March 13, 2008
Now let's see some of that convert zeal
I love political converts. It's true I was born to be a Republican; the Russian-born child of Soviet dissidents, who named their first-American born child after Ronald Reagan, doesn't generally end up as a Democrat.
But I do consider myself a convert to conservatism, and in my lifetime I've converted, personally and at minimum, several hundred people to the (R) line (I don't mean by this blog, because that's not quantifiable. I did it mostly by handing registration forms to friends and giving them the Republican pitch. Funny sidenote: my current boyfriend, who had been my friend for more than a decade, used to disrupt my registering of our mutual friends with his Democratic propaganda. Today he's a convert to Republicanism too.)
So I love the story of David Mamet deciding not to be a "brain-dead liberal" (his words, not mine), anymore:
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
...
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.
Read the whole thing, it's brilliant.
Hat-tip W.O.
Posted by Karol at March 13, 2008 10:38 AM | TrackBackTechnorati Tags: David+Mamet
So is he a conservative or just not a liberal? (I haven't gotten to the essay yet.)
Posted by: Shawn at March 13, 2008 12:07 PMBTW, I read Ed Morissey's link to the piece in The Voice yesterday and don't quite understand why he was so surprised by the tone. This is the style of his non-fiction prose, unless he expected a dramatist to write an op-ed in the same way he would a one act play.
It's funny, because as I was reading The Wicked Son I got the sense that he was on the verge of an intellectual epiphany, despite the fact that he still sounded like a socialist Kibbutznik, ca. 1960, in some chapters.
I really like this essay though.
Posted by: Gerard at March 13, 2008 12:25 PMis the new b/f on the right b/c of the company he works at?
Mamet's CBS show, "The Unit," is pretty good.
Posted by: BadBoyInASuit at March 13, 2008 01:20 PMDon't skip the comments. It's running about 99% "throw Mamet under the bus."
From the riders of the short bus.
Posted by: Mark Poling at March 13, 2008 04:02 PMOld story. Wendall Wilkie is running to be the GOP nominee back in 1940. He was a Dem only a year before. A GOP leader would not back him. Wilkie asked the leader if the town whore came to church, would he welcome her. Of course he would, the leader said, but I'll be damned if she is going to sing lead in the choir that first Sunday.
So it is with the boatpeople the left has cast aside who drift to the right. Yes, they may be right on some issues. But they are wrong on a heck of a lot. For example the boatpeople fleeing McGovern hint that McCain should name Joementum to the ticket since Lieberman is good on Iraq. Yes, but he is wrong on all else.
Is this the same Mamet of "Wag the Dog" who had DeNiro say that Reagan invaded Granada to make the public forget about 240 Marines being murdered in Lebanon? The same "Wag the Dog" which mocked Jeremiah Denton and one of the great moments of heroism in American history? Is this the same Mamet who helped write a hagiographic movie about Malcom X?
Look, Mamet is welcome in the church of American conservatism but he can sit in the back. I think Gerard is on to something about some of his past films (I think "The Winslow Boy" had a message a lot of people on the right can respect). But I don't think we should be praising him and making him sing lead quite yet.
i converted to the religion of arnold schwarzenegger at the age of 6, after watching his austrian hunkified presence deliver a solid smackdown to the martian landscape (and faux wife sharon stone).
Posted by: E. E. Grimshaw at March 13, 2008 06:46 PMNot sure I'd call it brilliant, although the man does make a living being verbose into infinity. Weirdly unsurprising though if you're familiar with his work, he's really into challenging social mores (er, writing selfish mysogonist characters whose one dimensional bitches betray them and thus we are left debating - did the asshole deserve it? endlessly because we are supposed to care. Oddly I never felt much empathy for his characters - was coincidentally reading a review of Edmund today though and gosh darn it William H.Macy might sucker me in again). He seems to think he's being a rebel, which he likes. The lazy liberal argument, while having some basis in truth is equally matched in laziness by those tossing it out as a valid reason for leaving the tribe without further elaboration. He could be your Sean Penn. Or maybe it's just me that finds him annoying - can't imagine many Conservatives are that into Mamet to be honest.
Posted by: Steff at March 13, 2008 08:31 PMOr maybe it's just me that finds him annoying - can't imagine many Conservatives are that into Mamet to be honest.
I'm not but my dad has been raving about November.
Posted by: Karol at March 13, 2008 08:36 PM
