Posted on 03/15/2008 8:30:47 AM PDT by Clive
Why aren't the Vietnamese more grateful to Tom Hayden? Recently, he returned for the first time in 36 years to the country that he and his then-wife Jane Fonda tried to save from American domination in the Vietnam war. The trip disappointed him. As he writes in the March 10 issue of The Nation, Vietnam has turned capitalist. Was that what he fought for? Absolutely not. He remains capitalism's enemy, still the same lefty who helped found 1960s student radicalism.
This week, another celebrated American liberal, playwright David Mamet, declared that he's abandoned the ideology he shared with Hayden. Mamet, never gentle, broke this news where it would hurt most --in the pages of New York's Village Voice, a weekly that hasn't carried a right-wing article since it was founded in the 1950s.
Under the heading "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal,'" Mamet denounced every one of the principles that give American liberals their sense of righteousness.
He's abandoned his hatred for corporations, which he now considers merely "the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live." This comes as a surprise from the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, the play and movie depicting a repulsive business atmosphere. And the role of government? He once considered it fundamentally good but now he's "hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow."
He's decided that America is not a schoolroom teaching values but a market-place. He now puts John F. Kennedy on the same moral plane as George W. Bush. And when he listens to the standard liberalism of National Public Radio he mutters that its initials actually stand for National Palestinian Radio (he defended Israel in his last book, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-hatred, and the Jews).
Mamet has decided that free-market thinking meshes better with his experience than liberalism. He even reads conservative thinkers. He names Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele, and confers the title "our greatest contemporary philosopher" on Thomas Sowell, an economist always ignored by liberals. (Black skin makes Sowell hard to attack, particularly when he brings severe logic to racial questions, so the left prefers to pretend he doesn't exist.)
It may seem odd that a much-admired writer makes such a noise about the banal fact that he thinks the society he's always lived in is grounded in sound principles and operates reasonably well. But in his milieu, that opinion remains big news.
Successful artists favour capitalism in practice but not in theory. For this they have their own special approach to reality. They accept capitalism's money and buy its products, but prefer not to be reminded that it's essential to the richness of their lives. They pretend, in fact, that they oppose it. Readers of a typical leftist newspaper (such as Now, the Toronto giveaway weekly for the young and the cool) appear to believe they've hooked up with capitalism only until something better comes along.
An article such as Mamet's probably won't shake the faith of many liberals. Tom Hayden, for instance, stands firmly by his prejudices. Not even Vietnam can shake him. Its economy grows swiftly and so does its per capita GDP. It's a single-party state, still using the name Communist Party, and it has economic freedom without the other kinds of liberty. During his trip, a leading Vietnamese novelist told him, "Some Americans may sympathize with communism, but I lived under it and couldn't stand it." The novelist has a son making millions travelling for a high-tech corporation.
Is it possible, Hayden asks himself, that Marxism and nationalism won the war but capitalism and nationalism won the peace? Are "the supposedly scientific models of history long embraced by the left being replaced with a kind of chaos theory of unpredictability? Is this all that was ever possible?"
A few Marxist senior citizens share his unease. "We are better off materially, but not mentally, ethically," one octogenarian veteran says. But the Vietnam resident most upset by the new way of life turned out to be an American expatriate, Gerry Herman, once an anti-war activist, now a film distributor.
"Far be it from me," says Hayden. "to question the desire of the Vietnamese to share our globalized consumer culture like everyone else." But of course that's precisely what he wants to do, and does. He made his trip, he writes, because "I wanted to understand the long-term lessons." Considered in that light, his journey was a failure.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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*Bump*
This maudlin romance with 60's era Marxism is a total attempt to deny reality.
Useful idiot.
Hayden and Fonda will never give us the satisfaction of admitting that they were wrong.
After my first visit to VN after 1969..it seemed to me that they took a vote and communism lost and capitalism won.
Each trip I took after that, there were new stores resturants, hotels and more cars.
Stupid is as stupid does. It’s taken Mamet this long to break with liberal lefty Hayden. Mamet & Hayden—dumb and dumber.
Useful idiot.
All of liberalism is an attempt to deny reality.
That's all liberalism is. A fancy name for a philosophy of fantasy, a dress-up costume for those too weak, too dumb, or too mediocre to deal with their weakness, dumbness, and mediocrity.
They're all idiots, every one. Unfortunately, they are useful to certain people. People whose thoughts and goals would, if you could see them, make you grab your children and hold them close, stock up on guns and ammunition, and do your best to disappear.
This comes as a surprise from the author of Glengarry Glen Ross........
Arrrrrrrrgh!!!
Oh God, please, noooooooo! Not THAT thing.
I wanted to commit Hara-Kari three minutes into that dredge. After an hour of being subjected to it I was searching for my gun (1).
'Glengarry' is the worst, most BORING movie ever made, even worse the Gigli and anything with Madonna or Cher in it!
(1) thanks to Bill Clinton it had a trigger lock on it, but I couldn't find the dam key. so I couldn't kill myself when I did finally find it) /s
Just goes to show how far left this moonbat really is.
For him to bemoan the fact that this oppressive Communist regime, now has some measure of capitalism, and thus this is evil, is beyond the pale.
Dude, you should copyright that.
Communism is the ideology of the ant hill. Socialism is the ideology of the playground. Capitalism is the reality of the adult world.
-ccm
Yeah. I have too. But there's nothing on the horizon, and nothing better has yet been devised.
Some people don't have to try the harebrained to know that it won't work. These are called smart people.
Some can't recognize unworkability without trying it. These are called stupid people.
Unfortunately, stupid people, also known as morons, are too stupid to know that they're stupid, and they repeatedly try to foist their stupid ideas onto smart people.
I suppose stupid people will always be among us. They always have been. The Left is a stupid people magnet. They just can't figure it out--though smart people know it for what it is at a glance.
New stores, new restaurants, but same old Communist bastards in charge.
For better clarification.
I could be wrong but I don’t think you can copyright something that is a well known fact.
Couldn’t have said it better.
Anyone that reads TS knows that Libs are full of it.
He wears the armor of pure logic!
The play was great. Joe Mantegna was a better fit for Mamet’s dialogue.
Maybe the play was better. But the 'movie' ... gag.
I'mm no expert but I've heard sometimes a play doesn't work when made into a movie.
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