The Speech Barack Should Have Given

Dan Henninger draws our attention to David Mamet's editorial in the Village Voice. I noticed that he (Mamet) made the "Notable & Quotable" blurb in the WSJ last week, in the middle of the Spitzer hoedown (sorry.) I made a mental note (first mistake) to find out what Mr. Mamet had written but neglected to do so in favor of reading Mr. Obama's 5,000 words of heartstrings-tugging, soaring, elegant, moving, trenchant drivel.

Mr. Mamet had an epiphany. Most people think that epiphanies have to be "in a blinding flash of light," as my mother used to say. They aren't usually quite so dramatic, and I don't care what the dictionary definition says. Most epiphanies take the form of slow realization and relatively sudden acknowledgment of a reality that has been in place for a long time. Mr. Mamet describes this, wittily, deliciously, bitingly, in this brilliant essay.

Money quote:

 "...I recognized that I held those two views of America...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."

Update on Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 12:08PM by bbmoe

When I googled David Mamet to find a picture, I ran across this blog post  in the UK Guardian about Mr. Mamet's conversion.  It's hillarious in its deeply-held, anassailable  presumption that a conservative worldview is antithetical to great art.   Mr. Billington and his ilk lump "Conservative" with many other perjoratives, but even when true Conservatism stares them in the face, can't name it as something they would otherwise value. 

Only last week I also found myself defending Mamet from the charge, levelled by the wife of an American playwright-friend, that he was a misogynist. I conceded that Mamet wrote better about men than about women. But in a play like Speed-The-Plow, currently packing out the Old Vic, he creates a deliberately enigmatic heroine who may be a Hollywood hustler or a genuine idealist. Even in Oleanna, where a female student accuses a professor of sexual harassment, Mamet's real target is America's recourse to legalistic solutions to personal problems. "Mamet," I suggested to my friend, "is not anti-women. Only against a political orthodoxy that sometimes drives them, along with men, into false positions."

Oooh, when Mamet was "Liberal," he was striving against political orthodoxy and flaws in America's legalistic culture.  Now that he's "Conservative,"  I guess he really is a misogynist after all. 

The author, Michael Billington, concludes:

I hope I'm wrong about Mamet and that he continues to astonish us. But his talent as a dramatist springs from his fascination with demotic speech and his own divided nature. He may pose as macho man but he has always shown an incredible awareness of human fallibility. I just hope that, in leaning to the right, Mamet doesn't destroy the very qualities that have made him America's best living dramatist.

Uh, I think Mr. Mamet's awareness of human fallibility is still vigorous.  That he now acknowledges it as a reality that can't be made better by government, Utopian dreams notwithstanding, is what makes him an outed Conservative.