The Silence Of The Hams
Daniel Henninger notes the extraordinary silence that has greeted David Mamet's self-described escape from brain dead liberalism. Well, silence from the American left and especially from the denizens of Hollyweird.
The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'" Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the "Mamet-word"), didn't himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: "I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: 'Shut the [Mamet-word] up.'" Been known to happen.
Toward the end of the essay, he names names: "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."
This of course is an outrage against polite American wisdom. Isn't Paul Krugman supposed to be our greatest living philosopher? One would have thought that David Mamet saying bye-bye to liberalism would have launched sputterings everywhere. But not a word.
As I think Groucho Marx once said, either no one reads the Village Voice anymore or my watch has stopped.
That one of the language's greatest living playwrights would say this in our hyperventilated political times was news worth noting in most of the English-speaking world. Commentaries appeared the past week in England, Canada and Australia. But there's been nary a peep about Mr. Mamet going over the wall in what some call the Mainstream Media.
Could there be a reason for the silence? Well, the left could be distracted, as Henninger points out, by the clash of the titans in the Democratic race. But there may be even more at play - and more to worry about:
Still a thought: If David Mamet says he can't take it anymore, can others be far behind? Were I a Democratic Party strategist, out on the frontier of voter sentiment, my thought would be: This is not good for Democrats. David Mamet's mind is a tuning fork of regular-guy sentiment. He's the one who wrote "Glengarry Glen Ross." He says he's been a reliable liberal all his life. All of a sudden, the party sounds off-key. What if other guys are starting to think this? What if, after Barack's charisma gets stripped away, all you're left with is "universal health care" and Hillary's blind ambition? Come November, you could be [Mamet-worded].
Do read it all, it is a delightful take on the wonderfully written article Mamet published. (If you have not read the Mamet piece, you really should.) Could other lifelong, self-defined liberals also be coming around to the idea the autonomy of the individual is more important than the collectivist ideals of the current Democratic party? Wouldn't that be fun to watch? Maybe we'll get to watch a few of the hams from Hollywood start singing a different tune.
By RiverRat, Sunday, 23 March , 2008 @ 12:10 pm
What I wish is you and others on the right or in the center would stop writing is that American Socialists, in an Orwellian fashion, are "liberal". Stop calling the left, the Democrats, liberal. They’re just not. I consider myself classically liberal or small "l" libertarian but haven’t voted for a Democrat since 1964…boy was that a mistake. The only excuse being it was my first election.
Call them anything you like, but don’t call them "liberal". On the extreme left they’re Marxist and in the center they’re econo-fascist with slightly repressed totalitarian tendencies. Remember that "fascisti" in Italian means "a bundle" or "a collective". Don’t let them define political speech.
Great site with timely and well-reasoned commentary. I’ve been reading your work for over a year but this is my first comment.