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It
bothers me when people I otherwise admire for their talent go and ruin
it by broadcasting liberal political views, and in the process choke
all the joy from the thing. The notion that one person can, at
once, be brilliant and an idiot doesn't compute, so I run from
it. Al Franken is a prime example. While David Mamet never quite
grabbed me, I hated Glengarry
Glen Ross for example, his word smithing and intellectual
abilities were always evident. No more so than in this Village Voice polemic; his renouncement
of Liberalism.
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| “ |
 As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith
that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that
people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as
increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable?
Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them
in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along
and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the
words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted.
And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper
truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of
national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of
place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I
thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to
NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found
myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
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What
will happen, I predict, is that all the "Hollywooders" who worshiped at
his altar yesterday, will of a sudden conclude Mamet has experienced
brainal infarct, and stop reading when they hit my exampled ¶.
Too bad, because the ensuing dialectic could change everything for the better, given that his natural audience are much responsible for the current state of things. Still, I feel
phuking GREAT!
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