David Mamet - Playwright - Turns Right

David Mamet – Playwright – Turns Right
Relentless pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2011

Thanks to Suzanne Field’s Townhall.com’s article 6/10/2011, “David Mamet Turns Right”. David is a screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist. He is a convert to conservatism and common sense. Mamet writes of his conversion to free market economics, his discovery of the errors of multiculturalism, in a new book titled, “THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE: ON THE DISMANTLING OF AMERICAN CULTURE.”

“No longer, he declares, is he a “brain-dead liberal.” Sometime after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at 60, he engaged in a conversation with his Republican rabbi (where did he find one?), who gave him the books of conservative writers, such as Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. He had a dramatic political conversion.

“Mamet re-evaluated his own heroes, starting with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, whom he now describes as “a show dog of communism,” who theatrically criticized capitalism even as his royalties allowed him to live comfortably on capital deposited in a Swiss bank account. Karl Marx, he discovered, never earned his money, but mooched on Friedrich Engels’ family, which may account for his ideas about how wealth should be distributed.

“The great wickedness of Liberalism,” Mamet discovered, “was that those who devise the ever-new state Utopias … set out to bankrupt and restrict not themselves, but others.”

“Mamet first observes his own hypocrisy, recognizing the disconnect between how he acted and how he talked, “talking Left and living Right,” which leads him to a collective indictment of himself and others in his generation of baby boomers, whose ideology has never quite been in sync with the real world they inhabit.

“As my generation did not live through the Depression, World War II and the agony of the immigrants who are our grandparents or great-grandparents: as we were raised in the greatest plenty the world has ever known and in the most just of societies,” he writes, “we have grown lazy and entitled (not unlike Marx, who lived as a parasite upon Engels, and never worked a day in his life).”

“In this scenario, liberals replace the Judeo-Christian roots of democracy with wishful Utopian thinking, belief in man in the abstract rather than the flawed human being that he is : “We are told we need not produce, but may merely hope, we need not defend, but may hope, we must not consume, but are allowed, somehow, to hope for sustenance, magically, deriving from some unspecified actions of a government, which, all observe, is at best competent, and, more usually, self-serving and corrupt, whoever is in power.”

“The title of Mamet’s book is meant as ironic … there is no secret knowledge, except the recognition that the federal government in its expanding power is “the zoning board write large.” Mamet’s new-found hero is Friedrich Hayek, who observed that man is limited and government should be also... He passionately defends patriotism, tradition, the family (rather than the diluted “family values”) and the Bible. [He is a traditionalist.]

“The book is spontaneous, contemplative, wild, and earnest, ferociously eloquent, pugnacious persuasive, angry and edgy. On the difference between liberal and conservative, “It’s the difference between the heavenly dream and the God-awful reality. How true!” +++ George H. Kubeck +++