The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, David Mamet, Sentinel, 241 pages
By Scott Galupo | September 22, 2011
When David Mamet’s “Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” manifesto was published in the Village Voice in 2008, conservatives—this one, at least —were impressed.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and filmmaker is, let’s face it, a bigger deal than the actor Ron Silver (God rest his soul); than the crazy, washed-up coot Jon Voight; than TV’s Kelsey Grammer; than virtually any entertainment figure who has outed himself as that most exotic of Hollywood critters, a conservative.
Coming as it did on the heels of playwright Tom Stoppard’s denunciation of the British nanny state and self-identification as a “timid libertarian,” Mamet’s piece signaled the possible emergence of a new class of sensitive literary artists who, having abandoned the shibboleths of the left, embraced a healthy skepticism of busybody government.
Alas, on the evidence of this fleshing-out of his manifesto, it’s clear that Mamet has simply traded one state of mental compromise for another. He’s now a Brain-Dead Conservative.
Turgid when it’s not imperious, utterly lacking in fresh insight, full of breathtakingly stupid generalizations, The Secret Knowledge is, for a writer of Mamet’s caliber, nothing short of embarrassing. What is this thing?
The book is structured haphazardly as a series of pensées: some political economy and polemics here, some anthropology there, “some personal history” off to the side. Done tightly and skillfully, such an omnivorous performance can be satisfying, as with, say, Robert Nisbet’s Prejudices: A Philosophical Dictionary. But not The Secret Knowledge. It is, like Tom Skerritt’s Calvinist minister said of human nature in “A River Runs Through It,” “a damn mess.”
The 63-year-old Mamet thinks he has a lot to say—there are stale-tasting gripes about feminism, affirmative action, abortion, and a jaded riff on the impracticality of liberal-arts education—but really he ends up saying the same thing over and over. In short: Capitalism, free markets, and families are part of the naturally evolved order of things, and liberals can’t do anything except screw up that ecological balance.
Also, they hate Israel.
He self-seriously juices up the copy with lots of capitalization: “Right,” “Left,” “Liberal,” “Conservative,” “Statism,” “Globalism,” “Free Market,” “Man.” And when Mamet finds that he has exhausted mention of his favorite examples of intervention gone awry—affirmative action and forced busing—he resorts to the kind of catch-all category you might find in freshman poli sci: “Government Programs.”
Speaking strictly of readability, the book is torture. Mamet writes like a pompous ass, beginning countless sentences with the rhetorically overloaded “For,” and he can’t seem to finish those sentences without some parenthetical aside or throat-clearing (“which is to say,” “this being so”). There’s a profusion of alternatively snarky and faux-scholarly footnotes, plus referential shorthands in the main body of the text—“see” this, “viz.” that, and, if you’ve still got time, go and “cf.” something else—that suggest Mamet himself became bored with the book’s repetitiveness.
His characterization of liberals as outsize cartoon villains would impress even Ann Coulter. He snickers in one footnote: “What Conservative has not had the experience of concluding a discourse with a Liberal friend in which the Liberal acceded to all the Conservative’s points but on being asked, ‘Well, then why do you vote Democratic?’ replied, ‘I’m a Democrat’?” (Answering only for myself: I’ve never enjoyed that experience.)
At one point, the reader is invited to “Observe that to propitiate an unknowable power, the Left, ignorant or dismissive of any society or history but its own, insists upon the primacy of Trees and Soil, Oceans and Animals—theirs is a return to the nature worship of the Savage.”
I imagine the late liberal historians Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Richard Hofstadter would be tickled to learn they’d been lumped in with the disciples of Gaia.
Substantively, Mamet’s book will annoy longtime conservatives the way teachers’ pets annoy their classmates. The kid simply tries too hard. He’s ingratiating. “I speak as a reformed Liberal,” he announces as if in front of the parole board.
Perhaps a better comparison is to the door-to-door cultic propagandist. There’s something unsettling about the intensity, the totality, of his post-Damascene convictions.
The literary critic James Wood once described a certain kind of freshly adopted religious commitment this way: “It is like entering prison: you must turn out your spiritual pockets and hand over all your inner belongings, even your shoelaces.” Well, Mamet has handed over his shoelaces, voluntarily stripped, and appears eager for a cavity search.
He isn’t just a rich man who has soured on paying taxes, as some liberal detractors have charged. He’s not just a professional dramatist who cares deeply about the English language, wincing every time he sees and hears it mangled by the enforcers of political correctness.
No, Mamet ventures far out of his comfort zone in this book. With startling self-assurance, he informs us that “polar bears are not, in fact, decreasing but increasing in population; the earth is not, in fact, warming.” And: “Carbon dioxide is not harmful to the atmosphere. There have, in the past, been periods, much colder than today, when the CO2 in the atmosphere was twenty-five times what it is today. Carbon emissions offer no threat whatever to the planet.”
How can Mamet possibly know this with such certainty? How much has this “reformed Liberal” thought about climate science at all? Whatever one’s opinion of global warming, and of the environmental movement more broadly, is it not obvious that Mamet is clutching a new holy book and believing everything in it as a matter of course?
Elsewhere Mamet declares that “Most legislation aimed at eliminating unhappiness and discontent has resulted in misery.”
“Most”? Really? A fair-minded liberal reader could be forgiven for wondering if Mamet would include, say, Social Security and Medicare. Sure, the old-age pension and healthcare programs have serious long-term financing problems that may come to bankrupt us. But have they resulted in “misery”? If so, why are they so darn popular?
Stepping, for a moment, out of the weeds, it’s worth asking why Mamet has written this book. Was it a Sept. 11 mugging by reality, as in the case of the actor Ron Silver and comic writer-director David Zucker? This is probably the case on some level: Mamet clucks a few times about “Islamo-fascism,” by now a hackneyed ideological term of art, and he seems earnestly to be coming to grips with the historical continuity of the Jewish people as it relates to himself and his family.
But there are also ways that The Secret Knowledge isn’t so much a clean break from his misguided liberal youth as it is a new twist on it.
Young Mamet believed that the human pageant is an unsentimental Darwinian struggle.
“My early plays, American Buffalo, The Water Engine, Glengarry Glen Ross, concerned Capitalism and business,” he writes. “This subject consumed me as I was trying to support myself, and like many another young man or woman, had come up against the blunt fact of a world which did not care.” He adds that he “enjoyed—indeed, like most of my contemporaries, revered—the agitprop plays of Brecht and his indictments of capitalism.”
The famous opening scene of the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” (1992), adapted by Mamet from his play, features seven of the most riveting minutes of onscreen dialogue anywhere. “The rich get richer; that’s the law of the land,” laments a schlubby salesman played by Ed Harris, who’s being berated by Alec Baldwin’s slick downtown emissary. (Incidentally, actor Liev Schreiber, who performed in a 2005 revival of the play, informed me that Baldwin’s iconic character was original to the screenplay, which evidently had lacked the full payload of Mametian bleakness.)
“Nice guy? … Good father?” Baldwin taunts. “Only one thing counts in this life: Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.”
Yet Mamet, even in his early anti-capitalist phase, never singled out men of fortune; a line in “Glengarry” slags “clockwatchers, bureaucrats, officeholders.” His peers in Tinseltown have come under the knife, too. Bridging both coasts, the movie “Wag the Dog” (1997), for which Mamet co-adapted an Academy Award-nominated screenplay, famously anticipated the Lewinsky imbroglio with a plot about a U.S. president who fakes a war—with Hollywood’s abetment—to divert attention from a sex scandal.
Old Mamet still believes the human pageant is an unsentimental Darwinian struggle. His contempt for the clockwatchers, bureaucrats, and officeholders has only increased.
The difference now is that Mamet has become a Friedrich von Hayek buff. Mamet presumably used to associate “Darwinian struggle” with “strong conquering weak” or “rich getting richer.” But Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit has replaced those associations with notions of “spontaneous order”—of culture and trade evolving well in advance of the state.
Oh, it’s still a struggle, still unsentimental. After all, “we are a bunch of crazy monkeys,” says Mamet. It’s just that any rational effort to alter this complex and mysterious dance of interactions will end in ruin at best, serfdom and slaughter at worst.
In one of The Secret Knowledge’s better chapters, Mamet recalls with a nostalgic glint the rough and tumble of his Chicago hometown and extrapolates from there to a universal theory of cultural evolution:
We conceive the world not through indoctrination, but through osmosis: ‘This is how we do things here.’ And I believe that, in Chicago, I had a very interesting youth. This is how we did things here: one spiffed the mechanic at the cab garage if one wanted to get a working cab to drive; one paid off the cop who pulled you over, as it was much cheaper than going down to 11th and State and paying the fine; the politicians were corrupt—why else would they be politicians? (the absence of this understanding in the minds of the young baffles me); the Governors, regularly, went to jail, how about that?
How about that, indeed?
Sadly, there isn’t nearly enough of this—of Mamet writing like a dramatist—to sustain this book.
He says his intellectual journey began with Whittaker Chambers’s epic Witness. Too bad it ended in the same welter of pseudo-sophistication and invective that his newfound heroes of the talk-radio right prefer to wade in.
What is the “secret knowledge”? It’s this: if you haven’t already, you should just go read the original Hayek.
Scott Galupo is a writer and musician living in Virginia.
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What is the point of this review? I’ve read political philosophy most of my life. I have a doctorate in the field. I am 71 years old and have considered myself a conservative all of my life. Now at this late stage I discover that I may not do so unless I receive Mr. Galupo’s approval.
Is it entirely possible Mamet’s “coming out” story was ghost written to explain its shortcoming from such a gifted playwright?
A large part of the impetus for Mamet’s “conversion” is due to the left’s attitude about Israel. That fact is easily the most important thing to him. It seems to me that if one reads his own early (post conversion) statements on what he hadn’t read about free markets or any other examples of his ignorance one would quickly see a very uninquisitive mind. Especially for a genius. Yes. His cursing characters were always ripe with adolescent umbrage. And hate.
Anyone…I repeat, anyone, who can listen to NPR for a lifetime and only recently determine the level of intellectual corruption and political myopia therein is not someone to ever want on your side.
And Dr. Leon: You can just be any little thing you want to be…
What’s the big deal? Mamet’s moral conservatism has been evident in his work for some time. Now he’s older, his pants are uncomfortable, the foods he can’t eat outnumber those he can, and he sees no reason others shouldn’t be as miserable as he is. This is the secret knowledge: manipulate the economy as you may, aging will take its cut, leaving all worse than penniless.
It is not impossible – though improbable admitted – that Mamet’s ‘conversion’ is some sort of extraordinary and sustained stunt, carried out over several years and a couple of books. Something about teaching us not to think in stereotyped terms. watch and see if he turns around with a large aha
“The Earth is not, in fact, warming”
Ice on the Arctic Ocean has melted to its second-lowest level on record.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/140516890/arctic-ice-hits-
near-record-low-threatening-wildlife
According to NOAA scientists, 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880.
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html
These pesky things called “facts” keep accumulating, but whatever.
Far too harsh a review of a book I read with considerable enjoyment. Mamet may have overplayed his hand a bit in a few areas, and I noticed, too, that he resorted to hackneyed terminology a few times, but overall the book adds a thoughtful and powerful polemic to the conservative armory.
More importantly, as Galupo observes but doesn’t seem to fully appreciate, Mamet is a card-carrying member of the intellectual elite in the artistic community, a sine qua non creator of art and not just one of its interpreters or agents. He enjoys top tier status in Hollywood. His defection cannot be laughed off or sneered at by the community, since the best among them are spending their lives with the aim to, at most, match what he’s already achieved.
Mamet on the right undermines the pretensions to intellectual superiority so common among Hollywood liberals. One of their most powerful minds has defected. What does that say about the rest of them?
Mr. Galupo is strangely condescending.
Mamet isn’t a political philosopher. He’s an artist describing ( in an honest way and at some personal cost) his journey from Approved Political Opinion to his own personally achieved sense of the true and the good. The fact that Hayek did it better is inconsequential.
“Speaking strictly of readability, the book is torture.” Anyone who can write a a sentence like that is no judge. I can imagine that it’s hard for a little-known author to watch the new kid in class be fawned over for saying the obvious, just because he’s already famous. Think of the good it does, and forget one’s justifiable envy.
what a mean-spirited, foolish, senseless article by Mr. Galupo. I have read Mr. Mamet’s book. It is a conversion narrative, relating how he came to give up his “tribal assumptions” in favor of a more accurate view of how the world (contemporary america) really works. Why would any conservative have a problem with this? Mamet did not intend to write an economics tome or sociological tract but to articulate a new worldview which matches his life experience.
In his attempt to describe conflicting whole world views, Mamet inevitably ends up a speaking in generalities. So what? So did St. Augustine and every other writer who has tried to describe a new world-view pardigm.
Galupo calls Mamet’s experience “pseudo intellectual”. He insists in several lines that Mamet’s new views are empty of content. Galupo also charges that Mamet is out of his depth when he contests climate change orthodoxy and is brain-dead. Its weirdly self-aggrandizing for Mr. Galupo to set himself up as the judge of these matters. Mr. Galupo can call Mamet a “pompous ass” for venturing out of his box as dramatist and opining on political and economic subjects. But I give Mamet credit for committing to writing a sense of the dissonance between mainstream views and the truth about the American reality.
Even if a reader believes that Mamet is 20% or 50% or 80% wrong, the remaining value of his book is worth immeasureably more than Galupo’s profitless pensees.
Because David is a much better writer, that’s why.
Excellent review. Helps support the common-sense argument that there are stupid reasons to choose the left, and stupid reasons to choose the right, and smart reasons to choose the left, and smart reasons to choose the right. Bravo to Galupo for calling out this stupidity and furthermore for such an astute recommendation as Nisbet’s wonderful book “Prejudices”.
Alas, why do Americans seem to think that “genius” (which is cretinously believed to be bequeathed by a series of awards) – is permanent?
Here we have the sad trajectory of a once vibrant life, at its end…and the (genius?) self-righteous posturing that goes with it…perhaps with diminishing grey matter as well….
god, these arguments are tedious. When theoretically smart people begin to take their ideological marching orders from the knuckleheads who dominate the squawk radio segment the cause of conservatism is in pretty serious trouble. Mamet was never much of a dramatist, now he’s a mediocre political theorist to boot.
On 31 May 1866, John Stuart Mill spelled it out in a Parliamentary debate: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.” Now David Mamet witnesses much of the converse, that people embrace stupidity in the measure they embrace Conservatism.
Mamet’s book is a great first-read for anyone curious about exploring conservatism, his reading list throughout the book contains excellent resources for all.
Not a bad refresher, either, if you’re going toe-to-toe with the usual liberal idiots on the job.
I’d call it a valuable addition.
Scott–this is a good review. The fact is, Mamet’s essays have *always* been problematic–pedantic, stilted, and condescending. (When he’s writing about the theatre, as in “True and False,” he can sometimes get it right, but even then, he can miss the mark. I remember a phrase “Johnny and Judy are going home, but I’m staying!” Johnny? Judy? Did we suddenly rush back to the 1950s?
As a playwright, his later work is still damn good–”Boston Marriage” is smart & fun, “Romance” is comedic genius, and “State & Main” and “Heist” are both very good, and “The Unit” was strong. But yeah. Essays. Not about the theatre. Destined not to be good.
@Tom B: Uh, it says different people in Hollywood have different views. Trust me–as someone who’s actually had paying gigs in Hollywood, and who spends time with others who have, Mamet hasn’t come up in conversation once in the past six months. (He will if he makes another movie or TV series, though, that’s to be sure, but no one will care about his politics if it’s as good as “State & Main,” or even “The Unit.” In fact, no one on set will care about his politics, period, since he’s known for treating cast & crew members well.)
“…relating how he came to give up his “tribal assumptions”
…in order to assume the other side’s tribal assumptions. The kids that allows one to write screenplays for Fox. That’s the main point of the review and that’s what TAC has been fighting against. Conservatism should be an ethos, not an ideology.
If a book Is 80% wrong then it is not worth money nor anyone else.
@Waynberg: “Now at this late stage I discover that I may not do so unless I receive Mr. Galupo’s approval.”
Look, Galupo was asked to *review a book*. He did not think it was much of a book. His job is then to say so. That does not mean he now holds himself up as the gatekeeper of conservatism!
As a longtime fan of David Mamet’s plays, movies, and essays it is painful to watch his transformation. I must ask the same question I asked when PJ O’Rourke transformed from a liberal to a conservative who mocked liberals. Why should I trust your current certainties, when you mock your own past certainties?
Does Mamet (or O’Rourke for that matter) really believe there is a divine phenomena that makes liberal ideas bad and conservative ideas good? Life is not that simple or neat. Using the Darwinian model Mamet is prone to invoke, if one set of qualities is superior to all others, then natural selection, over time, would make all living things embrace those qualities out of necessity. This isn’t so, nor is the conceit that one philosophy is superior to another. Nature has many solutions to the problems of existence and to think otherwise is to simply expose one’s biases.
To paraphrase an old saying, I can summarize Mamet’s thinking as follows: “It’s not enough that I am right, others must be wrong.” When he was a liberal, conservatives were fools, now that he is a conservative, liberals are fools.
The only real foolishness is to not see the narcissism in this chosen path.
It depends on how (and when) you describe “liberal” and “conservative”.
Most current self-named “liberals” revere the JFK iconography but would be utterly opposed to most of his policies. His definition of liberal made containment and defeat of Communism mandatory.
More that a few public buildings had their honorary “Barry Goldwater” name ripped down because “conservatives” were aghast at his support for abortion and gay rights. Goldwater didn’t support these causes in spite of being conservative – his definition of conservative demanded it.
Mamet’s conversion?
From what? To what?
I get the sense that he’s not a conservative mocking liberals so much as a liberal rebuking hard-left “liberalism”, inc.
I can name that tune in fewer notes and inspire David Mamet while I’m doing it.
In an Atlantic Wire article from August a charitable group named AntiSpec is out to save from herself the writer who writes for Huffington Post for free and in the hopes of obtaining for herself a contract, a paid job: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2011/08/designers-lash-out-huffington-posts-call-free-logo/41350/
On Monday an Atlantic Wire article celebrated Valerie Jarrett’s belief that free writing is not only good but so good that the taxpayer should subsidize the writer who only promises to write for free: http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2011/09/five-best-monday-columns/42937/
A Wire article published yesterday visited journalist-cum-techno whiz Jeff Jarvis, and the Wire regularly publishes a page that sums up the best of what the reader is missing if he doesn’t have a subscription to the NYT and if he refuses to install Internet Explorer in order to use that browser’s InPrivate Browsing app to access whatever he wants, even everything, at the Times.
We *are* the richest nation in the world, folks. The Koch brothers and Ron Paul aren’t wrong or attempting to trick us when they tell us this, about ourselves. (Actually, what the Kochs and Paul are doing is far more reserved, conservative, than what you’d like to see them doing, every time you have reason to think about that bunch in DC and conclude that ‘they’ should round up the whole lot of them and take them out and hang them.) The last thing that a wealthy people who are unable to feed their kids want to do is to bet on a program, jobs- or any other kind, if it’s being heralded by a political party too supstitious to denounce such intelligent designers as Valerie Jarrett and AntiSpec.
It’s too bad he fell in with the climate change deniers–they’re wrong & no few of them are dishonest. When scientists working in several different fields come up with data pointing to the same conclusion: AGW is real, artificial, growing, and a menace–a consensus like that isn’t to cried down as some leftist cabal.
And what is it with his scornful pity for college students? Yes, it’s sad to think of unemployable soft-science majors spending their working lives folding sweaters in Macy’s. But, liberals don’t work? Who is in the membership of all those labor unions, then? Counselors sell empty breath to jaded rich people? Surely Mr. Mamet at least knows of people who have been stymied or hurting, and benefited from healing words. I wonder if he is taking his experience with Hollywood hangers-on and projecting it to the entire rest of the country.
But he’s spot-on about a number of things, especially when he brutally demonstrates how society’s solemn rite of Leaving Home is no longer marriage, owing to its many many counterfeits, but divorce.
I enjoyed the autobiographical bits of this book. I’ll look forward to his memoirs.
“As a longtime fan of David Mamet’s plays, movies, and essays it is painful to watch his transformation. I must ask the same question I asked when PJ O’Rourke transformed from a liberal to a conservative who mocked liberals.Why should I trust your current certainties, when you mock your own past certainties? ”
That’s rather odd. For starters, I’m at a loss as to how it can be painful to witness the transformation of a third-rate political thinker into a third-rate political thinker.
Secondly, O’Rourke has been on the right for the entirety of his professional career, so it’s rather absurd to even suggest that you questioned his transformation. He may use his mindless collegiate leftism as a writing device somewhat excessively, but a dalliance with the left while possessing the idiotic self-assurance of youth is so common as to be a cliche.
Pairing the two of them together is rather silly.
Lame review. Mamet’s book is about much more than rehashing Hayek. True, he does a fair bit of Sowell and Hayek quoting, but Galupo and the critics above and below miss the point. Mamet is read by liberals. Sowell is not. Mamet is adored by the left. Hayek is not.
Mamet has something his critics lack, experience living and working deep in the liberal culture.
And anyone who thinks he’s overrated as a dramatist would do well to watch Glen Gary again, or Homicide for that matter, or Race. Mamet is great. His critics can suck it.
The essential inanity of this article is its presumption that because many people in Hollywood declare themselves to be liberal, therefore Hollywood conservatives are rare creatures. Could there be any institution of American life that is more conservative than Hollywood? Accruing money for oneself and keeping money to oneself is as conservative as it gets; keeping things the way they are is the very definition of conservative, albeit one that declared conservatives (most of them reactionaries) would rarely profess, and even more rarely practice.
Scott Galupo is not a very wise person, nor is he a good writer. As a critic, he is mediocre at best. It is doubtful that he even read the book.
Climate change alarmists are dishonest and verging on criminal. Mamet was exactly right on that point.
Editor: Please be more selective in your book review authors. Thanks.
John R.,
P.J. O’Rourke started his writing career at an underground paper in Baltimore writing revolutionary rants.
Some people seek certitude. When one certitude fails, they seek another.
this book will turn people away from conservatism if they believe Mamet to be making its case. No rational person can side with those who see the liberal boogie man dismantling American culture everywhere. Look at how commenters are so derisive of the critique, as if this article is part of the dismantling of American culture. Oleanna was an adroit deconstruction of some ugly facets of American culture, nothing wrong with that. If you don’t like how Mamet or Galupo see things, stay cool, it’s okay. Maybe some day you will be able to bear self reflection and not be upset by it.
If a devotee leaves X church and joins Y church, becoming even more devout in his new place of worship, does not not speak more of him than of either church?
Converts are often, as the adage goes, “holier than the Pope.”
In this case, Mamet is holier, with a need to not only embrace his new faith, but thoroughly trash his old. Insecurity? Doubt? Maybe he could write a play about it.
Dan
Sorry, should read: does that not speak more of him than of either church?
Dan
Alice Finkel:
“Climate change deniers are dishonest and verging on criminal.”
FIFY.
If you formed a police lineup consisting of Glengarry Glen Ross, the sequence of Sopranos episodes where Moltisanti operates a pump-and-dump stock office, Aguirre The Wrath of God, Midnight Cowboy, and The Mosquito Coast to play a little game of “spot the liberal” (it would be a depressing night) I think Midnight Cowboy would win in a landslide, with the other MC as runner up, and no-one would give GGR a second thought. They’re all running from something, and it’s never pretty.
If the Baldwin character bowls Ratso over leaving his office building, it wouldn’t have been the least bit incongruous, in either movie. From there, MC peels where GGR grinds. The main characters have about as much skin left by the end as the leaders of the resistance in Red Sorghum. MC lightens the mood by finding closure in death; GGR doesn’t. I’m not picking up the liberal vibe.
What about Mamet skewering steak knife aspirations makes him liberal any more than Animal Farm makes George Orwell an anti-government libertarian?
Never, over the years from 1978 to 2008, did Mamet’s sour, cramped, benighted view of human life ever strike me as liberal. Rather, his work always seemed to reflect a kind of conservatism that arises from hopelessness. In short, a reactionary. It came as a shock to learn, in 2008, that he ever thought of himself as liberal. His pronouncement invited the conclusion that he spent a long time lying to himself about who he really is. For him now to have switched so quickly and completely into a new ideological orthodoxy suggests he has merely exchanged one exoskeleton for another, while still seeking to protect himself from something. Advocates of conservatism should be wary of such an ally, for he is likely to prove to be a crank, like the drunk in the corner of the club, and not good for much besides the occasional angry outburst.
Hmmm….the first seven minutes of the film adapation of Glengarry Glen Ross is mentioned, only insofar as it differs from the play itself….that brought to mind the late great Jack Lemmon playing the desperate pleading character of a struggling real estate agent trying anything, begging and pleading for the Glengarry Glen Ross listings that could potentially save his bacon (his house, family, life). It is one of the most heart-wrenching and haunting scenes ever…and I think anyone moved by that scene will know that the compassion of pre-conversion Mamet is what his legacy will be. And well it should be. Democracy i
Dr. Leon Waynberg said: “Now at this late stage I discover that I may not do so unless I receive Mr. Galupo’s approval.”
In what way has Mr. Galupo forbidden you from doing anything? Histrionics serve you no better than Mamet in this case, it seems.
Mr. Galupo seems to go out of his way to object to Mamets arguments: Regarding Global Warming and CO2 concentraions…
“How can Mamet possibly know this with such certainty? How much has this “reformed Liberal” thought about climate science at all? Whatever one’s opinion of global warming, and of the environmental movement more broadly, is it not obvious that Mamet is clutching a new holy book and believing everything in it as a matter of course?”
Mamet may not have had the saavy to collect all of the reference data to satisfy Mr. Galupo (a’la Michael Crichton) But his statements have some supporters in the science community.
The facts are The earth warms and cools in intervals that are not regular. There are contributions by a sun and oceans and volcanos that, individually, dwarf mans contributions and in the aggregate make it inconsiquential.
I am more interested in the why of the book. Mamets early works are less Darwinaian as Galupo suggests but more Hobbsian. Explorations of base characters, only a few of whom suprise us with their humanity(Jimmy Malone)
After his conversion and exposure in 2004 to Sgt Mjr Haney, a charter member of Delta Force, Mamet produced a television show that was more a showcase of personal values and brotherhood, with some salacious base characters peppered in.
He spoke with a conservative Rabbi. Who pointed out that liberals hate Israel…and do not really know why.
Even then it would take another 2 years for Mamet to sum up the courage to vent in a liberal icon paper his conversion.
I credit the disjointed nature of the book in his childlike giddiness of how liberating it is to expect people to behave in their own interests. But, really, to expect anything more…
structured from the author of “Wilson…considering the sources.” That may be hoping against hope.
“A large part of the impetus for Mamet’s “conversion” is due to the left’s attitude about Israel. ”
Which he just confirmed in his latest screed.
The problem is, some of the biggest liberals in Congress are some of Israel biggest backers.
Groucho, and then Woody, describe Mamet’s shape-shifting best: I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me as a member. Once he looks around the motley conservative world a while, he’ll have squatter’s remorse.
He’s a man between, on a swinging pendulum propelled by resentment and arrogance, in that he believes he embodies both the frictionless pivot and the centrifugal force but will never be credited with being both.
How’s that Sarah-Palin-is-so-brilliant thing working out for ya, Mr Mamet?