“I don’t know if the United States will survive in a recognizable form for my generation,” laments the great Pulitzer prize winning American playwright and author David Mamet, the screenwriter of The Untouchables and other film classics, who has written an essay worth memorizing, titled: “This is a time of terrifying change.”

FUTILITY

I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation.

By: David Mamet, National Review, September 2026,

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Age may, and often does, weaken obstinacy, by the revelation, at seventy-odd years, that most human things do not matter.
— Bolitho

In Morgan Robertson’s 1898 novel, Futility, a superliner on her maiden transatlantic voyage strikes an iceberg and sinks, with all but 13 on board drowned. His fictional ship is named the Titan. Pulling out of the harbor, she strikes and sinks a smaller ship — just as the Titanic did 14 years later.

In Nevil Shute’s 1948 novel, No Highway, flights of the transformational Reindeer airliner keep crashing. No one can determine the cause. Then an eccentric boffin, Dr. Scott, suggests a brand-new theory: Metal fatigue at the subatomic level causes the tailplane to separate. Everyone thinks he’s nuts, until his theory is proved and he is exonerated. In ’48, metal fatigue was a novelistic device invented by Shute. Three years after the book’s publication, de Havilland started flying the world’s first commercial jetliner, the Comet. And they began falling out of the sky. Three went down for no apparent reason. Pilot error, sabotage, bad fuel, and so on were all suggested and disproved. All Comets were grounded and tested until a major design flaw was discovered. There were cracks in the fuselage brought on by a previously unsuspected phenomenon: metal fatigue.

Twenty years ago, a hard-hitting American wrote a play called November. On Broadway, Nathan Lane played its protagonist, a gormless American president up for reelection. He stands no chance, as “his numbers are lower than Gandhi’s cholesterol.” Furthermore, he has no money. An aide informs him that he can go home with the $50,000 that Big Turkey annually awards the president for pardoning a turkey at Thanksgiving.

He says, hell, he’ll take the money. The aide continues: By the way, this year the turkey folks want a pardon for two turkeys — the head and an alternate, “just in case.” The prez says, at $50K per, that’s $100,000. The turkey guy shows up and is told the price of pardons just went up. He refuses to pay, calls the president various types of loser, and says the price is $50K — take it or leave it.

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The prez, now insulted, strikes back. He asks his aide if he actually has the power to pardon turkeys. He is informed that he does. “In that case,” he tells the turkey guy, “I want $200,000,000 on my desk by breakfast, or I’m going to pardon every f***ing turkey in this country.” End of Act One.

Act Two begins, and the aide says yes, you can pardon all the turkeys, but Americans will still eat them. The prez assigns his genius speechwriter, Bernstein, to explain to the electorate why they must not eat turkey.

She puts on her thinking cap and extemporizes that they must not celebrate Thanksgiving at all — that it celebrates patriarchy, the exploitation of indigenous peoples, and conspicuous consumption — all combined under the auspices of a seemingly nongovernmental holiday that is, in essence, a hymn to the Power of the State.

Does this sound familiar?

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My beloved Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher, noted that the truism “an artist sees the future” is incorrect: An artist sees the present.

And consider Second Sight. The Gaels and the Celts believe the ability to see a troubling future to be a burden — it can’t be summoned or propitiated, and it only and always announces tragedy and induces despair in the soothsayer. We know also of Cassandra, who had the power to predict the future, but whose predictions were always mocked.

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With the academic repurposing of History as a series of abuses and their indictment, it is now difficult even to predict the past. In 1905, George Santayana wrote that “those who cannot remember the Past are condemned to repeat it.” After a long life, I must add: “as are those who can remember it.”

For only those old enough to have lived through history can actually understand it. I don’t mean that one need have suffered this or that historic calamity, reversal, or outrage to understand it, but that age and intelligence — reasonably free of prejudice — can conclude in a way that youth cannot that, perhaps, “History” is valuable as it has taught us the following:

(1) That there is no such thing as countries, there are only governments. (Rebecca West); and

(2) The Great Man theory is absurd, as Leo Tolstoy wrote. The peasant sees the smoke before he sees the locomotive and concludes the first causes the second; and five million Frenchmen did not march on Moscow because some gent from Corsica told them to.

Yes, history will repeat itself — what else does it have to do?

The no-good brother-in-law, once lent money, will always come back for more; a Western world in upheaval will reliably savage the Jews; and communism, promulgated by the intellectually arrogant, will always appeal to the bored wealthy. They will use their money to inform their pets, the working class, of its grievances, and ride the wave to their moment of hegemony, when observant thugs will liquidate them.

There are only so many ways in which something can go wrong, and even a complete awareness of them (and who could have such) doesn’t give one the power either to avoid catastrophe or to convince others of its imminent arrival. Like Cassandra, the Aged Observer will prognosticate only to be disbelieved, for the world has moved on, and his very inclination to convince has waned, with an ever-increasing conviction of debate’s futility. We age and die, and a populace (i.e., ours) doesn’t change because people change but because they die.

Those who suffered real trauma in childhood will inevitably age with a warped notion of the world and its interactions. Reciprocally, the young, educated to a delusional understanding of these interactions, must mature into some psychic trauma: viewing a world whose observable truths are in conflict with the ineluctable understandings of their childhood.

My father was an immigrant kid, raised by a single mom during the Depression. He often chided me for various thoughtless behaviors, through stories of his early poverty. But however moving they might have been, they were only stories.

This is a time of terrifying change — I will amend that, a time of change terrifying to the old, and particularly so to those of us who have grown past a strength sufficient for both the challenges of action and the analgesic of outrage.

A contemporary remarked that, perhaps, “the pendulum will swing back,” and that reason, courtesy, and patriotism will reemerge. But he was wrong. For he could only imagine their reemergence in those (our contemporaries) who understood these attributes as essential for a functional and prosperous society.

But to the young, the American Century is a disgrace, and the American Dream a shuck. Histories may be debated, but the irreducible core must be verifiable fact, and what if Fact is determined only by Big Brother?

I don’t know if the United States will survive in a form recognizable to my generation. I can’t even describe the current form other than as a civilization split into two factions, one decrying and the other exploiting chaos. I don’t know if prophecy as prediction actually exists; but I know, like Cassandra, that if so, it will do so in no useful form. I don’t know if the sun can actually supply enough power to run our cities, but I know there is nothing new beneath it.