Posted on 05/29/2011 9:10:26 PM PDT by neverdem
While reading your new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that you’re alienating your public?
I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When “American Buffalo” came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, “How dare he use that kind of language!” Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for.
Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.
Don’t you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didn’t have a penny, and I was glad to be working at entry-level jobs. Having lived for quite a while longer, I see life from a different perspective. What am I going to do, go on denouncing capitalism all my life?
I gather you’re not subsisting on a diet of Rachel Maddow and The New York Review of Books. What do you read on a daily basis?
I went to a consultant a few years back...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.
Maybe we can talk him into running for President.
Wow. Someone got to him.
Mamet is done. Hopefully he will find a spot in the camps with the rest of us.
Mamet: I don’t know. If you look at Paul Johnson’s or Thomas Sowell’s description of the term, it would be a guy who’s not aware that he doesn’t know anything.
Chomsky should take language lessons from Mamet. At least then his crap would be funny.
Ping for later reading.
Please mark (tag) questions and answers correctly.
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David won’t eat lunch in this town any more.
Yeah, his rabbi. Mamet sent the rabbi a copy of Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” The Rabbi sent back Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell.
It wasn’t even a close contest.
Yes, his rabbi.
I've read a few of the other interviews with Mamet in connection with his book, and one when the Village Voice piece he wrote (which The Voice retitled "Why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal" or something like that). On the other hand, the tragic sense of life which came through in his plays was always conservative: the left thinks man is perfectible, that if we just put the correct programs in place everyone will be happy forever. The conservative, or anyone with a tragic sense of life, knows this to be rubbish.
interesting
Bump
A long and fantastic read.
Explains the transformation from the herd mentality in Hollywood to independent thinker.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/full
On the other hand, the tragic sense of life which came through in his plays was always conservative:>>>>>>>
Most of his material was conservative. He wrote the screenplay for the movie “The Edge” which is a conservative movie where the hero is a billionaire — “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a jet airplane”
ping
Good for him if he’s now seen the light, and hopefully this new conservative position isn’t as admittedly self-serving as the vocal leftist one in his earlier writings was.
Another one has seen the light.
Good Morning: I know nothing about David Mamet's personal life except that I *think* he's from Chicago, and I *think* he is/was married to a woman who acted in one of his movies. Everything else I know about the man has come from reading his plays, acting in scenes from his plays and watching his plays and movies.
David Mamet has never been a liberal. I knew this decades before he did. Good grief, Mr. Mamet, go watch Homicide again--you always were a conservative.
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