David Mamet, considered by some to be the greatest living playwright, has
proclaimed for all to hear - but few to listen - that he is no longer "a
brain-dead liberal."
Mamet uses the phrase "brain-dead liberal" in quotation marks precisely
because he was never actually brain dead. Rather, he just told the relevant
parts of his brain to play dead whenever inconvenient facts staged an
assault on his cranial bunker.
"As a child of the '60s," he recently wrote in a startling and lively essay
for the Village Voice, "I accepted as an article of faith that government is
corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good
at heart."
But Mamet has changed his mind. The accretions left from wave after crashing
wave of reality made it impossible for him to carry the load of his
cognitive dissonance. For years he'd called NPR "National Palestinian
Radio." He'd realized that while government may be incompetent, corporations
at times myopic, and the military imperfect, seeing politics through the
prism of a Thomas Nast cartoon (you know, where industrialists are cast as
pigs in tuxedos feeding at the public trough) might not be as wise as, say,
The Village Voice believes it is.
"I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest
contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby
Steele ... and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of
the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic
vision I called liberalism."
Mamet invokes John Maynard Keynes' response to criticism that he changed his
mind: "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
Michael Billington might have a different response. "I am depressed to read
that David Mamet has swung to the right," wrote the Guardian's theater
critic of more than three decades. "What worries me is the effect on his
talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position."
This response is quite simply perfect, a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa
of moronic imbecility.
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