A Mexican Wave of Profound Kindness
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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. 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. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
David Mamet in his controversial essay in The Village Voice.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811%2Cwhy-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal%2C374064%2C1.html/full
We had already been the "it" people of the moment, we had operated in that fulcrum of time, space and social movement, operated at the centre of the known universe, when everything we did was of profound importance; when our lives were political, were cultural, were social, and the applause rippled out from our every act. If New York thought it was the centre of everything, or at least of the civilised world, we too, in our moment in the sun, had been in that place. Everything we did was watched, admired, talked about. We couldn't go anywhere without people immediately knowing we were there, the ripples of our fame spreading out from our every act.
We had learnt that time moves on. We had got used to the fact that our every act no longer had a ripple effect, through the cosmos, through the social world. The yellow crested sulphur cockatoos are everywhere this season, having come into the coast from inland during the drought and not yet having returned, their raucous cries cutting incongruously through the inner-city streets. We had learnt the discomfort of knowing that everything we had once believed in was no longer true; of having our dearly held belief systems shattered.
But these orthodox minions, these old men with their stale flesh and their pompous walk, they had become used to being the centre of everything, accustomed to flying first class, expectant of security as they strode confidently through airports, the flurry of movement and recognition as they entered a room. They had, in effect, become addicted to the applause. It had gone on so long, they had taken it as their accustomed due, that any life outside of this, the life of the peasants out there beyond the screens, the common man, these were the lives of failure and ordinariness which there own talents and uniqueness had distanced them from. Or so they thought.
They didn't know, couldn't cope, with the fact that the wheel always moves on; that the centre in one moment is on the periphery the next, that all the cruelties of time slaves, of drudgery and working lives, of the ordinary, common folk, they couldn't understand that despite their extraordinary successes, despite their accomplished lives at the centre of everything, with their every act having a ripple effect, repercussions on dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes even millions of people. They couldn't accept that they woke up with the same stale smells as everyone else, that they needed a shower like any other bloke, that every head no longer turned as they entered the room, the hall, the auditorium.
It was all a terrible kind of insanity. The only way to escape the crunching realisations of failure, the blunt impact of everybody elses disappointment, the lack of interest that now greeted their presence, their utterances no longer quoted and analysed ad nauseum, their chin no longer jutted forward in defiance; a kind of shuffling grace. I am used to being famous, this is who I am, this is where I belong. All these pretences they had once adopted were gone; they were now more infamous than famous, their comments were ridiculed rather than reported, their views on the social and cultural issues of the day were dismissed as stale and out of date; as stale as their own flesh, the dead smell seeping into their underclothes no matter what they did.
Al this was too much to bear. The humility that the rest of us had arrived at long ago was no resource, no comfort, not even an admirable trait. They wanted it all back, that glorious high, the thousands of people clapping, cheering, rising from their seats in a standing as he stood smiling, waving, a gracious acknowledgement. No one but another on his level could understand the difficulties of leadership, the enormous sacrifices, the strength of character traits required to function at his peak. He barked out orders to his secretary; ordered in heads of department, railed against their impending loss. And it was all for nought. The wheel turned and there was no way to stop it.
And when the wheel turned and he was left a speck on an outer rim; just another soul in a crush of millions, that was when the truth began to finally dawn. He had been so mistaken. He had thought he could get away with it, all bluff and gloss and announcements, all movement and decisions and function after function, planning meetings and dashes through one airport to the next, one smart hotel to the next. In the end they became meaningless. The crisp white sheets he had once loved, had so appreciated, meant nothing when your own flesh was rotting off your bones, when your breath was stale and no number of mints could change it, when your eyesight was faltering and the crowds were no longer there.
The halls were empty, the giant auditoriums abandoned. The crowds, the moment, history itself, they had all gone elsewhere, moved on. It was someone elses turn now. He tried, he tried so hard to get that moment back, to be on top of the world, to be ascending the steps to the first class lounge, to gracefully acknowledge the captain's greeting as entirely his due, he so so wanted it all to come back. In this dark moment, with only himself for comfort, with only himself to blame, he cringed in embarrassment in these secret places, almost cried; but even now he couldn't let go. There were people around him; his wife, security, the cleaner, the cook, his secretary visiting from the city office he still maintained. The dignity, the noble courage, no sign but the quivering lip, graciousness and courtesy maintained at all cost. Already he could feel the pain creeping through his chest, mortality perhaps offering the only way out. But the cringing moments kept thudding back, until finally, one morning, paralysed, unable to postpone the inevitable any longer, he finally realised that all was lost; and that it had all been his own stupid idiotic fault. It was in that moment he knew the taste of complete defeat. There would be no wisdom surface from this appalling, abject failure. And then, in the private silence, the doors locked, he finally cried. Just like any other man.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klavan19mar19,0,1967288.story
David Mamet's public coming-out as a political conservative -- done in a 2,500-word essay in the Village Voice last week -- is wonderful news for the culture, far better, I fear, than many conservatives will appreciate. The left has monopolized the arts for so long that some on the right have lost the knack of them. We love to denounce Hollywood and indulge in paroxysms of rage about the latest artistic insults to patriotism and God. But when it comes actually to producing mature and complex works of art -- or supporting the people who produce them -- a good conservative can be very hard to find.
Mamet, on the other hand, is a pillar of the arts. I don't know if he's America's greatest living playwright, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better one. Many people know him for his movie work: "The Untouchables," "The Edge," "House of Games," etc. But it's plays such as "American Buffalo," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Speed-the-Plow" that represent his best writing by far, each searching for remnants of heroism in the rubble of modernity through a hilarious and poetic tough-guy vernacular.
The journey 60-year-old Mamet has made from being what he calls a "brain-dead liberal" to acknowledging the genius of philosophers such as Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman is a difficult one for an artist. We in the creative world swim in liberalism like fish in water. It's hard for us even to imagine that one might evolve and walk on dry land.
"Yes," we might say to ourselves, "it certainly does seem that history has vindicated those warmongering right-wingers who opposed the Soviet Union. And really, in secret, one must admit that women and men are pretty fundamentally different. It does seem true, as well, that government programs manifestly worsen the problems they're designed to solve, whereas freedom in markets and ideas always seems strangely to improve things. ... But that doesn't mean I'm a conservative! Conservatives are mean, racist, sexist, greedy -- and they hate gay people, who are an artist's colleagues and friends! I'm nothing like that."
But creators at Mamet's level of talent are consigned to truth-telling by their deepest nature. The arts-world imperative to mouth allegiance to a creed at conflict with their new political awareness creates in them a simmering dyspepsia. You could see that already in an angry play such as 1992's "Oleanna," in which a pompous but basically decent professor is ruined by the denunciation of a student who's been body-snatched by the academic and feminist left.
The Guardian: predictably very depressed at the news:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/03/david_mamet.html
I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right. In an essay for the Village Voice, Mamet claims he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal" and increasingly espouses a free-market philosophy and social conservatism. As a citizen, Mamet is free to do as he likes. What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.
Mamet's greatness as a dramatist has always depended on two things. One is his fantastic ear for everyday speech rhythms: in particular, the four-letter bluster with which men mask their insecurities. Mamet's other great quality is his ambivalence about the enterprise culture. In Glengarry Glen Ross - arguably his finest play - he depicts the way a group of salesmen are demeaned by a cruelly competitive, capitalist ethic. At the same time, Mamet shows a wary admiration for these guys who, unlike the desk-wallahs, have to venture out into the jungle of the hard sell. Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity.
Only last week I also found myself defending Mamet from the charge, levelled by the wife of an American playwright-friend, that he was a misogynist. I conceded that Mamet wrote better about men than about women. But in a play like Speed-The-Plow, currently packing out the Old Vic, he creates a deliberately enigmatic heroine who may be a Hollywood hustler or a genuine idealist. Even in Oleanna, where a female student accuses a professor of sexual harassment, Mamet's real target is America's recourse to legalistic solutions to personal problems. "Mamet," I suggested to my friend, "is not anti-women. Only against a political orthodoxy that sometimes drives them, along with men, into false positions."
Fox News, predictably bellicose:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,338893,00.html
Last week David Mamet wrote an essay for the Village Voice (a publication for she-male escorts) revealing that he was no longer a "brain dead" liberal. He now sees the value in free markets, while admiring great conservative thinkers like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman.
But sure as there are wasps in Rosie's beard, the left has already dismissed Mamet as a talentless hack — this from chuckleheads who used to kiss his ass when he was a smug liberal. But now that he's gone to the dark side, he's worthless to them.
This is nothing new. In the entertainment industry, developing a conservative streak is akin to leprosy of the mind. Just days after Mamet ditches liberalism, one Guardian writer worries that his talent has already gone "off the boil" — it happens that fast people!
The real truth behind these lefties suddenly ridiculing Mamet's talent? They're like jilted lovers. They thought Mamet liked them and now they're alone, dejected and rejected in their footsie pajamas, cradling a pint of Ben and Jerry's, talking to their cat while Nick Drake moans in the background.
And so, they lash out. But not simply out of loss — but from the profound bitterness caused by knowing that Mamet is right, in more ways than one.
Related
And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.
The chimney stacks at Sydney Park.
*
*
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. 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. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
David Mamet in his controversial essay in The Village Voice.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811%2Cwhy-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal%2C374064%2C1.html/full
We had already been the "it" people of the moment, we had operated in that fulcrum of time, space and social movement, operated at the centre of the known universe, when everything we did was of profound importance; when our lives were political, were cultural, were social, and the applause rippled out from our every act. If New York thought it was the centre of everything, or at least of the civilised world, we too, in our moment in the sun, had been in that place. Everything we did was watched, admired, talked about. We couldn't go anywhere without people immediately knowing we were there, the ripples of our fame spreading out from our every act.
We had learnt that time moves on. We had got used to the fact that our every act no longer had a ripple effect, through the cosmos, through the social world. The yellow crested sulphur cockatoos are everywhere this season, having come into the coast from inland during the drought and not yet having returned, their raucous cries cutting incongruously through the inner-city streets. We had learnt the discomfort of knowing that everything we had once believed in was no longer true; of having our dearly held belief systems shattered.
But these orthodox minions, these old men with their stale flesh and their pompous walk, they had become used to being the centre of everything, accustomed to flying first class, expectant of security as they strode confidently through airports, the flurry of movement and recognition as they entered a room. They had, in effect, become addicted to the applause. It had gone on so long, they had taken it as their accustomed due, that any life outside of this, the life of the peasants out there beyond the screens, the common man, these were the lives of failure and ordinariness which there own talents and uniqueness had distanced them from. Or so they thought.
They didn't know, couldn't cope, with the fact that the wheel always moves on; that the centre in one moment is on the periphery the next, that all the cruelties of time slaves, of drudgery and working lives, of the ordinary, common folk, they couldn't understand that despite their extraordinary successes, despite their accomplished lives at the centre of everything, with their every act having a ripple effect, repercussions on dozens, hundreds, thousands, sometimes even millions of people. They couldn't accept that they woke up with the same stale smells as everyone else, that they needed a shower like any other bloke, that every head no longer turned as they entered the room, the hall, the auditorium.
It was all a terrible kind of insanity. The only way to escape the crunching realisations of failure, the blunt impact of everybody elses disappointment, the lack of interest that now greeted their presence, their utterances no longer quoted and analysed ad nauseum, their chin no longer jutted forward in defiance; a kind of shuffling grace. I am used to being famous, this is who I am, this is where I belong. All these pretences they had once adopted were gone; they were now more infamous than famous, their comments were ridiculed rather than reported, their views on the social and cultural issues of the day were dismissed as stale and out of date; as stale as their own flesh, the dead smell seeping into their underclothes no matter what they did.
Al this was too much to bear. The humility that the rest of us had arrived at long ago was no resource, no comfort, not even an admirable trait. They wanted it all back, that glorious high, the thousands of people clapping, cheering, rising from their seats in a standing as he stood smiling, waving, a gracious acknowledgement. No one but another on his level could understand the difficulties of leadership, the enormous sacrifices, the strength of character traits required to function at his peak. He barked out orders to his secretary; ordered in heads of department, railed against their impending loss. And it was all for nought. The wheel turned and there was no way to stop it.
And when the wheel turned and he was left a speck on an outer rim; just another soul in a crush of millions, that was when the truth began to finally dawn. He had been so mistaken. He had thought he could get away with it, all bluff and gloss and announcements, all movement and decisions and function after function, planning meetings and dashes through one airport to the next, one smart hotel to the next. In the end they became meaningless. The crisp white sheets he had once loved, had so appreciated, meant nothing when your own flesh was rotting off your bones, when your breath was stale and no number of mints could change it, when your eyesight was faltering and the crowds were no longer there.
The halls were empty, the giant auditoriums abandoned. The crowds, the moment, history itself, they had all gone elsewhere, moved on. It was someone elses turn now. He tried, he tried so hard to get that moment back, to be on top of the world, to be ascending the steps to the first class lounge, to gracefully acknowledge the captain's greeting as entirely his due, he so so wanted it all to come back. In this dark moment, with only himself for comfort, with only himself to blame, he cringed in embarrassment in these secret places, almost cried; but even now he couldn't let go. There were people around him; his wife, security, the cleaner, the cook, his secretary visiting from the city office he still maintained. The dignity, the noble courage, no sign but the quivering lip, graciousness and courtesy maintained at all cost. Already he could feel the pain creeping through his chest, mortality perhaps offering the only way out. But the cringing moments kept thudding back, until finally, one morning, paralysed, unable to postpone the inevitable any longer, he finally realised that all was lost; and that it had all been his own stupid idiotic fault. It was in that moment he knew the taste of complete defeat. There would be no wisdom surface from this appalling, abject failure. And then, in the private silence, the doors locked, he finally cried. Just like any other man.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-klavan19mar19,0,1967288.story
David Mamet's public coming-out as a political conservative -- done in a 2,500-word essay in the Village Voice last week -- is wonderful news for the culture, far better, I fear, than many conservatives will appreciate. The left has monopolized the arts for so long that some on the right have lost the knack of them. We love to denounce Hollywood and indulge in paroxysms of rage about the latest artistic insults to patriotism and God. But when it comes actually to producing mature and complex works of art -- or supporting the people who produce them -- a good conservative can be very hard to find.
Mamet, on the other hand, is a pillar of the arts. I don't know if he's America's greatest living playwright, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better one. Many people know him for his movie work: "The Untouchables," "The Edge," "House of Games," etc. But it's plays such as "American Buffalo," "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Speed-the-Plow" that represent his best writing by far, each searching for remnants of heroism in the rubble of modernity through a hilarious and poetic tough-guy vernacular.
The journey 60-year-old Mamet has made from being what he calls a "brain-dead liberal" to acknowledging the genius of philosophers such as Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman is a difficult one for an artist. We in the creative world swim in liberalism like fish in water. It's hard for us even to imagine that one might evolve and walk on dry land.
"Yes," we might say to ourselves, "it certainly does seem that history has vindicated those warmongering right-wingers who opposed the Soviet Union. And really, in secret, one must admit that women and men are pretty fundamentally different. It does seem true, as well, that government programs manifestly worsen the problems they're designed to solve, whereas freedom in markets and ideas always seems strangely to improve things. ... But that doesn't mean I'm a conservative! Conservatives are mean, racist, sexist, greedy -- and they hate gay people, who are an artist's colleagues and friends! I'm nothing like that."
But creators at Mamet's level of talent are consigned to truth-telling by their deepest nature. The arts-world imperative to mouth allegiance to a creed at conflict with their new political awareness creates in them a simmering dyspepsia. You could see that already in an angry play such as 1992's "Oleanna," in which a pompous but basically decent professor is ruined by the denunciation of a student who's been body-snatched by the academic and feminist left.
The Guardian: predictably very depressed at the news:
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/theatre/2008/03/david_mamet.html
I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right. In an essay for the Village Voice, Mamet claims he is no longer a "brain-dead liberal" and increasingly espouses a free-market philosophy and social conservatism. As a citizen, Mamet is free to do as he likes. What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.
Mamet's greatness as a dramatist has always depended on two things. One is his fantastic ear for everyday speech rhythms: in particular, the four-letter bluster with which men mask their insecurities. Mamet's other great quality is his ambivalence about the enterprise culture. In Glengarry Glen Ross - arguably his finest play - he depicts the way a group of salesmen are demeaned by a cruelly competitive, capitalist ethic. At the same time, Mamet shows a wary admiration for these guys who, unlike the desk-wallahs, have to venture out into the jungle of the hard sell. Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity.
Only last week I also found myself defending Mamet from the charge, levelled by the wife of an American playwright-friend, that he was a misogynist. I conceded that Mamet wrote better about men than about women. But in a play like Speed-The-Plow, currently packing out the Old Vic, he creates a deliberately enigmatic heroine who may be a Hollywood hustler or a genuine idealist. Even in Oleanna, where a female student accuses a professor of sexual harassment, Mamet's real target is America's recourse to legalistic solutions to personal problems. "Mamet," I suggested to my friend, "is not anti-women. Only against a political orthodoxy that sometimes drives them, along with men, into false positions."
Fox News, predictably bellicose:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,338893,00.html
Last week David Mamet wrote an essay for the Village Voice (a publication for she-male escorts) revealing that he was no longer a "brain dead" liberal. He now sees the value in free markets, while admiring great conservative thinkers like Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman.
But sure as there are wasps in Rosie's beard, the left has already dismissed Mamet as a talentless hack — this from chuckleheads who used to kiss his ass when he was a smug liberal. But now that he's gone to the dark side, he's worthless to them.
This is nothing new. In the entertainment industry, developing a conservative streak is akin to leprosy of the mind. Just days after Mamet ditches liberalism, one Guardian writer worries that his talent has already gone "off the boil" — it happens that fast people!
The real truth behind these lefties suddenly ridiculing Mamet's talent? They're like jilted lovers. They thought Mamet liked them and now they're alone, dejected and rejected in their footsie pajamas, cradling a pint of Ben and Jerry's, talking to their cat while Nick Drake moans in the background.
And so, they lash out. But not simply out of loss — but from the profound bitterness caused by knowing that Mamet is right, in more ways than one.
Related
And if you disagree with me, then you sir are worse than Hitler.
The chimney stacks at Sydney Park.
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