The playwright has explicitly rejected dime-store Marxist categorical
thinking, embracing instead the idea that whatever differences people bring
to the stage of life based on their varied experiences, human nature is
universal (at least to humans) and people are, well, people. Of course, some
are evil, some good, most a complicated mixture of the two. But simply
because a person represents or works for The Government or Big Business -
or, for that matter, Fashionable Minority X, Y or Z - doesn't mean you know
all you need to know about them. A business card is not a Rosetta stone for
deciphering a man's soul.
But don't tell this to those who define sophistication and nuance by a
work's ability to confirm preconceived notions. A writer in The Independent
frets that "so complex and profound and gifted a playwright should now seek
to reduce his own work and his own politics to simple concepts." People like
this see more complex hues in, say, George Clooney than in a painter's color
wheel.
Clooney proclaimed not long ago, "Yes, I'm a liberal, and I'm sick of it
being a bad word. I don't know at what time in history liberals have stood
on the wrong side of social issues." Ah, yes, there's fine-tuned,
historically informed thinking on display!
Mamet has committed the sin of free-thinking in a world that defines it as
"ideological rigidity" while dubbing conformity "diversity." Already,
critics are saying his work is slipping. Soon, they will say his work was
never that great to begin with (that's what they've been doing to Dennis
Miller for his heresy). The more Mamet rejects the divine pieties of the
left and thinks for himself, the more the Greek chorus of straitjacketed
"free thinkers," their heads shaking in unison, will tsk-tsk Mamet's
rigidity.