David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

March 11th, 2008 12:00 AM

Village Voice

Wow, what a self-absorbed prick he was. But I think you're getting ahead of yourself here. Could you write a whole bunch of common knowledge shit to first explain why one might write a newspaper article. Then I'll be prepared for the fact that you are writing anything at all in the first place. Then you can explain that it is actually reasonable for people to change their mind about things, then you can finally get to the subject of the article.

Every playwright's dream.
I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine.

What the fuck are you talking about? This is beginning to remind me of those Harry Carey sketches from SNL. Hey! Did you know that in the 8th grade I went to the California finals with a History Day project that I did with a kid who is now the guitar player in Linkin Park? It was about... well, I won't bore everybody with the tedious details of some dumb contest I was in years and years ago.

Jesus.

...the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

So aaaanyyywayyy...

My prize...

Jesus fuck.

...in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

So... you won a contest in a small periodical you didn't like eighty years ago and the prize, which I assume was made clear to people entering the contest, was a subscription to the paper. What stunning irony!

But I digress.

I'm reasonably sure that you have to actually begin writing about the subject at hand before you '"digress" from it. Doesn't this article have something to do with... Hey! My favorite food as a kid was chicken fried steak. What stunning irony!

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

I have pretty much no idea what you are talking about, though I even looked up 'jejune' to make sure that I really knew what it meant. One thing is for sure though, when a 100 year old man announces that he's just started to think about politics seriously, my money says he probably has fresh ideas and really knows what he's talking about.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views.

Not so much, chief. I mean, you could say it, but you'd be wrong because by your definition, people arguing about Chicago vs. New York style pizza is politics.

Implying that Democrats are actual adherents of Thomas More... a fine start, shit bomb. I also like how being a utopian socialist is "leftish."

The play, while being a laugh a minute...

Maybe even more.

...is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

What!? Nobody can ever change their... oh wait, you already explained why people sometimes CAN change their minds. So this is like Norman Mailer writing a fraudulent article about a play he'd never seen then spending a bunch of money so he would not be remembered as the guy who hated Godot... although that's not really changing his mind so much, because he never really had an opinion about the play when he wrote the first piece. Then the ad was just him trying to cover his ass with the same selfishness that led him to write the fraudulent article. Actually, it's exactly like that because it is becoming clear that you never saw the play in the first place and are now just parroting other people's views, with the one constant of doing what is self-serving.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

But establishing your political views based on sweeping generalizations that you take purely on faith would make you an total idiot! If you were an idiot for decade after decade and also a "liberal," then all liberals must be idiots. Thank God you are now a conservative.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

National Palestinian Radio? You dumb donkey. I'll admit that I haven't focused on NPRs coverage of one (mine or yours) particular ethnic group. This is because I am not a bigot. But, the occasional "drive the Jews into the sea" rant on "Car Talk" aside, based on NPRs standards and coverage in general, and the fact that you are throwing out a wild, goof fuck accusation with no support whatsoever, you were mad because NPRs coverage has too much depth. Like maybe they explained exactly what the Jewish settlements involve, or how the Israeli courts and government openly assert that that God choo-choo chooses them to have the unique right to torture other human beings. I'd also bet they interviewed a person you don't like and believe nobody should be allowed to hear. You are well on the road to being a good pseudo-conservative, though. It's important to understand that simply reporting facts and interviewing people with different opinions is biased when it fails to conform to your agenda.

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

If this was your "worldview," it truly was your own, douche copter, because nobody else thinks that. "Liberals hate rainbows!" Moron. Like, who the fuck have you been talking about politics with for all of these years? Oh yeah, people in the theater.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

Wow, not every single thing was wrong in every community that you ever lived in. I guess liberals must be wrong, since they believe that everything, everywhere is wrong, as everyone knows. I guess that means that the US doesn't now imprison 1% of it's population for mostly non-violent crimes because none of them are from your neighborhood. I'm detecting a trend here. Your experience, your neighborhoods, your ethnic group... I wonder if your revelations have anything to do with the fact that you're rich and you're selfish and you're an ignoramus.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart?

It is not difficult to piece together. You were a fool and remain a fool.

Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

Mind blowing. Why have you waited so long to share these revolutionary thoughts on human nature?

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...

Again, who exactly is it that believes or believed that all people behaved like gods? You know, there are other fallacies besides the straw man. You might want to take one out for a test spin, because it sounds like you are going to need them.

...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.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

No, only idiots. Twelve whole years of schooling! I'm very eager to read more of your constitutional scholarship. I bet it's brilliant.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

You are joking. You seriously did not learn all of the above in about the eighth grade and know it from that point forward? Look, I'll be the first to admit to not knowing all of the amendments or whatever, but you should realize that everyone who is reading this is laughing at you and that is probably what The Voice intended by publishing it. Let me guess, they offered, at most, cursory editorial advice.

VV--"The article is... mnnnn...hhhhhh... fantastic, David"

DM--"Whats so funny?"

VV--"Oh, I was just thinking of something I saw on 'Herman's Head'"

DM--"Mmmmmmmm."

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers...

I like how you are a famous playwright and don't know anything at all about Greek gods. "Olympian perfection?" Yeah, my pie in the sky, liberal, Pollyanna perception of government fits with the press secretary saying, "Sorry, but the secretary of energy is unavailable for comment because the president has chained him to a rock forever so that his liver might be newly eaten by a vulture every day." And, assuming that it were even a sensible phrase, who is it again that envisions "Olympian perfection" in Washington?

...the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And this just now dawned on you.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

You are such a puerile dick tree. Like, corporations are not 100% evil and provide goods and services we need? No shit?

Nobody over the age of 13 is even arguing that. The leftist criticism is mostly that corporations have way too much influence in the government when it should be the government that is making the rules for them. Of course, as an expert on free market economic thought (see bellow) you know that Adam Smith himself was very worried about these issues. Just kidding. No you don't.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.

Yeah, Iraq, Panama, Grenada... so much we need to be protected from. The world is just a box of scary chocolates. Thank God our military budget is literally larger than the rest of the world's combined. Thank God some kid is being eviscerated by shrapnel so that Saddam couldn't come to New York and hummus-fart in your general direction.

Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Did you cereally used to go around asking if everything is perfect or are you just lying?

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view.

Who's a fucking Marxist? I mean, independently of anyones assessment of Marx and the fact that there is no fucking way you, in particular, have even a rudimentary understanding of Marxism, there are no significant political figures in this country who are Marxists. You know, I think you should rejoin the "liberal" segment of society because American heads of state are chosen through an electoral process, unlike in a monarchy.

That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

I really can't believe this shit is just hitting you and you think that there might be one single person who is not already aware of most of what your are saying. It feels dumb to even discuss things that are so obvious, but moving up in class is difficult and often requires as much luck as work or skill. Jesus, you've never heard an actor talking about his "big break?" The point is we do not live in a meritocracy, so left leaning people think it is fair to redistribute a certain amount of wealth and try to give poor kids a chance in the race, to facilitate the mobility you are so fond of. Stop just pointing out obvious, obvious shit as though it backs up your point. I mean so far your argument is that liberals are all simultaniously Marxists, nihilists and utopians, but puppies are cute, so not EVERYTHING is wrong and therefore, liberals, are wrong and and sometimes poor people get rich.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me...

Stunning!


...and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

You've made no actual argument for this, other than one time you were afraid a zoning commission was going to take your $3 million house, which happens all the time. The government is great at creating sorrow with things like the war on drugs and actual wars, but presumably you now like these things. If you're talking about college scholarships and aid, section eight housing, the Hubble telescope, the useful aspects of law enforcement, providing roads, putting out fires, health and safety in everything from building codes to food and drug standards, minimum wage, employee rights, food stamps... all of the things your new posse wants to stamp out or privatize (i.e., stamp out), I don't see all that much sorrow. Most, if not all of these things could stand to be improved significantly but I don't see how they inflict fucking "sorrow." "I'm driving on public roads, eating a safe burrito to buy safe drugs and pick up my kid from a pretty crappy, but still free school. Oh the goddamned humanity!"

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

Well, obviously things seem to work themselves out. Was your expectation that, if your governor made enough poor decisions, the state would suddenly be spring launched into the sun? I mean, I'm sure day to day shit just kind of works itself out for most people in Mexico too. Iraq, probably not so much. "Well, my entire family my home and my business were all blown up, but at least I have a sturdy pair of shoes."

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

So now you are an anarchist? What in the fuck are you rambling about?

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.

It's hard for me to believe that you do not understand how irrelevant all of this is and that, if anything, it is an argument for collectivism of some kind. I mean, your bus example is basically Rawls run through the monglanator. And the jury system... I can't really see what it pertains to. Like, in your analogy the jurors represent what exactly and the decision they reach represents what exactly? If it's not an analogy, what does it relate too, considering how contrived and controlled juries are?

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack.

Oh my fuck, you actually believe in Captain Invisible. I like the part where some shrubbery tells this guy that it is God and he believes it and then tells everyone about it and they believe him. You believe the shrub.

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.

You and the rest of the flock are obviously idiots. I mean, you can sort of feel for a guy who is born into a Pentecostal family in Arkansas. But New York Jews have no excuse for shrubism , so I assume your congregation is made up of some real schmucks. And what kind of idiot wants their clergyman to expound on the pork projects or something. Like, why not the ice cream man, or your doctor or a fading play write who started examining politics seriously for the first time shortly after his 84th wedding anniversary.

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...

Nobody fucking thinks that "everything is magically wrong!" Argh! It's just a bullshit straw man that a selfish fuck like you can use to avoid addressing or accepting any responsibility for real problems.

"Mr. Mamet, we are working to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina, many of whom are still being neglected, and..."

"Oh, so you think everything everywhere is wrong, do you?"

"No, but in New Or..."

"Then explain this to me. If everything, everywhere is wrong then how do you account for my beautiful marble flooring?"

"But.."

"No, I will not fall for your Marxist ruse. Good day."

...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...

"Workplace," that's pretty fucking rich my friend.

Um, the freeway, the jury room and even the school board meeting are heavily regulated creations of the government. The market and workplace would obviously revert to total savagery without government regulation. And again, what is your point? Some guy waved you into his lane on the freeway so Regan wasn't a terrorist?

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.

Aha!

Actually, it's pretty simple to see what's going on here. You openly admit to not having thought or read about politics with any seriousness at all from the day you were born until like last month which is probably why you have no idea what you are talking about. You read like four books that went way over your head by themselves, never mind any understanding of the context of those books or the actual positions of other thinkers (hint; that position is not that everything everywhere is wrong). Now, you think that people should listen to your obvious, yet incoherent thoughts on politics because you are famous.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right.

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.

So, it only took you a few weeks of reading serious and semi-serious books on politics to figure out who our greatest contemporary philosopher is. You must be so smart!

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.

White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.

So it is the best book you've ever read about the presidency, AND you recommend it unreservedly? Well, you definitely pass the windbag test for your new affiliation.

White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "

Jesus Christ, you're not so great at sharing the spot light are you. Anyway, that is pretty clearly a stupid thing to say. It's hard to believe that you are arrogant enough to write an article about fundamental political issues when you so obviously don't understand anything at all about politics. Like, you have made no distinction at all between social liberalism and economic liberalism. How is NOT wanting to throw people in jail for being gay intruding on their lives? I mean, I don't want to go on too much because anybody reading this can see what a fool are and what an intolerable person you must be, but I will congratulate you on being spectacularly misinformed and not making a single correct or even plausible assertion, beyond stuff like "the government is divided into three branches." That's why you, David "whoopteedoo" Mamet are a hack. For writing about a subject you do not understand at all, for spewing out nonsense that many school children would recognize as trite and for somehow being unable to string these simplistic and obvious statements into anything coherent or relating in any way to planet earth. Congratulations, you suck.

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler.

Not really. I mean, Hillary is running in hope of twenty-eight years of rule by two families. The overwhelming majority of Senators are millionaires. When the CEO of Raytheon sends me a Vermont Teddy Bear on my birthday, I'll see these fucks as folks like me.

Happy election season.

Fuck you.