Just today I was complaining again about the one unfortunate constant in David Mamet’s otherwise often quite marvelous dramas: the secretly scheming woman. We see it in “Speed the Plow,” we see it in “Heist,” we see it in “Oleanna,” we see it in “The Verdict,” we see it in “The Edge,” we see it again and again; when it’s unclear who the villain is, look to the woman in the cast. Those men may be crooks, but somehow they have better morals than those women whose intention is to emasculate them.

Then this afternoon I came across this piece in the Village Voice, in which Mr. Mamet’s other, less-visible, fault reappears: that of setting up false targets so he can easily knock them down. In this case, he equates liberalism with being brain-dead and attacks liberals for arguments I don’t hear them making.

(And you will note that I use “them” as the pronoun for liberals, rather than “us.” Please don’t think I dislike Mamet’s thin argument because my own group is being attacked. It isn’t. But I do wonder at how negative the connotations of “liberal” have become, when once there was a fine tradition of liberal humanism that cut across the political spectrum on these shores. Where once liberals were strong and proud standard-bearers of the improvability of the human condition, now they are cast as appeasers to tyrants and abettors of the disenchanted and ungrateful. In other words, they seem weak — which may be why the famously macho Mamet has jumped ship.)

Mostly when I listen to liberals I don’t hear a nostalgia for Che Guevara. What I hear is concern over a loss of civil liberties (an issue I would think both conservative and liberal and an issue, therefore, unreservedly patriotic and “American”), a bemoaning of the misconduct and malpractice of government (Katrina, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), and a great economic unease as enormous stockpiles of wealth are slushed over to an often incompetent few presiding over the ruin of major corporations while hundreds of thousands suffer from their daily mismanagement. If those complaints are liberal, then statistically we are all liberal. To me, a believer in free markets and friendly relations, someone who chokes up over the founding notions behind this nation and wishes we would get back to them, these complaints are commonsensical.

When liberals attack Rush Limbaugh, whom Mamet almost seems to embrace in this strange essay, surely they recognize Limbaugh as the opportunistic showman he is. (Let us always remember that the cowardly Limbaugh is hiding behind that microphone in his broadcast booth every day; if you were one of the few who saw his short-lived television show and his actual confrontations with a live audience, you will never forget the terror in his eyes and the timidity in his voice.) No, what irks leftists and, well, me about Limbaugh is rather what he represents: the dumbing-down of the dialogue and the debasement of the platform. As incredible as this may seem, many people actually listen to Rush Limbaugh and think he makes sense. Worse, the tenor of how he says what he says feeds an indignation that is misdirected against the sufferers rather than the perpetrators. And that, too, is what Mamet’s essay at times seems to do.

If David Mamet found himself caught up in groupthink and extricated himself, I’m delighted. We should celebrate that; it seems like one of our founding principles. But if he has left behind one groupthink to surrender to another, he hasn’t gone anywhere new.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 10:00 pm and is filed under On reading, Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.