The Conned Artist

Take a look at the following sentence in David Mamet’s new book, The Disenlightenment, and see if you can make more sense of it than I can: “Today, the Left’s protestation of benevolence is everywhere unsaid by its real threat of immediate ruin.” Does Mamet mean to imply that the Left is opposed to benevolence? Or is he trying to say that the Left claims to be benevolent but is, in fact, nothing of the kind? If the latter, then what is in danger of immediate ruin? The Left? Benevolence? Protestations? And why does he use the word “unsaid”? Wouldn’t “undone” or “nullified” have made the sentence clearer? While I don’t subscribe to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, which holds that language constrains cognition, I do believe that muddled writing is often a symptom of muddled thought, and The Disenlightenment has plenty of both.