David Mamet turns right

[Valin]

Washington Times:

Suzanne Fields
6/8/11

Conservatives have a new celebrity spokesman-writer-thinker-philosopher. David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, movie director and sometime essayist, has come out of the closet. No longer, he declares, is he a “brain-dead liberal.” Now he’s a wide-awake conservative. Sometime after arriving in Hollywood, of all places, and at age 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 reevaluated 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 from Friedrich Engels‘ family, which may account for his ideas about how wealth should be distributed.

Mr. Mamet writes of his conversion to free-market economics and his discovery of the errors of multiculturalism in a new book entitled “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.” He sounds like a latter-day Candide marooned in post-modern America, where liberals think they have all the answers for creating the “best of all possible worlds.” He renders them as absurd as Dr. Pangloss, who saw even the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755 as among “the best of all possible worlds.”
(Snip)

This is a big mess of a book, spontaneous and contemplative, wild and earnest, ferociously eloquent and pugnaciously persuasive, filled with free association, dashes of hyperbole and overwrought arguments posed in angry and edgy Mametspeak. He closes with a remark by his son, offered as something calmer with the clarity of simplicity, on the difference between liberal and conservative:
(Snip)

The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

[Valin]

[Valin]

Hugh Hewitt Show: David Mamet on his new book, The Secret Knowledge

Saturday, June 11, 2011

 

HH: Special couple of hours ahead. David Mamet is one of the nation’s most influential playwrights, screenwriters, directors, and until recent years, an icon of the left. Then, in a 2008 article for the Village Voice, and most thoroughly and recently in a brand new book, The Secret Knowledge, Mamet has broken with the left, and has written a devastating critique of its intellectual shallowness, its impact of devastating quality on the culture, and he joins me now. David Mamet, welcome to the program, good to have you on.

 

 

 

DM: It’s great to be on, thank you.

 

 

HH: Let me ask at the beginning, do your old friends on the left think you are ill, or the victim of blackmail, or what?

 

 

DM: Well, I think I have some friends who roll their eyes. I don’t have that many friends. You know, I spend most of my time either at work or at home with my marvelous family. But I think I have some friends who roll their eyes, and I had some who read the book and said oh, you know what, I agree with many of the things you say, which coming from a liberal, is like a road to Damascus moment, you know?

 

 

HH: But they don’t accept the conclusion, do they?

 

 

DM: I don’t think so, because I think they can’t. I think that’s the essence of liberalism, is that one can’t change one’s mind. It’s just like being a neurotic. One doesn’t know that one is making a false vision of the world. If one were aware of that, then the neurosis would be over.

(Snip)

 

Audio is behind the subscription wall

[saveliberty]

Thanks, Valin for posting this.

 

I read the reviews on Amazon and David Mamet is right. Liberals cannot change their minds.

 

So I ordered the book.

 

I added "The Road to Serfdom" and that qualified for free shipping.

[NCTexan]

Rush had a long interview with him yesterday... It was a great listen.