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 youre alienating your public?
Ive 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 Im alienating the public! Thats 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. Heres 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 its 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 whats absurd, youre on the road to serfdom.
Dont you have to denounce your early, anticapitalistic work then?
Of course not. At that time in my life I didnt 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 youre 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 ...
Thanks for posting this interesting interview.
When Churchill made that statement, “liberal” did not mean Marxist, as it does today.
Have ordered Mamet's book from Amazon. Can't wait to read it!
Camps? That is soooooo 20th century! They will be referred as Re-Patriotizing Day Spa's. Sheeez. Get with it. And, I will see you at a "meet and greet" at one of those Spa's underneath the Diversity Pavillion.
Bingo. You just nuked the entire Left.
“Camps? That is soooooo 20th century!’
Exactly! For the 21st century just one word - biodiesel.
I went to high school with Mamet ... nothng is as it seems ... everything is an "act" ... he was a fraud then and now.
Oh for crying out loud! Soylent(sp) Green! Emphasis on the "green". This is surreal. Your freaking me, headsonpikes.
The more condescending and snarky the intellectuals attitude, the closer to null his accumulation of knowledge.
I have often referred to PHDs as narrow minded egotistical idiots. Do you think this might be why my college GPA suffered?
if I where absolute dictator there would be no progressives in any position of power or authority in this nation.
Disagree. I sold retail inside in the 70's. That's what frustration with life sounds like, when guys are being slowly sharped and shortchanged into an early grave by their cheapskate, chiseling employers. Salesmen talk like that among themselves. Absolutely. Mamet didn't turn up the thermostat but a trifling couple of degrees.
The "black films" of the 1940's depicted an intact "colored" society in the "colored" part of town. It was segregated (in the North moreso, but pretty much everywhere), and Jim Crow was around in the South, but blacks had intact families served by a black middle-class business community, black lawyers and detectives and policemen, and a vigorous black religious and newspapering establishment.
The black part of town was functional.
Gore tried to steal the election in Florida. bush did not.
Kennedy stole his in Chicago and Texas.
Bush did not out a CIA agent. That was by a minor progressive functionary and the agent was only a low level annalist. Cheney's chief of staff was wrongfully convicted.
Kennedy did leave hundreds to die at the Bay of Pigs. Where they all or even mostly CIA agents? Unlikely!
Bush did not lie about his military service.
Was bush in bed with the Saudis or Kennedy with the Mafia? That would make a good book plot. BUT.....
I think Soylent Green is a difficult product to sell because of the negative cannibalism vibe.
Biodiesel, not so much...
Yep, and the irony is that once you see life in the tragic sense and that people aren't perfectible, you can be happy and truly love people. Liberals don't get this, of course, because they are deaf to irony.
I’d like to see the whole thing. One of his answers seems to miss the point and I strongly suspect it’s a result of the editing.
You think he's faking it?
he's always "on" ... no telling his real feelings
Glengarry Glen Ross, good movie.
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