my favorite director comes in from the cold
David Mamet always struck me as a really wise, smart individual, even when I found myself disagreeing with certain of his conclusions. I wondered if I was wrong about his wisdom, or wrong about his views.
It turns out that I was right about both, and he was wrong about his views.
Fascinating read:
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811%2C…
David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”…
I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics…
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
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…
I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president – whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster – were little different from those of a president whom I revered.
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations” – the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world…
But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?
I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience…
Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute – to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other – the world in which I actually functioned day to day – was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace…
March 12th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Wow.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Everyone wants to get ahead and get along.
It seems so simple, yet so many people miss it.
March 12th, 2008 at 10:31 am
Wonder how many other lefties shout ‘Shut the fuck up’ at NPR without realizing the reality of their personal opinion?
March 12th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
He’s still dead wrong about certain aspects of theater, directing, stagecraft, and art. Brilliantly right about certain others, of course.
March 12th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I agree it’s a good article. The challenge in making it practical, of course, is that “liberal” and “conservative” don’t map cleanly to “Democrat” and “Republican”. And neither maps at all well to “Libertarian”.
All politicians suck, so we should approach politics as a practical matter. For example, the majority of outspoken Republican politicians believe, at best, that I shouldn’t be allowed to be married, or at worst that I and my husband should be thrown in jail for varied crimes against Nature and/or God. All other issues aside, this makes is extremely unlikely that I will vote for a Republican candidate. No matter how corrupt the alternative, a Jew isn’t going to vote for the Nazi candidate.
March 12th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
He almost gets it. He may proclaim himself “not a brain-dead liberal”, but he gets is info from brain-deal liberal sources. Mamet repeats the lefty lies that Bush stole Florida, that Bush outed a CIA agent, and that Bush lied about his military service.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Jered –
“All other issues aside, this makes is extremely unlikely that I will vote for a Republican candidate. No matter how corrupt the alternative, a Jew isn’t going to vote for the Nazi candidate.”
I must have missed the new reports of Republicans rounding up homosexuals in cattle cars and sending them to mass extermination camps.
I understand you have issues with many Republicans’ stance on gay marriage, but comparing such a thing to what the Nazis did to the Jews is a crime against history and the victims of the “Final Solution”; and, rather than building your own argument, merely belittles the monstrous, EVIL, actions of the Third Reich.
Shame on you!
March 13th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
(P.S. to the webmaster — please install the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin!)
March 13th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Stephen R, you already can subscribe to comments – there’s a link in the right column that you can use to sub (via RSS) to ALL the comments here. There are also feeds generated for each individual post but this theme doesn’t display them. If, from this blog’s home page, you click on the link that says “n comments” next to the link to the general category at the bottom of any post, you can copy the URL for that page and paste it into your RSS reader to sub to the comments to that post ONLY. For instance, for this post, the URL is
http://tjic.com/?p=8569#comments
March 13th, 2008 at 6:24 pm
Whoops, sorry -spoke too soon, that just discovers the general comments feed. The URL I was thinking of would have been
http://tjic.com/?p=8569/feed/
but that doesn’t seem to work here, either – must be something added to more recent versions of WordPress.
March 13th, 2008 at 11:15 pm
[quote comment="131211"]
I must have missed the new reports of Republicans rounding up homosexuals in cattle cars and sending them to mass extermination camps.[/quote]
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Prior to the Supreme Court ruling in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas,14 states had “sodomy laws” which had penalties including life in prison. Perhaps in your world, US prisons are full of shiny unicorns and happy rainbows and sugar drops, but the general situation as I understand it is that it’s a lot less fun.
I wasn’t referring to Republican (or, for that matter, politician-at-large) wide stances on gay marriage laws in that metaphor; I was referring to this. And guess why those laws weren’t repealed before the SCOTUS declared them unconstitutional? Those same damned politicians. Primarily, though not soley, Republican. And who were the 3 justices against? Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas. Notice a pattern there?
Yes, we’re short some poison gas, but that’s what makes it a metaphor.
And I’m Jewish, so I’m allowed to make Holocaust references. (That last part’s a joke.)
March 14th, 2008 at 12:20 am
Were these laws enforced, or from more …amusing… times, still sitting on the books? I mean, I believe that here in MA it’s illegal to take a bath on Sunday.
March 14th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Jered,
I might be wrong, but most of the state legislators in Texas were Democrats right up until the 1990s.
It’s probably more accurate to say that a conservative lege kept the sodomy laws on the books there, not a Republican one.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:49 am
[quote comment="131334"]Were these laws enforced, or from more …amusing… times, still sitting on the books? I mean, I believe that here in MA it’s illegal to take a bath on Sunday.[/quote]
You can’t have a Supreme Court challenge without an actual case, so yes these were (selectively, of course) enforced. See Lawrence v. Texas. I’m not aware of any recent life sentences, but that’s hardly comforting.
March 14th, 2008 at 9:55 am
[quote comment="131336"]It’s probably more accurate to say that a conservative lege kept the sodomy laws on the books there, not a Republican one.[/quote]
I’m with you on that. There’s a pretty strong correlation today between “social conservative” and “Republican” today, but it’s hardly an absolute. In fact, both major parties are rather excessively “socially conservative”. One side wants as many laws as possible for victimless crimes viz. sex, drugs, rock’n'roll (or, rather, language or other expression deemed inappropriate/against community standards/against God). The other side wants to pass as many laws to “help” in ways that not everyone wants viz. universal health care, mortgage bailouts, etc.
March 14th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I’d like to point out something – In Lawrence vs. Texas, it was a Class C Misdemeanor. When they were found guilty initially, they were fined.
Meanwhile, NY’s law was only struck down in 1980, and officially repealled in 2000. Mass’s sodomy law was only struck down in 2002.
The most severe was Idaho, where the sentence was could have been 5 years to life, but AFAIK, nobody’s ever served a life sentence..
March 14th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Not to belabor the point, but for an example from this week, Oklahoma state Rep. Sally Kern (R-OKC) says that homosexuality is “the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam, [...] it will destroy this nation.” I find the general situation more hilarious than scary, but the political response from her caucus members is rather more on the scary side…
March 14th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Hmm, lost the link somehow.
March 14th, 2008 at 11:41 pm
Not to belabor the point,
I felt the same way when some anonymous frigtards posted on my town’s topix site that some of my wife’s co-religionists should be hung from lamp posts as a warning to the rest to clear out.
There are bigoted people everywhere – but I hold that such are more noisy than numerous.
March 15th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
[quote comment="131507"]I felt the same way when some anonymous frigtards posted on my town’s topix site that some of my wife’s co-religionists should be hung from lamp posts as a warning to the rest to clear out.
There are bigoted people everywhere – but I hold that such are more noisy than numerous.[/quote]
Lovely. I’m a bit annoyed that my town’s newsblogs have all disabled commenting because of that sort of thing. A lot of the local stupidity requires comment, but on the other hand the level of discussion was never worth the trouble.
On the other hand, I posit that there’s a difference between “anonymous frigtard” and “state representative”. At least, there ought to be.
March 19th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
Mamet’s “great essay†is full of convoluted half truths, ignorance, and several outright lies — much like you would expect from the neocons.
Hollywood’s Newest Neo-Con: David Mamet Chugs the Kool-Aid
March 19th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
From the linked page:
Oh boy. So that’s the color glasses you wear when you look at the world, is it?
March 19th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
…and I note that the author doesn’t allow comments at his blog, and both links to 9/11 deniers, and seems to write such “truther” nonsense himself.
…and now he’s trolling through my blog, ranting about a playwright.
Woo hoo!