Film and Digital Media @ Messiah

Recently the Village Voice ran an editorial piece written by playwright, screenwriter, and director, David Mamet. Mamet is perhaps the most significant dramatist in the American Theater in the past 30 years. Yes, I recognize the impact that Tony Kushner, August Wilson, Sam Shepard, Wendy Wasserstein and many others have had. But Mamet continues to have an incredible impact not relegated to a small, particular set of dramatic issues like the aforesaid writers. Perhaps the only one in his class as a dramatic influence would be Tom Stoppard, but he’s a Brit!

David Mamet

Mamet relates — in a mischievous manner and with a gentle spite — how he left off being a “brain-dead liberal” and became a much more discerning political independent. He re-evaluates many of the liberal shibboleths and changes his mind on most of them. Here is a longish quote from near the end of the editorial. I hope it whets your appetite to read the whole of it. To do so, click the link at the end of this blog entry.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read “conservative”), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

“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.

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a “brain-dead liberal,” much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding …

To read the whole article in the Village Voice click here:
http://villagevoice.com/news/0811,374064,374064,1.html