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 ...
>Wow. Someone got to him.
He wrote and directed Spartan with Val Kilmer that may have sparked his interest in conservatism. It was based on the exploits of the founder of DELTA FORCE, that Mamet befriended and made co-creator of THE UNIT on CBS.
He’d be wasted in politics. What we need is well-written polemics, widely circulated. Can’t have enough of those. I’m proud of every bit of hate mail I got for what they published from me in Counterpunch. But maybe we could get him to Freep.
This article by Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard is one of the best written, and funniest articles about Mamet. Lots of great quotes.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/converting-mamet_561048.html
“Coffee is for closers.”
“F-— You, THAT’S my name!”
Only one I can think of... John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (and he was more of a linguist, anyway, thought his degree was in English Language and Literature)...
LOL. Now that's funny.
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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With David Mamet you might have other liberal Jews questioning their beliefs and coming over to David Mamet’s side. Mamet has always been pro-Israel and not shy about being Jewish,
I wish we had more Americans who got their knowledge of conservatism from these names as opposed to the Savages, Hannitys, and Medveds.
“When I was a child, I thought as a child...when I became a Man, I put away childish things.”
Or maybe, to paraphrase: “When I was a child, I voted Democrat; when I became a Man, I realized I had a brain and began to understand Conservatism...”
Sorta, anyway...we’ll see how long his “Right Turn” lasts.
Who is his rabbi?
A sharp cookies and he nails it. I have made many stupid mistakes in my like, but they were mine to make. Must we remain children and let "PAPA" Government make our decisions for us?
I was a radical nonconformist conservative ad a child (just didn’t know it) and I still am.
Same here. I went to college in Newark, NJ, and saw firsthand the destruction wrought by the welfare state. While I had no problem with a social safety net, I saw the liberal bureaucrat willfully holding down their “clients” by making schools worthless and stifling initiative. I had to ask, “what’s wrong with this picture”. I concluded that the definition of a liberal was one who stabs you in the back, cuts you off at the knees, and has the audacity to say “we’re doing this for your own good.”
This was when heavy head trip pop psychology was getting big in the seventies.
we “won in Vietnam”
We were winning when I left.
We were winning until Walter Krankheit (German for sickness) spewed his lies.
sounds like one of those “fiscal conservatives, social liberals.” In other words, a CINO.
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