David Mamet's Coming Out Party

[Valin]

WSJ:

BARI WEISS
5/28/11

In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: *"Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"

(Snip)

But spend five minutes with Mr. Mamet and you realize that coy can only last so long. "Being a rather pugnacious sort of fellow I thought, as Albert Finney says in 'Two for the Road': 'As I said to the duchess, 'If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess. If you want to make love, it's hats off.'"

(Snip)

Hear him take on the left's sacred cows. Diversity is a "commodity." College is nothing more than "Socialist Camp." Liberalism is like roulette addiction. Toyota's Prius, he tells me, is an "anti-chick magnet" and "ugly as a dogcatcher's butt." Hollywood liberals—his former crowd—once embraced Communism "because they hadn't invented Pilates yet." Oh, and good radio isn't NPR ("National Palestinian Radio") but Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.

(Snip)

If you are interested (or not) more....

NY Times: David Mamet Explains His Shift to the Right
By ANDREW GOLDMAN
Published: May 27, 2011

WSJ: Enter Stage Right
ANDREW KLAVAN
5/28/11



(* Link inserted by me)

[NCTexan]

Thanks for posting.... reading the whole article is a must.

[Valin]

Weekly Standard: Converting Mamet

A playwright’s progress

By ANDREW FERGUSON

May 23, 2011

 

 

(Snip)

 

His fame was enough to fill the stalls of Memorial Hall at Stanford University when he came to give a talk one evening a couple of years ago. About half the audience were students. The rest were aging faculty out on a cheap date with their wives or husbands. You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-’n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’.

 

(Snip)

 

It was as nervy a speech as I’ve ever seen, and not quite rude—Mamet was too genial to be rude—but almost. The students in Memorial Hall seemed mostly unperturbed. The ripples of dissatisfaction issued from the older members of the crowd. Two couples in front of me shot looks to one another as Mamet went on—first the tight little smiles, then quick shakes of the head, after a few more minutes the eye-rolls, and finally a hitchhiking gesture that was the signal to walk out. Several others followed, with grim faces.

 

It was too much, really. It’s one thing to titillate progressive theatergoers with scenes of physical abuse and psychological torture and lines like “You’re f—ing f—ed.” But David Mamet had at last gone too far. He’d turned into a f—ing Republican.

 

(Snip)

 

The Secret Knowledge begins with a parricide—a verbal throat-slitting of the leftwing playwright Bertolt Brecht, father to three generations of dramatists, especially those who, like Tony Kushner or Anna Deavere Smith or Christopher Durang, make agitprop the primary purpose of their art. For most of his career Mamet revered Brecht too: It was the thing to do. The reverence came to an end when he finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

 

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. .  .  . The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system .  .  . support and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.”

 

(Snip)

 

He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period.

 

(Snip)

 

Sounds to me like he is channeling his inner Breitbart.

[Pepper]

Did you see House of Games

[Valin]

Did you see House of Games

 

 

No, but I will now. Thanks.

 

In return if you haven't seen The Verdict you really should. Just wonderful!!!

 

[righteousmomma]

Andrew Klavan - former Liberal and agnostic Jew - who reviews Mamet's book is a convert himself. He had an "encounter" with God and has become a Christian (Messianic Jew).He is also an awarding winning screenwriter. I thought these comments from his review were interesting:

So I rejoiced—and I also sympathized. Breaking free of leftism while working in show business is like escaping from "The Matrix" only to find oneself in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." You wake to a risky but bracing new reality of individual liberty, limited government and free markets and are instantly beset by zombified statist dreamers determined either to make you rejoin their ranks or to destroy you. Mr. Mamet reports that a certain prominent left-leaning newspaper actually panned his first openly conservative play not once but twice for good measure. (Libertarian humorist Greg Gutfeld has introduced a "Mamet Attack Clock" on his late-night cable show to measure just how fast critics will now downgrade their opinions of the playwright's work.)

 

"Liberalism is a religion," he writes. "It affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. Central to this religion is the assertion that evil does not exist, all conflict being attributed to a lack of understanding between the opposed. Well and good, but this does not accord with the experience of anyone."

 

The blessings of liberty are not the stylistic and artistic preferences of an age. Either human life is ennobled by the dangers and rewards of freedom or we are better off when governments baby-proof reality and shepherd us to the good. It is one way or the other, and history and reason must be brought to bear in order to determine which. This means that Mr. Mamet the political theorist must essentially reiterate the work of those more expert than he: Thomas Sowell, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and other architects of modern conservative thought.

 

Since these brilliant men are frequently ignored or underrated by mainstream critics, it is no bad thing to have a writer as concise and engrossing as Mr. Mamet offer us a sort of digest of their most salient observations on the depredations of the ruling class. And in fact, "The Secret Knowledge," written in Mr. Mamet's tough and funny style, is entertainingly informative.

 

Take, for instance, this delightful exchange between the playwright and an ideologue in a class he was teaching, who feels that as many plays as possible should strive to demonstrate the humanity of homosexuals.

"Are gay people people too?" I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. "Are they aware of that fact?" I asked him. And he responded similarly. "Then why," I asked, "as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?"

"Ah, but," he said, "the straight people should see it."

 

"Ah, but," I said, "the straight people don't care. They may reward themselves for the ability to be bored by a play with a Good Message, but they, just like the gay people, come to the theater to be entertained. Your enlightenment is insufficient to capture the audience's attention for two hours."

 

This one piece of advice alone, if heeded, could revolutionize both Broadway and Hollywood for the good, and the reader might wish that there were more such wisdom in this book. "Theatre" is packed with such stuff and will, I think, do far more to advance both conservatism and show business. That said, "The Secret Knowledge" remains a sharp-tongued and heartfelt primer on modern American conservatism. And for those who have already read Thomas Sowell and Friedrich Hayek and the rest, it might make an amusingly irritating present for a liberal friend.

—Mr. Klavan is a Los Angeles-based screenwriter and novelist.

[Valin]

Andrew Klavan - former Liberal and agnostic Jew - who reviews Mamet's book is a convert himself. He had an "encounter" with God and has become a Christian (Messianic Jew).He is also an awarding winning screenwriter. I thought these comments from his review were interesting:

 

 

Take, for instance, this delightful exchange between the playwright and an ideologue in a class he was teaching, who feels that as many plays as possible should strive to demonstrate the humanity of homosexuals.

 

"Are gay people people too?" I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. "Are they aware of that fact?" I asked him. And he responded similarly. "Then why," I asked, "as they are aware of the fact, would they find its repetition on stage entertaining?"

 

 

I love it...."Are gay people people too?" I asked the student, and he said that of course they were. "Are they aware of that fact?" I asked him.

 

 

I would have cash money to watch that, just to see the look on the guys face.