David Mamet's Revision

Wall Street Journal ^ | 3/20/08 | Daniel Henninger

[MartinaMisc]

The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the "Mamet-word"), didn't himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: "I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: 'Shut the [Mamet-word] up.'" Been known to happen.

Toward the end of the essay, he names names: "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."

This of course is an outrage against polite American wisdom. Isn't Paul Krugman supposed to be our greatest living philosopher? One would have thought that David Mamet saying bye-bye to liberalism would have launched sputterings everywhere. But not a word.

As I think Groucho Marx once said, either no one reads the Village Voice anymore or my watch has stopped.

[Free State Four]

If David Mamet says he can't take it anymore, can others be far behind?

From your lips to God's ear. I know I turned the bend when the feminazis stabbed Paula Jones in the back. The scales fell from my eyes. Maybe this little Obama/Clinton drama will do the same to some liberal die-hards.

[dennisw]

David Mamet did screenplay for “The Edge” ——
Meaning he was always conservative but just had to get things right

“House of Games” is also worthy of revisiting in this age of Obama the con artist

[IreneE]

Thanks for the link. However the rich and famous liberals I know in Hollywood, they are really all capitalists at heart. It is on the capitalistic issue — earning your own bread by the sweat of your brow and keeping it — that diffuses liberals most easily. However, when it comes to “other people’s money” I actually had a rich lib friend tell me that “poor people don’t know how to spend their money, it is better that the government does it for them”...

So there’s that creeping socialism for ya. Or creeping elitism. Part and parcel of our fallen human nature. Libs can’t be trusted or should I say — unthinking nonChristians can’t be trusted — because that’s what Libs are in the end, after all. Ask Ann Coulter.

[Clink]

“House of Games” is also worthy of revisiting in this age of Obama the con artist

One of my favorite movies of all time.

[Dr. Ursus]

Paul Krugman- another self-hating liberal.

[Mad Dawg]

“poor people don’t know how to spend their money, it is better that the government does it for them”.

Of course your friend's description misses one important point: It's OUR money the government spends for the poor ... and this enables to poor to continue to spend their money unwisely.

[eureka!]

marking

[driftless2]

Apparently many libs think one way but live their lives another. There have been many lib utterances through the decades about the necessity of freedom but very little understanding of it. For many libs freedom obviously meant the freedom to have Big Government do all your thinking and providing for you. Mamet was a lib who finally arrived at the inescapable conclusion that the more autonomy ceded to the government by the individual, the more the individual is made a slave. With the best of intentions. Congrats to Mamet for finally reaching that conclusion even if in his later years.