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David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'
An election-season essay
By David
Mamet Tuesday, Mar 11 2008 |
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SOURCE: http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-03-11/news/why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal/
Copied here 10 may 2012 |
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John
Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When
the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman
Mailer at The Village
Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York
premiere of Waiting
for Godot.
Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer
called it a piece of garbage.
When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He
was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in
the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece
it is.
Every playwright's dream.
I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York
magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was
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.
My prize, 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.
But I digress.
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.
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is
to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument
in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned,
and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, 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.
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.
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. |
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For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in
a godlike manner, 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.
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.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian
perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their
employers, 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 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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. |
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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.
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack.
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.
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 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,
the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board
meeting).
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," 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.
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.
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 . . . "
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. Happy
election season. |
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