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I really could care less if Hollywood despises conservatism or not. But I must admit reading about David Mamet conversion made me quite happy. Mostly because I'm a huge fan of many of his screenplays and films. Heist, State and Main, The Spanish Prisoner, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna just to name a few. I can't really put it into words, but the dialogue style and tempo he gives the characters is unique and entertaining. If you are a fan, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.


I wouldn't say his now a conservative, but he certainly is no longer a liberal, and his<br>Essay about his awakening is well worth reading.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, 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.

Welcome to the club, Mr. Mamet. He may not be with us yet, but give it time - the "brain-dead liberals" will finish the job by showing their true bigoted, hateful, and unintelligent face - and pointing out to him where he belongs - with the despised cast of the "right-wing rednecks." That happened to me and many others.

He transformed in the process of researching conservative authors for a new play about a conservative president - and suddenly realized that the conservative authors had been right all along.

That tells me a few things:

- The liberal "intellectual" bubble has grown to such a gigantic size and has such thick walls that an honest and thinking man like Mamet could go through life and spend his most productive years without being in touch with the real world and the ideas on which this country had been built upon and which had made it successful. Considering that his whole life he was attempting to write about the real world, which he now realizes he never knew except for the rear glimpses of it coming from outside the bubble, this ought to be perceived as a personal tragedy.

- The liberal bubble that sucks people in, isolates them from reality, rejects any dissenting thoughts, but is not self-sustaining and needs the outside world to survive, is very much like a cancerous tumor and is as much dangerous to the body of the nation whose juices and flesh it is devouring as cancer is to a living organism.

- The tumorous liberal bubble must be getting weaker these days if it lets people like Mamet and many others discover the outside world and walk out relatively unscarred. (the latter remains to be seen - just look at the vitriol of "liberal" comments!
<br>P.S. I added the above in the comments on theVillage Voice website.

Red Square wrote:- The tumorous liberal bubble must be getting weaker these days if it lets people like Mamet and many others discover the outside world and walk out relatively unscarred. (the latter remains to be seen - just look at the vitriol of "liberal" comments!

They don't even address what he's said about "brain dead Liberalism."

What's interesting to me is that he seems to have come to understand what the freedom of association is.

Mamet wrote:But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out? .... 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.

Free people come together in free associations and accomplish the things that need to be done. This is what civilization is all about and built on. But Mamet, for most of his life, didn't understand this and his coming to understand the concept and the very goodness of the freedom of association is to him a remarkable occurrence that he needed to write down and express to other people. That's how out of it the Left is. The Left doesn't even understand the freedom of association. Mamet's raised his head out of the neo-Marxist muck and seen the bright shining city on the hill. Maybe he'll be able to crawl all the way out and walk there.

Denial. This idiot needs HOPE and CHANGE.

Some idiot at DU wrote:8. The David Mamet I've read and am familiar with does not digress.
Edited on Wed Mar-12-08 04:48 PM by OmelasExpat

A signature element of Mamet's writing and speaking is that it gets to the point quickly, and always has a point. Mamet built his literary reputation on being succinct. That meandering piece of gibberish on the Village Voice was anything but.

The David Mamet I'm familiar with wouldn't use the director's role in a play as a bullshit metaphor for the need for government. He would know that a play without a director would be a power struggle, not the solution to power politics. He would know that comparing GWB with JFK isn't an argument for or against liberalism. He doesn't stoop to facile comparisons or quoted stock phrases like "brain-dead liberal".

Either that isn't Mamet, he's joking, or he's joined the dark side and lost the plot in the process.

Maksim, I see your no-good girlfriend's out of the gulag and at it again:


https://www.hollyscoop.com/angelina-jolie/angelina-jolie-snubs-barack-obama_23757.aspx

I can certainly see snubbing Bush--that would've been a courageous and patriotic thing to do, and you could still respect her in the morning. But refusing dinner with Obama? Who does she think she is? And actions over words? Ppfft! Like that's the way to get more funding for anything. Doesn't she know if you actually DO something instead of just TALKING about it, eventually it'll get done and then the money will dry up?

But you stick with her, Maksim. It just means more Braddikins for me.