David Mamet, the 60-year-old playwright, screenwriter and just plain writer, has decided that being “a brain-dead liberal” all these years has been, on consideration, a misjudgment on his part. He elaborates in a piece in the Village Voice, called “Why I Am No Longer A ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.’” (Thanks to Rich for the link.) There’s nothing so very radical in his essay, and some of it might even seem rather twee to someone who has been conservative-minded for many years, but it is valuable for illustrating the path of logic which he has followed to his ultimate enlightenment — in a C.S. Lewis kind of way, you might say. Snippet:

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.

...................
Share this!

Posts which might be related to this one based on a mysterious algorithm:

• All I Need Is The Air That I Breathe
• Life and Life Only
• The Story of the Hurricane