We owe David Mamet for Glengarry Glen Ross (and, therefore for Glen and Gary and Glen and Ross NSFW!). This essay, extracted from The Village Voice (and tipped by The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid), is a fine job of work. I knew Mamet was reading Thomas Sowell when he got to the tragic versus perfectionist world-view, which was further confirmed by the idea of lifelong class mobility, but, that aside, he manages to surprise throughout. This is off-topic, in a sense, but it is dead-centered on the topics we have been addressing lately, here and elsewhere. A thoughtful man thinks about his own thoughts. What could be more human than that?
I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the “writing process,” as I believe it’s called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it’s at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
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 Read more
