Andrew Ferguson has a lively profile of the playwright David Mamet:
His fame was enough to fill the stalls of Memorial Hall at Stanford University when he came to give a talk one evening a couple of years ago. About half the audience were students. The rest were aging faculty out on a cheap date with their wives or husbands. You could identify the male profs by the wispy beards and sandals-’n’-socks footwear. The wives were in wraparound skirts and had hair shorter than their husbands’… The unease that began to ripple through the audience had less to do with the speaker’s delivery than with his speech’s content. Mamet was delivering a frontal assault on American higher education, the provider of the livelihood of nearly everyone in his audience.
Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.
What happens when you decide, as Mamet did, that your membership in the tribe is no longer lifelong?
After reading The Secret Knowledge in galleys, the Fox News host and writer Greg Gutfeld invented the David Mamet Attack Countdown Clock, which “monitors the days until a once-glorified liberal artist is dismissed as an untalented buffoon.” Tick tock.
I wrote about what Mr. Mamet could expect a couple of years back:
In The Village Voice the other week, the playwright David Mamet recently outed himself as a liberal apostate and revealed that he’s begun reading conservative types like Milton Friedman and Paul Johnson. If he’s wondering what he’s in for a year or two down the line, here’s how Newsweek’s Jonathan Tepperman began his review this week of another literary leftie who wandered off the reservation:
“Toward the end of The Second Plane, Martin Amis’s new book on the roots and impact of 9/11, the British novelist describes a fellow writer as ‘an oddity: his thoughts and themes are… serious — but he writes like a maniac. A talented maniac, but a maniac.’ Amis is describing Mark Steyn, a controversial anti-Islam polemicist, but he could just as well be describing another angry, Muslim-bashing firebrand: himself. Talented, yes. Serious, yes. But also, judging from the new book, a maniac.”
Poor chap. What did Martin Amis ever do to deserve being compared to me? As Mr. Tepperman concludes, the new Amis is “painful for the legion of Amis fans who still love him for novels like The Rachel Papers and his masterpiece, London Fields.”
Likewise, the new Mamet will be “painful for the legion of [Mamet] fans who still love him for [plays] like [American Buffalo] and his masterpiece, [Glengarry Glen Ross].” And pretty soon at all those colleges the received wisdom will be either that only the early Mamet is worth reading — or that even those first works were hopelessly overrated and don’t stand the test of time. To “liberals,” apostasy is the greatest sin, and they’re serious enforcers.
I have never heard of a liberal apostate that ever regretted it though. I believe the main reason is that those who appreciate them do so honestly, whereas prior it was fake all along, so long as you tow the line.
He will be appreciated by those capable of appreciation for the sake of his worth, as opposed to his loyalty to a cause.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseFascinating. My favorite part of the article:
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And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror.
“I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.”
He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates. The widening gap between liberal politics and liberal life became real to him when, paradoxically enough, he decided at last to write a political play, or rather a play about politics. It was the first time he thought about partisan politics for any sustained period.
“This was after the 2004 election,” he told me in an interview last month. “I’d never met a conservative. I didn’t know what a conservative was. I didn’t know much of anything.
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SO TRUE!
Welcome to the adult world David. My name is Mark.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—'Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever'—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way."
How peculiar! I did not know other people actually believed the stuff they put on exams and papers. Paying attention in class is all it took for me to get what professors wanted to hear, but, heavens, I never BELIEVED any of that neo-Marxist garbage!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe shunning or figurative "beheading" of a previous believer gone apostate, especially an ex-prophet or priest is just another way that liberalism behaves like a religion and a particularly retrograde unforgiving one at that. They are that afraid of hearing anything outside their dogma. In addition, Mamet committed the cardinal sin - hurting a liberal's overweening self esteem and smug sense of moral superiority. All their confabs are basically cheering sessions with the subtext: "We are superior in every way! Yay us!"
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI am ~so~ please with myself for having posted to a political thread here within the last 24 hours the David Mamet/Ricky Roma/Al Pacino quote from Glengarry Glen Ross, "When everybody believes one thing, then I say, 'Vote the other way.'"
Then, in the Standard article, I read, "Mamet’s disdain for consensus, for received wisdom of any kind, has been evident in nearly every aspect of his career." I had no idea that the cynical sentiment in the Ricky Roma quote was central to Mamet's worldview.
I ~love~ David Mamet. Can't wait for his book to appear at the beginning of June.
The defection of Mamet to our side is huge for us, although, naturally, the MSM has taken little notice.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWell, then, it's settled. No more Oscar or Tony nominations for Mr. Mamet.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseInteresting to read this, just back from Home Depot, where I'd chatted with a young UCLA political science graduate.
When the conversation turned to Europe, he said how advanced they were, so far ahead of us. I gave him a quizzical look and said, "They created a socialist paradise that only lasted for one generation. Ireland is broke. Greece is broke. Spain is broke." This was news to him. "But they'll fix it," he said.
This handsome, well-spoken young man was on the job, by the way, standing at a table handing out brochures on a new waste management system for home remodeling. I wonder how long it will take for him to repay his college loans.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAs memory serves me, I believe that Sean Penn starred in Mamet's Speed the Plow several years ago. Wonder what Spicolli thinks of the conversion of Mr. Mamet? Glad to see another literary heavyweight come out and expose the myth's of the left.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMamet's is not a conversion, it's a graduation.
And this Steyn guy, yeesh. He's become a standard, a benchmark. He's a shark prowling amidst guppies in the liberal sea. He's a bully, is what he is.
Keep it up!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI always knew a liberal couldn't have written "Glengarry, Glen Ross.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI first thought something was going on with Mamet about a dozen years ago when I read an article of his in Sports Afield about deer hunting in Vermont, around the same time I saw him in an "I'm the NRA" ad.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI keep encountering conservatives complaining about some mythical liberal backlash at supposed apostates and wondering what they're talking about. Then, I think "Rino!" and I realize that these folks are, in fact, just talking about themselves.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseRINOs aren't apostates; they're heterodoxes! Completely differently kettle of wax!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe whole piece is well worth reading. I had come across journalistic fragments regarding Mamet's conversion (e.g. his discovery of Thomas Sowell) but this was the first complete essay I have found. This is a great story, one I am very grateful that Mr. Steyn is sharing.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOffhand, I can't think of any RINOs who were apostates. They were always liberals.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLast summer, PBS interviewer Charlie Rose tried to vilify him as a traitor to the leftist cause, but Mamet nimbly eluded Rose’s traps. I wrote about it here:
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn contrast to the horrific treatment meted out to David Mamet, the 'apostasy' of Christopher Buckley was marked by movement conservatives with open arms and swells of cheers.
After all, movement conservatives are far more tolerant of ideological dissension. It's not like they dismissed him from National Review after he endorsed Obama!!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHAHAHAHA, AemJeff. That's funny. How long did it take you to come up with that? Probably longer than it took to google this about Ron Silver:
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"I keep encountering conservatives complaining about some mythical liberal backlash at supposed apostates and wondering what they're talking about."
I can personally attest to the liberal backlash that comes when apostates realize the trash that is forced down the throats of the unthinking. I used to post at a gaming board around the beginning of the Iraq War that is well known for its unabashed Leftism. I used to be vehemently against the Iraq War for all the standard Leftist reasons. Needless to say, after the war commenced I started to support our efforts because if we're going to be involved in a war we should be involved to win. Not so the Left. As time went on, I started to see the opposition to the war turn into outright hatred, violent hatred, towards Bush. I started questioning their positions after seeing the wisdom in what Bush was doing. Not all things, but some things that Bush was doing. They would have none of it. It ultimately ended with me being banned from the website because I told a moderator that the more he typed in the more conservative I became. In classic amoral fashion, this same moderator months later had the gall to say he never banned anyone for what they wrote.
Apostasy from liberalism is indeed real. Last I checked, no one ever ran a person against Lincoln Chafee. The Democrats purposely run against their own if they fail their liberalism test. You know who comes to mind, AEMJeff.
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