David Mamet: Now a Brain-dead Something Else

David Mamet undergoes a conversion:

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

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.

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."

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

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.

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? 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.

Source: a longish piece in the Village Voice entitled "Why I Am No Longer a Brain-dead Liberal" (link).

He makes me think of another, somewhat similar, conversion across the pond. That would be David Aaronovitch (link), British journalist and alpha sandboxer in London intellectual life. David is the son of Sam Aaronovitch who started life (so I am told) as a street communist in the London East End (link). By the time I met Sam in the 70s, he was more or less domesticated, with a government paycheck and an up-market accent. But he remained a force in the intellectual life of the British left until his death in 1998. David started out in the Young Communist League, but drifted far enough right to support the Iraq war; a lefty website calls him a “sometime media hack” (link). Sam’s wife, Lavender—David’s mother—stuck to her lefty guns all the way along, or so I’m told.

As Pigpen said in the comics, times change, people change, every day we grow a little older. So Mamet is converting to—something. I hope it is a responsible centrism. I hope he’s not going to become one of those nasty ex-Trotskyites who make such a nuisance of themselves. I look forward to hearing more from the new Mamet, but I do think it’s bonkers to say that this guy is “our greatest contemporary philosopher.”