How To Age Disgracefully

On the moral narcissism of the modern Presentist.

A Sunny Day in Crimea by Sergei Vinogradov (1917)

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There is a curious type of modern man who wakes each morning driven by the laudable aim of purging the past of its unspeakable sins.

Nobody knows who deputised these busy little bees to launder the putrid mores of the late nineteen hundreds, but they take their work—and themselves—rather seriously, indeed.

And so, meet The Presentist. A young, progressive urban male to whom an episode of Friends from 1998 is a relic of intolerance, but a tribe which practised ritual cannibalism as late as the 1800s was merely honouring its deeply held spiritual beliefs.

Glengarry Glen Ross and the Review That Cried “Problematic”

A theatre critic for the Daily Beast, in a rather curious use of free will, penned the following screed in review of Broadway’s revival of Glengarry Glen Ross.

“The audience laughed at the many lines degrading Indian Americans… They laughed when ‘fairy’ was lobbed as another insult, and at the mention of ‘Polacks.’ The laughter was of the simplest kind—it was at that insult or slur, those people…It was not nervous or derisive laughter. It was literal laughter…”

Mistaking the Broadway revival of the great Glengarry Glen Ross with a Yale University campus struggle session, the critic drains his time, my time, and your time, trying to score points with imaginary friends.

Forget the great David Mamet’s sizzling return to Broadway. Forget the renewed, ferocious appetite for unapologetic cultural excellence. Instead, the critic laments Glengarry’s lack of diversity, its dearth of inclusion, its coarse language, its casual racial slurs, its hard-boiled depiction of ‘toxic’ masculinity.

Has the critic missed the memo? Come on down from those treetops, Lieutenant Onoda. The Japanese have lost. The war is over. And so, too, is Woke.

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For those unfamiliar with Mamet’s Pulitzer-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross centres on a predatory commission-only real-estate brokerage staffed entirely by the kind of men whom The Daily Beast and The Guardian find utterly repulsive.

That is, ‘toxic’ men who don’t whine, bitch, or languish. Men who, long ago, banished from their minds teenaged laments of life’s unfairness and man’s existential right to happiness, not merely its pursuit.

These men wear ties. They scoff at political correctness, reject effete self-indulgence, and burst hot hollow-points through the moral preening of those sneaky, sexless ‘male feminist allies.’
The Glengarry boys live, as Pacino says in the excellent film, “on their wits.” Tasked with palming off pointless land to the gullible and the guileless, the cast—Roma, Levene, George, and Moss—relish the sink-or-swim sales gig, trading time-worn tales of famous and infamous ‘sits’ as one would war stories. The Glengarry boys accept, too, that after giddy highs come crushing lows.

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Always Be Closing

In one thundering scene, Blake, the brutal yuppie land shark with the $80,000 BMW and the Rolex, which “cost more than your car,” lays out the stakes. The Glengarry boys, most of whom flounder in the shadow of the young, slick hot-shot Ricky Roma, are to scrap with tooth, elbow and knee for their livelihoods. Blake announces a Darwinian gambit:

“We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”

The office inhales, as Blake boils over: “Get the picture? You laughing now? You got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money to get your names to sell them. You can’t close the leads you’re given, then you can’t close shit! You ARE shit! Hit the bricks, pal, and beat it ‘cause you are going OUT!”

A cruelty ordained by the natural order of things thickens their predicament. Those ‘leads’ (the names and contact details of prospective clients) are hopeless. The ‘good’ leads, the Glengarry leads, are those they covet and upon which their livelihoods depend. Naturally, the good leads go to those sitting pretty atop the totem pole. In Glengarry, sympathy is an alien abstraction.

As Blake lays it out: “You’re a nice guy? I don’t give a shit. Good father? Fuck you! Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here? Close!”

And so, stark stakes provoke primitive instincts. Glengarry spills over in a maelstrom of ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’. This is man at his most ingenious and most ruthless.

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Now, let’s bear in mind that Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984. Let’s assume that its author, David Mamet, knows a thing or two about playwriting. Let’s consider Glengarry’s longevity and appeal. Three actors who are not shy of work, Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr, think it appropriate to play Glengarry. Audiences think it appropriate to watch Culkin, Odenkirk and Burr play Glengarry.

And yet, these minor considerations don’t quite compute in the Daily Beast’s review. Aside from being “painfully dated and offensive,” Glengarry lacks a levelling dose of postmodern enlightenment. According to the critic, Glengarry’s characters reel off ribbons of problematic speech.

They glory in casually racist jokes and jibes. Worse yet, they do so freely, openly, and without “getting called out or proven wrong.” Reader, the Glengarry boys talk like great swathes of men, from all ethnicities and all walks of life, talk when the womenfolk are safely outside of the blast radius. You don’t believe me? Glance at a male friend’s group chat for confirmation.

What is Glengarry’s worst offence? As the play blazes across Broadway, it ignores 2025’s sprawling cast of eternal victims from which many siphon their moral perfectionism. A play written in the early 1980s doesn’t pander to the fashionable ever-shifting pieties of 2025? Nope. This Pulitzer-winning classic earns the affections of its audience on artistic merit alone.

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The Plague of Presentism

But that’s the thing with merit. Despite modern mores, demand will always outstrip supply. And so, we return to The Presentist, who gleefully judges the past by today’s lofty modern standards. This slavish mode of thinking is akin to gambling in a casino in which you always win, chiefly because you’re betting on red with cash you found in someone else’s bottomless back pocket.

The Presentist insists that we—that presumptuous ‘we’—respect all cultures, except, of course, the culture which gave the world the Enlightenment. After all, aside from democracy, human rights, medicine, law, reason, philosophy, great art, great literature, sanitation, the individual, women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, the expectation to live past 35, and the radical notion that burning ‘witches’ alive was a tad unreasonable, what has Western Civilisation ever done for us?

After decreeing modern Western civilisation an irredeemable and racist failure, the Presentist scours the history books for an alternative. He lands upon the most primitive, sorry—authentic—societies to walk this earth. What does our saviour see? Amidst the plush grass huts lay an egalitarian idyll in which an errant sneeze constituted witchcraft and an authentic death by forced drowning. Amongst the authentic peoples, The Presentist imagines soporific elders passing around a peace pipe, at one with God and Nature. The reality, to riot in understatement, is not quite the postcard.

The Presentist, a curious subtype of modern male, commonly found perusing The Guardian, baulks at the barbaric Westerners of 1994, and lauds the noble peoples of 1494. Those revered tribes of eternal virtue, who were giddily slaughtering rival tribes and routinely barbequing their troublesome neighbours. And yet, Presentists pine for pre-modern idylls in which man—unblemished by consumer capitalism and Deliveroo, was free to be his authentic self—that is, sacrificing toddlers to Baal in the faint hope of abundant harvests.

Sure, such authentic tribes of a fevered imagination sang a mellifluous song of their people. They also believed a high-pitched sneeze was evidence of witchery punishable by death. They were hardly an inclusive bunch. Some routinely killed, cooked, and consumed their second-born, owing to the somewhat disputative belief that such a ritual doubled their firstborn’s strength. But, at least, they drew the line at gaudy jokes and foul, insensitive language.

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When the Past Becomes the Presentist

That said, I don’t expect the Presentists to listen to some throwback born in the late nineteen hundreds. When I was a boy amidst the dark ages of 1998, we routinely threw every scrap of litter—plastic, tin, glass, paper, an entire washing machine—outside. A truck would gobble it all up and whisk it away to a special treatment centre. We called that special treatment centre—the Irish Sea.

Today, in these mercifully enlightened times, I have a caddy for eggshells, a box for wine bottles, and a haunting fear that a slither of cling-film may fall into the wrong box, prompting a visit from the Recycling Compliance Officer. What is my point? Manners and mores change—often rapidly. To dump one’s rubbish at landfill, to burn rubber tyres, to drink and drive, to smoke around children, to slap an unruly child—modern social death sentences—were, not so long ago, entirely acceptable.

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One day, not too far from now, our latter-day moral policemen will abhor modern music, fret over yet another grey hair, and mentally calculate that ‘ten years ago’ was 2006. And soon enough, a new generation will deem their language offensive, their morals bankrupt, and their oat milk exploitative. And they’ll call it progress.

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