David Mamet: No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal
The
scales fell from Mamet’s eyes when he realized that humans are more self-interested
than good, and that our capitalist Republic is designed to work with this reality
better than any other arrangement:
I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that,
to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults
of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were
little different from those of a president whom I revered.Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida;
Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds
of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military
service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson.
Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the
hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods
and services they provide and without which we could not live.And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of
my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who
actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world.
Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they
are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country
into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free
from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither
are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything
perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according
to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be
unfolding pretty well.
And he commits the ultimate apostasy here:
I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
Crossposted from Ken McCracken
Tags: Uncategorized
