David Mamet (American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director) has a must read piece in today’s Village Voice… a piece that will have Liberal head’s exploding today — and thus proving the point of his essay: Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
The theme:
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
This is an excellent summation of the Liberal world view: Everything is always wrong. And only the government can fix it for us.
Some choice snippets (but make sure to read the entire thing):
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.
Exactly. As Coldfury points out, “most Americans, liberal AND Conservative are good people just trying to get by in life.”
And left to our own devices (and free markets and free wills), we’ll do a remarkably better job with less government interference, not more.
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.
[snip]
“Aha,” you will say, and you are right. 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.
Welcome to the logical, pragmatic and the right side David. That last statement there is what we’ve known all along. And we’re just dumbfounded that so many Liberals will do anything they can to destroy and replace those free-markets.
Jules Crittenden has a perfect review of Mamet’s tome:
“Brain-dead liberal†Mamet stirs. Master of dialog talks himself out of lifelong malaise.”
Another millionaire comes home to roost. (queue cricket chirps…) I hear the sun is rising in the east tomrrow too.
Left by Pat on March 12th, 2008 at 4:16 pm