Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' by David Mamet: "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."
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
First George McGivern, now David Mamet??
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4 comments:
Perhaps the Left has finally become too ridiculous and not everyone wants to stay on the ship as it enters the utopian harbor on the sea floor. However, there have been such shocks before: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the change of party line when Operation Barbarossa kicked off, Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin at the 1956 congress. And always the Left has recovered.
In Mamet's case, I have the impression that progressive support for the Palestinian cause was one of the irritants that helped him question his goose stepping ways. Let us hope there are many others who will find reason to follow.
I also thought this was a great article worth commenting on. Thanks for linking it.
Clearly there is a religious need being met here. Mamet lays out what were the tenets of his belief system, then goes on to notice that they don't match reality as he has experienced it. Most people don't come to that final stage, they don't see a connection between their abstract belief that "people are inherently good" and the actual people they have met and see every day in their lives.
It saddened me though to see him lay out his litany of Bush's sins, none of which are reality as far as I can see. It's clear that even for an apostate of the Church of the Left, there remains a pale beyond which one must not go.
Like MHA I found it troubling that he laid out the silly littany of anti-Bush nonsense.
It was nice to hear from a "liberal" who has finally realized that he'd prefer the government to keep it's nose out of people's business as far as possible so We The People can get on with best muddling through.
Now, if one of the "liberals" who continues to believe that they have the right, through government power, to shove the grubby mitts into Other People's Pockets just as deeply and frequently as they feel the need would have a public conversion, I'd appreciate that.
I'd put it this way. His F' them all attitude is virtually indistinguishable from most college freshmen, albeit expressed with better writing.
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