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Noah -> RE: David Mamet: why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal (3/25/2008 9:32:40 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Level
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John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.
Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.
When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.
Every playwright's dream.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,374064,374064,1.html/full
He's overturned his liberalism but his brain is still waiting for the lighting to hit the electrodes, I think.
Well that's unkind. He does in any event seem to have started out muddle-headed on the left and ended up the same way on the right.
Consider his silly synopsis of liberalism: that everything is always wrong. He very soon tars liberalism with a brush antithetical to that one: the sad "... and yet ... " gambit.
And he doesn't even notice that he's trodden theatrically upon his own rhetorical dick. Muddled, muddled, muddled.
He characterizes politics itself as "the polemic between persons of two opposing views," when the word has served through the centuries to address our attention to what differs between bilateral interpersonal interactions on the one hand, and broader disagreements in the public sphere, on the other. In memorializing this category error he buys into the Feminist notion that The Personal is Political, one of the most brain-dead notions ever propounded on the Left, and cranks it up till it all but excludes the polity and the public sphere.
I mean if you don't realize what the subject matter of politics is I don't expect much from you whichever side of the aisle you're slewing blindly toward this year.
As for the once quaint, now patently absurd fiction that The Right wants government to get out of the way, I have to wonder how Mamet failed to notice the grandest growth of governement and government power (and the horrifying shrinkage in civil rights) in history, all under the auspices of recent Conservative rule.
The Brain Dead Conservative wants government in the way of dissent, and especially in the way of the currently suspened Habeus Corpus rights which that radically Liberal document, the Constitution, attempted to enshrine for American citizens.
The (American ) Brain Dead Conservatives, singing a song of fiscal responsibility, are borrowing like drunken sailors the day before pay. And whom are they borrowing from? China. What are they borrowing for? To pay for an idiotic boondogle in the Middle East sailing under the ultra-Liberal flag of Nation Building.
The Brain Dead Conservatives are busy doing their best to crush civics under the massive weight of consolidated media promoting lowest-possible-denominator discourse (the Brain Dead on the Left are abetting them insofar as they sink to this level; I too pine for Buckley)
Brain Dead Conservatives are busy repealing science in the classroom, replacing it with theology; ; busy putting the federal government in the way of your local school board and the teachers they hire; busy putting government in the way of what happens in your bedroom ... the list goes on.
I guess if a Brain Dead Lefty were looking for a moment to fuck girls with pancake makeup and big hair for a change, this must seem like the perfect moment. No risk of rousing that brain from its dark slumbering.
Look at Mamet's praise for that icon of Liberal Politics, the US Constitution and the separation of powers, just as the Bill of Rights has been hung on a hook and power has been grabbed viciously and voraciously by the Executive. This shows his muddle-headedness as well as anything.
I can't believe he is anything but disingenuous or senile with such baloney as: " I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow." Would sorrow be so much reduced if slavery still obtained and women's suffrage didn't? The innovations which over-ruled these historical conditions must be doubly hated, since besides being instances of government in action, each is a triumph of the Liberal over the Conservative ideal.
Would sorrow be so much reduced if the Public Health system and Center for Disease Control had never been conceived? If roads and bridges had only ever been built privately? Would sorrow be so much reduced if there had never been any system of public education, no local or state or national parks. No, just more and more muddle-headedness from the newly minted Brain Dead Conservative, Mamet.
His notion of a world in which everything was magically wrong was indeed Brain Dead Liberalism. I'm glad he's left it behind. But his new notion of a world where any(status quo)thing that isn't perfectly evil should be praised and promoted is just as childish, stupid, and dangerous. He trades a pessimism he apparently saw shared among Liberals in his lofty and exclusive social circle for for the magical "realism" of such obvious fictions as Free Markets and Imposed Democracy. In this we can see that Mamet's brain is as far from vigorous as ever, even if the new stick propping it up happens to be on the Right instead of the Left.
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