Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Playwright David Mamet, author of Glengarry Glen Ross explains why he is no longer a 'brain dead liberal'.
No stranger to controversy, he makes this announcement in the nadir of brain dead liberalism, the Village Voice
John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"...
...As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been--rather charmingly, I thought--referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years.
One commenter, Angry Liberaltarian says
Sounds to me as if Mr. Mamet's youthful vigor is being lost to wealth and status.
It's a well written defense of his inevitable shift to the right (if you're under 30 and not a liberal you have no heart, if you're over 30 and not conservative you have no brain).
And the NPR quote?! Atrocious! I thought he had more sense than that. I guess in his defense of America, his idea of America, he forgot the parallels between Native Americans and Palestinians.
Parallels between Native Americans and Palestinians? Now there's an audience that doesn't care about facts.
Ace on Mamet and the not-brain-dead-liberals out there:
Conservatives, who embrace the "tragic" view as Mamet terms it (I would call it the "realistic" view myself, but then, I'm not a dramatist), are less childish in their starting conceits. We believe that people are selfish, self-serving, self-interested, self-obsessed, and only vaguely self-aware. It is the nature of all of us. And we do mean us; when we speak of human failings, we are really not, as the liberals are, speaking of other people only. We say "we are all selfish and flawed' and we do in fact mean we.
So for conservatives, the question isn't "Why is the world so awful and cruel?" The question is really "How do humans, especially those in the west and particularly those in America, manage to get so very, very much right so much of the time?"
Well, if one believed that the Native Americans were equivalent to the Palestinians, one would never have to ask that question....
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, p.44
Leftist/Socialist beliefs often fly in the face of common sense, and in the face of reality, and in the face of morality it's self. That probably explains why so few ordinary Americans are leftists/socialists.
George Orwell understood why: "One has to be in the intelligentsia to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool."
'change' is not a mere buzzword on the left. Progressives really believe that human beings can be improved through more enlightened politics.
Similarly, many look outside themselves for self awareness and self improvement and are willing to be guided by public opinion or apparent public opinion even on personal matters. Visit any guru seminar pitching nearly any kind of self improvement ideology you can imagine, and you will find the audience filled with people who describe themselves as progressive. They fundamentally do not trust their own judgment and as a consequence are easily led to believe that this or that candidate or ideology can save them, or the country, or whatever.
And if you tell them their latest guru is full of it and btw just taking their money, they call you closed minded.
The only reason that Mamet is suddenly becoming a conservative is that the conservatives have now been taken over by their slavishly pro Israel neocons faction. Mamet has always been a particularly fanatical supporter of Israel's right wing Lukidniks.
If the Republicans were to moderate their positions via Israel, Mamet's opinions of the party would change and he would abandon it immediately.
Ah, I see, Mr Dudley. What you mean is that Mamet is thinking with his blood, being a Jew, and Jews can only ever see things through a Jewish prism. Thanks for clearing that up
If the Republicans were to moderate their positions via Israel, Mamet's opinions of the party would change and he would abandon it immediately.
Condi Rice is currently trying to force Israel to negotiate with the Fatah wing of Islamist terrorism. I wouldn't call that pro-Israel. Who would call a real Republican? Pat Buchanan?
Otherwise, John Dudley, are you a mindreader? If not, how do you know what motivates Mamet? Do you believe that all pro 'Likudniks' think alike?
I really enjoyed this piece a lot. In fact you beat me to posting about it by a few minutes. Here's what I was going to write:
"Remarkable. All I've known of Mamet is that, aside from having it right with regard to generalized anti-Semitism, Mamet was more or less of the card-carrying Harvard Square loony-left family of protozoa (I believe he lived down the street during the few years my family lived in Cambridge).
I guess, however, that I was wrong, or at least, I seem to have became wrong recently."
I bet he'd be an interesting guy to have a chat with.
Mamet's description of his awakening sounded a lot like the descriptions I've heard from many former lefties. (well, except for the agile wordplay).
Many, in fact most of those former lefties were not 'pro-Likudnik'. They were just pragmatic. At some point, people realize that leftism doesn't work.
It would be interesting to chat with him. I can't wait to see the Voice's review of his next play..
Another one for our side. Funny how you never see lefties going the other way. But doesn't it say something alarming about the stranglehold that left-wing academia and the media have on the political discourse in the US that intelligent, well-informed and well-travelled individuals like Mamet take so long to realise what's obvious to many of us?