not the territory. The territory is the territory. The pilot’s answer to the question ‘where am I?’ lies not on the map, but out the windscreen. That’s where he is. It doesn’t matter where he calculated he should be, the territory below him is where he is.”

You know, it’s a damn shame this pilot’s plane doesn’t have GPS, which seems like it could solve a lot of his problems right about now.

“Modern ‘connected’ humankind is trying to determine its position backwards,” Mamet’s tale insists. “We are deluged with constant information (the map), and if, looking out, if we don’t see a corresponding situation we may disregard our senses, prefer the information to the reality, and, shun, deride or oppose any who don’t share our beliefs – which we, being human, call Reality.”

If I’m following this chart analogy correctly (which I might not be because I ran out of bread crumbs while making a topper for my macaroni and cheese yesterday afternoon), the “map” is social media, to which we American thought-pilots refer to in order to guide our mental journeys, while “Reality” is what the map would look like if Ye hadn’t been suspended from the map for praising Adolf Hitler.

“Navigating requires using tools correctly,” Mamet observes. “The confused citizen has a map. But, if he worked from his observations back to it, he might discover that he can’t find his position pictured there.”

Ah – now I get it! As American thought-pilots, we have a right to see our positions reflected on the map, supporting our perception of Reality. And social media platforms are screwing this up by insisting on editing and moderating the map under their pernicious Terms and Conditions, which are like a giant blob of organic ketchup spilled from an Anti-American Tofu Dog onto the border of Kentucky and Ohio, leading us to accidentally fly to Indianapolis when we were trying to get to Richmond, Virginia.

Returning to the pilot struggling with his map, looking out of his plane, Mamet says the pilot might “for example, see a free, prosperous, and good country, in which there was little actual poverty, scant racism, and no ‘systemic’ racism, where minorities and women, rather than being discriminated against were treated preferentially.”

“This belief might be correct or incorrect, but unless we prefer a Ministry of Truth, the belief is his own and surely he’s entitled to it,” Mamet adds, parenthetically.

Honestly, my personal experience makes me skeptical that we’re all entitled to have maps published for us which reinforce where we believe ourselves to be, rather than where we are, because that argument sure didn’t work for me when I got arrested for breaking and entering at my much wealthier neighbor’s house a few years back.

“Referring back, then, to his ‘information,’ the citizen might not be able to correlate it with his observations,” Mamet adds. “He knew where he was, as he’d just looked around. But he found no corresponding position on his map.”

In such a situation, Mamet suggests, a pilot “might conclude he’d simply picked up the wrong map… But what if the government and its privileged conduits prohibited him from choosing another?”

As a reader, I might conclude the author simply has chosen the wrong metaphor, but I suppose that’s splitting apples, or comparing oranges to hair, or however that works. (Mixed metaphors have never been my ball of tea, nor my cup of wax.)

Apologies for the flubbed axioms and mangled cliches above, but I’m working from this damned censored social media map – and I’m flustered because I simply have nowhere else to turn! Except, you know, other social media platforms that hue closer to my point of view, countless blogs and independent websites run by people who might share my politics and other such insignificancies.

Dave my man, you write fine plays, a couple of which have been made into truly exceptional movies. But maybe leave the amicus writing to the lawyers?

Sincerely, a citizen-pilot who believes social media platforms have First Amendment rights too – and that it’s absolute nonsense to believe the government forcing platforms to host content is consistent with the First Amendment, rather than turning that Amendment entirely on its head.

Facepalm photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels