In Honor of Bill Maher: "How David Mamet Became a Brain-Dead Trumpscum": Featuring Tikvah Tablet Rufo Fangirl Bari Weiss
David Shasha
"How David Mamet Became a Brain-Dead Trumpscum": Featuring Tikvah Tablet Rufo Fangirl Bari Weiss
I do not think that I have referred to the transformation of the once-great playwright David Mamet into a complete Right Wing whackjob, a la David Horowitz and Dennis Miller, as noted by Breitbart whackjob Bridgett Wagner:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2012/03/01/heritage-staff-remembers-andrew-breitbart/
And that makes him a perfect match for Tikvah Tablet Rufo Bari Weiss at the White Jewish Supremacy Streicker Center:
https://streicker.nyc/current-season/mamet
Here is the description of the event:
David Mamet
The Death of Free Speech
and the Cost of a Free Lunch
For decades, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright, director, author and screenwriter brought us terse and confrontational dialogue that crackled with energy and truth, in Glengarry Glen Ross, Hoffa, Wag the Dog and the Untouchables, to name just a few of his dramas. But in recent years, David Mamet has turned his intellectual vigor and trenchant sarcasm even more directly onto the tenor and challenges of our times, from political correctness and media bias to religion and global warming.
Upon the publication of his new book, the alternately funny, angry and wistful Recessional, he joins us to issue a stark warning about the liberal Visigoths at our gates whose “cultural thuggery” is killing not only free thought and expression but democracy itself.
Mamet will be in conversation with journalist Bari Weiss, author of How to Fight Anti-Semitism and The New Seven Words.
In honor of the event, I thought it worthwhile to collect a whole bunch of articles by and about Mamet, including his 2008 Village Voice article “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’”; which, based on all that he has become since, would be better titled “Why I Am Now a ‘Brain-Dead Trumpscum’”!
I chose a recent article from The Forward because it calls Mamet the “Kanye West of American Letters,” as well as a wide-ranging Trumpscum interview from The Guardian, which leads back to a 2011 Bari Weiss WSJ piece that dovetails well with a set of four enthusiastic articles from Breitbart that emphasize Mamet’s Porn fetish.
Send the book to Clarence Thomas!
In closing, I would still like to recommend Mamet’s two true masterpieces, “State and Main” and “Glengarry Glen Ross”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_and_Main
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glengarry_Glen_Ross_(film)
The former is one of the greatest Hollywood satires ever made, while the latter is a horrifying portrayal of a real estate sales office that, in a now-ironic way, speaks to the cut-throat Trump “You’re Fired” culture and its nihilistic inhumanity, which Mamet so proudly supports.
Both films are indictments of what Mamet has now become, as they critique the inhumanity and incivility of Trump and his criminal cabal with a strong dose of humor and empathy.
And that is a perfect way for the Brain-Dead Neo-Cons, Mamet and Weiss, to come together in celebration of the Antinomian values of The Tikvah Fund under the banner of White Jewish Supremacy. I only wish Bret Stephens was participating.
David Shasha
Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American letters
By: Jackson Arn
I should have known.
It took five weeks and two follow-up emails for the usually reliable Harper Collins publicity department to mail me a copy of David Mamet’s new essay collection, “Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch.”
At first, I thought this was an honest mistake, but now that I’ve read the book, I wonder if someone had been instructed to deal with critics in slow motion. If so, it was a smart move. Each day of delay means one extra day free from scathing reviews, one extra day for Mamet fans to order their copies, unaware that the author of “Glengarry Glen Ross” has gone full free-market, anti-mask MAGAhead — and, even more appallingly, thinks that “Our F’ing Town” is the greatest American play.
Of course, it’s possible that this was all just an honest mistake. But David Mamet doesn’t believe in honest mistakes, just conspiracies — so why shouldn’t I indulge in some harmless conspiracy-theorizing myself?
Mamet’s conspiracy theories aren’t exactly harm¬ful (the only two kinds of people who’ll finish this book are those who already agree with it and those who’ve been paid to review it), but they’re often breathtakingly stupid. David Mamet believes mask mandates were designed to train Americans to obey government tyranny. David Mamet believes college graduates know they’ll never have to pay off their student loans, because the Democrats will cancel them first. David Mamet believes he has been “blacklisted” for his conservative political views and explains his blacklisting in the book he’s just published with Harper Collins. He claims he’s “sworn off the news,” which might be a roundabout way of admitting that “Fox News” is a misnomer.
People, even icons of Broadway and Hollywood, tend to drift rightward with age — if you’re a conservative at 25, the saw goes, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative at 40, you have no brain. The political transformation of David Mamet, age 74, culminating in “Recessional,” a book lacking both heart and brains, is something else.
Mamet was never a full-on leftie, but he thrived in a world where left-wing politics were the air everybody breathed, and “American Buffalo,” his Broadway breakthrough, is a scabrous portrait of small-time capitalism that even Trotsky might have clapped for. Thirty years later, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, he defended CEO bonuses on the grounds that “it’s none of our goddamned business.” Nowadays he thinks eating gluten-free is a sign of “nascent totalitarianism” and thus very much his goddamned business.
Mamet didn’t drift to the Right, he sprinted. My theory is that the economist Milton Friedman is at least partly to blame. No, really, hear me out. The University of Chicago economics department’s accomplishments include 31 Nobel Prizes, the decline of the postwar welfare state, and the deregulatory policies that led to the Great Recession. Friedman, the most influential UChicago economist and a 1976 Nobel laureate, is probably most famous for making the argument that businesses’ only moral responsibility is to maximize profits — ergo, everything else they do — from CEO bonuses to wrecking the U.S. economy to filthying the environment — is none of our goddamned business.
Whatever the technical merits of his ideas, they caught on with a neocon political establishment happy to rationalize its own greed. Mamet, a Chicago boy himself, cites Friedman quite a few times in “Recessional,” always to show that the free market is an unalloyed good, self-interest is the highest virtue, and progressive taxes are the lowest evil.
“I see life from a different perspective,” he said of his conservative turn, which makes sense if by “different perspective” he means “different tax bracket” — it’s a whole lot harder to paint scabrous portraits of capitalism when you’re a millionaire.
“What am I going to do,” he asked, “go on denouncing capitalism all my life?”
In “Recessional,” Mamet has moved on to denouncing the kinds of liberals who pay $300 to enjoy his plays. Liberals are destroying America, they have a sickly kink for victimhood, they don’t believe in science. He has nothing but contempt for the herd instincts of the American media elite, but there isn’t a single opinion in this book that crosses the Fox/Breitbart party line.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and every dozen pages or so he’ll say something blunt and insightful and pretty much true — e.g., the recent push to censure professors for saying words that sound vaguely like the N-word is a manifestation of white guilt. But then he’ll blow it all on something like, “An insistence on pansexuality has replaced previous injunctions to chastity with an equal vehemence,” which could be the silliest thing written about hookup culture since Tom Wolfe described Charlotte Simmons losing her virginity.
“Recessional” has its share of pleasures, mostly unintentional but pleasures all the same. For someone who thinks liberals are indifferent to facts, Mamet has an adorably flighty relationship with the concept of evidence. He provides multiple footnoted sources, including Thorstein Veblen and Mary McCarthy, for the claim that the university system is bad, but zero for the claim that urban properties “will be found to have been purchased not only by canny observers but by those who engineered the decline [of American society],” which is both a massive tease and a very creative use of the future-perfect tense.
When crafting a hypothetical, Mamet defaults to the traditional “he” rather than the PC “she,” but somebody at Harper Collins (maybe the same somebody who told the publicity department to sandbag me) made him capitalize “Black” — imagining how that Zoom meeting went is almost enough to justify the entire book’s existence. One more: Mamet is shocked by the hypocrisy of Colin Kaepernick, who “loathes the country whose citizens have made him rich and famous.” As my uncle likes to say, the thing that most bothers you about other people is usually the thing that’s most wrong about you.
Mamet’s favorite trick is to psychoanalyze people he dislikes (lefties don’t want to grow up, fans of “12 Years A Slave” secretly want to celebrate Black inferiority, etc.), so allow me to do him the same favor. It’s painfully easy.
Mamet got famous by breaking taboos, stuffing his plays with curse words as a sausage casing is stuffed with ground meat. That was decades ago. What was once taboo is now tame as a golden retriever. Like his fellow Chicagoan Kanye West, he needed new rules to break and, finding few, turned to Trump. In doing so, he made plain what his fans knew all along: there was always something aspirational about his macho egomaniac characters; “always be closing” was as much a manifesto as it was a satire.
I should add that “Recessional” shouldn’t be canceled or banned or dropped — that would only encourage him to write a sequel, which somebody will definitely publish, and I for one hope that Mamet has a few more good plays left in him. Unlikely, judging from this book, but stranger things have happened. And what’s he going to do otherwise — go on denouncing the Dems for the rest of his life?
Jackson Arn is the Forward’s contributing art critic.
From The Forward, April 4, 2022
‘Trump did a great job as president’ – David Mamet on free speech, gender politics and rigged elections
By: Arifa Akbar
‘I have no idea how to work these machines,” says David Mamet, trying to get himself on to Zoom. He has managed to log on but is just a disembodied voice. “It’s like those old movies where they have one of the first telephones and the grumpy old guy doesn’t know how to make it work.”
Mamet is far from a grump, though he is now 74. His tone is baritone deep, bouncy, surprisingly Tigger-ish. He fiddles with his laptop but quickly concedes defeat with regards to us speaking face to face, saying: “Look, I can give you a description. I’m not that interesting anyway.” The writer is at home in Santa Monica, California, where it’s 72 degrees outside. He is sipping tea. There are occasional interjections from others who are ushered away politely with the words: “I’m speaking to the Guardian.”
Dialogue in Mamet’s plays is generally staccato, gum-chewing hard talk but his own conversational style is bubbly and loquacious, at times taking on an unstoppable, locomotive energy. He jokes about Shakespeare (“Another Jew – his real name was Velvel Shaperstein, did you know that?”) and describes the latest batch of cartoons he has been drawing. They sound funny, I say. “I’ll send you some,” he replies, and a parcel arrives some days later with a cartoon of “Madame de Sade” and a punning S&M punchline, another one with a cute Jean-Paul Sartre joke, and a copy of the book he has ghostwritten for the adult-film veteran Priscilla Wriston-Ranger, The Diary of a Porn Star.
Sex and sexual politics have long featured in Mamet’s work. He has an immense, omnivorous oeuvre, from Hollywood hits to Broadway smashes as well as novels, children’s stories, essays, articles and cartoons. Theatre was where he started and we are Zooming to discuss The Woods, a two-person play that serves as a prime example of the Venus-and-Mars-like gender dynamics in Mamet’s fiction. It premiered in 1977, starring Patti LuPone and Peter Weller, with a 29-year-old Mamet directing, and will be revived at the Southwark Playhouse in London this month.
The two characters, Ruth and Nick, are in a remote rural cabin and the drama goes from woozy repartee on desire, biology and commitment to point-scoring and then something much worse. It could be seen to follow on from Mamet’s 1974 drama Sexual Perversity in Chicago (later adapted into the film About Last Night, starring Rob Lowe and Demi Moore), about a couple embroiled in an emotional tug-of-war after realising they want different things from the relationship. Was The Woods intended to continue that conversation?
Mamet, never one to explain his work, takes a step back and talks about the place of men and women. It is clear that sexual differences for him are grounded by biological absolutes and polarities. Nick and Ruth, he suggests, are re-evaluating sexual desire and destiny in an era newly liberated by the pill: “The feminists come in and say, ‘Yes, we’re in charge of our own bodies. We don’t have to get married to have sex.’ So the boys – and I was one of them – say, ‘OK, fine by me.’” This, he says, created the illusion that sex comes at no cost. “But sex is never at no cost to anybody, specifically not at no cost to women because, just as men have a biology necessity to have sex, women have a biological urge – whether they give in to it or not – to have babies.”
So Ruth and Nick in 1977 is where we are now? No, he replies, we are even more confused. “We say, ‘We don’t have to get married to have sex.’ Then we say, ‘Actually, we don’t have to get married at all. Anybody can have babies.’ So people are walking around impossibly confused about what is a man, what is a woman, who can have babies, blah blah blah. This is a very unhealthy situation. Like most unhealthy situations, it presents itself as a solution but it’s not.”
The locomotive hurtles on as Mamet talks about law, morality, the decline of western civilisation and religion, giving answers that are treatise-like and opaque. But bring him on to the art of writing and his early life in Chicago, and he becomes bouncy again, full of memories that are vivid and vigorous. “Playwriting is a job for the young. It’s a huge expense of energy and exuberance. It’s a magnificent release to write these plays – and I got to not only write them but do them. If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.”
When Mamet first staged The Woods, he and the actor William H Macy were running their own theatre company, St Nicholas, from an abandoned dairy rented for “around 200 bucks a month”. Mamet often doubled up in day jobs as a cab-driver, window-cleaner or telephone carpet salesman. Did he develop his ear for dialogue – its demotic rhythms, pace and profanities – then? No, it was far earlier, in his Jewish-American family household: “We’re very oral people, the Jews. That’s what we do. We love ambiguity. And it wasn’t that I was listening on purpose. I just got a kick out of listening.”
His mother, a teacher, and his father, a lawyer, split up when he was 11. They were not theatre lovers but the young Mamet got some early exposure through his uncle, who was the director of radio and television for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. “It meant putting on what they called The God Ghetto at seven o’clock on Sunday morning. He needed actors so my sister and I were in these shows.”
There was also Chicago’s Goodman theatre which, in those days, he thinks was “bullshit – it imported second-rate New York productions of The House of Bernarda Alba. Who cares? So that was the theatre I grew up with. I looked around and thought, ‘This is garbage. I don’t get it.’” It all changed when, working as a bus-boy while at school, he encountered The Second City, a now renowned troupe whose actors he’d watch doing improv. Then he started reading Chekhov. “There’s no plot in these plays but you don’t mind because they’re brilliant. That, to me, is what theatre should be.”
Mamet dedicated his 1984 Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross to Harold Pinter, another Jewish-born playwright with a sharp ear for vernacular. This was because Pinter was instrumental in bringing the play into being. “I did a reading [of it] in my kitchen and everyone said, ‘It doesn’t work. Don’t worry, we’ll do another one.’ We had the greatest actors in New York and a wonderful director – and it just fell flat. So I sent it to Harold. I said, ‘Harold, I’ve never done this in my life. I’ve never asked anybody for advice. But what’s wrong with this play?’ He wrote back and said, ‘Nothing. It just needs a production.’” Pinter added that he’d given it to the great director Bill Bryden and it was going to be staged at the National Theatre.
Mamet’s writing credits range from acclaimed films such as The Untouchables and The Postman Always Rings Twice to the Tony-nominated plays Speed-the-Plow and Glengarry Glen Ross. What have been his highlights? “When you look back, you think, ‘Jeez, I can’t believe I came up with that gag.’ Or, ‘Jeez, I can’t believe I was there when so-and-so did that on stage.’ That’s the stuff that you remember. All those awards and stuff are just plastercast. Big deal.” Does he ever feel the desire to rework anything? “I always want to fix my movies but I never want to fix the plays. I don’t know why.” Which ones? “Oh, I’m not going to tell you.”
He does not go back to see his plays revived either. So he didn’t catch Lucy Bailey’s recent, feted production of Oleanna, arguably his most controversial play, which is about political correctness, a university professor and an aggrieved student. The drama sparked stand-up rows in auditoriums in 1992. He hasn’t seen it since that New York premiere, which starred Macy opposite Mamet’s wife, Rebecca Pidgeon. But he agrees with Bailey’s view that there is as much a threat to free speech today as there was then. He has, he says, only just written a book called Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. “I’ll send it to you,” he says and it arrives electronically the following day. Does he think universities are places where we cannot talk freely? “I know they aren’t. Of course they aren’t.”
In 2019, he staged Bitter Wheat, a black farce inspired by the Harvey Weinstein scandal that starred John Malkovich. It came soon after the #MeToo watershed. Was he a little frightened to go there? “I didn’t find it frightening. That’s the terrible thing about the death of free speech. You do a play because there’s something so thrilling you’ve got to write it down – or something so unfortunate you’ve got to figure it out. So I wrote the play and I sent it to John and he called back an hour later and said, ‘I read it twice. I’ll do it.’”
It wasn’t just about Weinstein, he says, but the entire movie business, “because the dark secret of the movie business has always been that it was run by men – mainly men – who got into it to get money to get power, and to get power and money to have sex.”
But how can he talk about the death of free speech if he got to put on the play? “I got to do it then – but I can’t do it now. Absolutely not. People have become so frightened that it seems rational to say, ‘I have to take into account this constituency and that constituency.’ So, while you’re taking all those constituencies into account, you just wrote yourself out of the equation.”
On to Mamet’s much-documented swing to conservatism, from his stand against the NFL’s kneeling-during-the-anthem protests to his support for Donald Trump. It seems so far away from the leftist leanings of his youth, the critiques of capitalism clearly visible in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross. “I was never, ever a communist,” he says. “All you need to know about communism is that Marx was a sponger. He lived off Engels’ family who had a furniture factory.”
He was raised as a “red diaper baby”, he adds – meaning his parents were communists – so even to say he is a Republican “sticks in my throat”. But he is a conservative because “I would like to conserve those things I grew up with: the love of family, the love of the country, love of service, love of God, love of community.” And love of the American constitution too. “For those who say the constitution is over 200 years old and can’t still be relevant, I say, ‘Well, what about the Ten Commandments?’ What’s going to rule in its place? Savagery.”
Mamet became a vocal Trump supporter during his presidency, which can’t have been easy in the Democratic stronghold of California. “Well, he did a great job as a president.” Really? “Well, if you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency. We told China to knock it off. We told Nato to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel . . . Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history …”
There was also Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Does Mamet believe America’s democratic process to be flawed too? “It’s an interesting question. I grew up in Chicago, which was run as a mob’s fiefdom by Mayor Richard J Daley. So all elections were rigged. The idea that people are not going to steal elections is ignorance because people steal elections all the time. The question is: ‘What was the extent of the election rigging?’ I don’t know. But was it questionable? Yes.”
From The Guardian (UK), February 24, 2022
David Mamet's Coming Out Party
By: Bari Weiss
In March 2008, David Mamet was outed in the Village Voice. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright had a comedy about an American president running on Broadway, and—perhaps to help with ticket sales—decided to write an article about the election season. The headline was subtle: "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal.'"
"They mistitled it," he insists. Mr. Mamet had given the piece the far more staid title, "Political Civility." But the Voice's headline was truth in advertising. "I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind," Mr. Mamet wrote, referring to his prior self as, yes, a "brain-dead liberal."
The article was the most popular ever published on the Voice's website. But was the acclaimed Mr. Mamet really a conservative?
For a few years, he played it coy. In a 2008 interview with New York Magazine, he sloughed off a question about who he was voting for: "I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer." In 2010, he told PBS's Charlie Rose he'd only offer his opinion about President Obama off-camera.
But spend five minutes with Mr. Mamet and you realize that coy can only last so long. "Being a rather pugnacious sort of fellow I thought, as Albert Finney says in 'Two for the Road': 'As I said to the duchess, 'If you want to be a duchess, be a duchess. If you want to make love, it's hats off.'"
Hats off, indeed. Now Mr. Mamet has written a book-length, raucous coming-out party: "The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture." (If only the Voice editors had been around to supply a snappier title.)
Hear him take on the left's sacred cows. Diversity is a "commodity." College is nothing more than "Socialist Camp." Liberalism is like roulette addiction. Toyota's Prius, he tells me, is an "anti-chick magnet" and "ugly as a dogcatcher's butt." Hollywood liberals—his former crowd—once embraced Communism "because they hadn't invented Pilates yet." Oh, and good radio isn't NPR ("National Palestinian Radio") but Dennis Prager, Michael Medved and Hugh Hewitt.
The book is blunt, at times funny, and often over the top. When I meet the apostate in a loft in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, he's wrapping up a production meeting. "Bye, bye, Bette!" he calls to the actress walking toward the elevator. That'd be Bette Midler. Al Pacino gets a bear hug. The two are starring in an upcoming HBO film about Phil Spector's murder trial. Mr. Mamet is directing and he looks the part in a scarf, black beret and round yellow-framed glasses. Looking out the window at NYU film school, where he used to teach, I ask him to tell me his conversion story.
He starts, naturally, with the most famous political convert in modern American history: Whittaker Chambers, whose 1952 book, "Witness," documented his turn from Communism. "I read it. It was miraculous. Extraordinary hero-journey of this fellow that had to examine everything he believed in at the great, great cost—which is a cost I'm not subject to—of abandoning his life, his sustenance, his friends, his associations, and his past. And I said, 'Oh my God. . . . Perhaps it might be incumbent upon me to see if I could get my thought and my actions into line too."
There were other books. Most were given to him by his rabbi in L.A., Mordecai Finley. Mr. Mamet rattles off the works that affected him most: "White Guilt" by Shelby Steele, "Ethnic America" by Thomas Sowell, "The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War" by Wilfred Trotter, "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek, "Capitalism and Freedom" by Milton Friedman, and "On Liberty" by John Stuart Mill.
Before he moved to California, Mr. Mamet had never met a self-described conservative or read one's writings. He'd never heard of Messrs. Sowell or Steele. "No one on the left has," he tells me. "I realized I lived in this bubble."
When it popped, it was rough. "I did what I thought was, if not a legitimate, then at least a usual, thing—I took it out on those around me," Mr. Mamet says wryly. It took "a long, long, long time and a lot of difficult thinking first to analyze, then change, some of my ideas."
Then comes one of Mr. Mamet's many Hollywood fables. "It's like Orson Welles," he begins.
"It's his first day on the set of Citizen Kane, and he's never directed a movie, he's the greatest stage director of his time. Gregg Toland is his cinematographer, and Toland's the greatest cinematographer of his day. And Orson says, 'Ok, this next shot we're gonna put the camera over here. And Gregg says, 'You can't put the camera there, Orson.' So Orson says, 'Well why not? The director can put it wherever.' Gregg says, 'No. Because you're crossing the line.' So Orson says, 'What does it mean crossing the line? So Gregg explains to him that there's a line of action." (Mr. Mamet attempts to demonstrate the principle to me by indicating the line of sight between our noses.)
"Orson says, 'I don't understand.'" (Neither did I.) "So Gregg explains it again. And Orson says, 'I still don't understand'—'cause sometimes it can get very, very complicated. So Orson says, 'Stop! Stop filming! I have to go home.' He went home and he stayed up all night with sheets of paper and a ruler and he came back next day and said: 'Now I understand, now we can go on.'"
And so it was with Mr. Mamet and politics. He couldn't move on, so to speak, before he understood "what the nature of government is, just sufficient so that I as a citizen can actually vote without being a member of a herd." Same for taxes: "I pay them, so I think I should be responsible for what actually happens to them." As for the history of the country itself, he wanted to understand "the vision of the Founding Fathers. . . . How does holding to it keep people safe and prosperous?"
Reading and reflecting got him to some basics. Real diversity is intellectual. Whatever its flaws, America is the greatest country in the history of the world. The free market always solves problems better than government. It's the job of the state to be just, not to render social justice. And, most sobering, Mr. Mamet writes in "The Secret Knowledge," there are no perfect solutions to inequality, only trade-offs.
It's a wonder he didn't explicitly adopt this tragic view of reality earlier on. The play "Glengarry Glen Ross," for example, for which Mr. Mamet won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, is about a group of desperate men competing with each other in a Chicago real estate office. At stake: a Cadillac for the top seller. Second place: a set of steak knives. Third prize: you're fired.
Needless to say, no one ends up getting the Caddie. "That's the essence of drama," Mr. Mamet says. "Anyone can write: And then we realized that Lithuanians are people too and we're all happier now. Who cares?" Tragedy is devastating, he says, precisely because it's about "people trying to do the best they can and ending up destroying each other.
"So it wasn't a great shift to adopt the tragic view, and it's much healthier," he says. "Rather than saying, as the liberals do, 'Everything's always wrong, there's nothing that's not wrong, there's something bad bad bad—there's a bad thing in the world and it's probably called the Jews,'" he says sardonically. "And if it's not called the Jews for the moment, it's their fiendish slave second-hand smoke. Or transfats. Or global warming. Or the Y2K. Or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. And something must be done!'"
It's the last part—the temptation to believe that everything can be fixed—that Mr. Mamet thinks is the fatal error. "That's such a f— bore," he says. "I mean, have you ever tried to get a pipe fixed in your bathroom on a Saturday? It's not going to happen. It's gonna happen wrong, and the guy's gonna be late because his dog got run over, and he's going to fix the wrong pipe, and when he takes it apart he's gonna say, 'Oops, the whole plumbing system's gonna have to go and dah dah dah and etc. etc. etc. And your daughter's Bat Mitzvah's gonna be ruined. It's interesting—it's the tragic view of life."
As Mr. Mamet quotes his son, Noah, in "The Secret Knowledge," "it's the difference between the Heavenly Dream and the God-Awful Reality."
On the left, Mr. Mamet is accused of having ulterior motives for his political shift. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait writes that the story is a familiar, Zionist one: "An increasingly religious Jew with strong loyalty to Israel, he became aware of a tension between the illiberal nationalism of his right-wing views on the Middle East and the liberalism of his views on everything else, and resolved the tension by abandoning the latter." Mr. Mamet calls this a "crock of s—."
The Slate website has run with the "Rich Person Discovers He Is a Republican" narrative. And then there's the jiu-jitsu theory offered by a film blogger: "Mamet's escalating interest in martial arts—traditionally the domain of right-wing nutjobs like Chuck Norris—has pointed toward this new stance for some time." Obviously.
None of these responses comes as a surprise. And, being a contrarian and a dramatist, Mr. Mamet doubtless relishes the attention for his heresy. What will be more interesting is to see how critics respond to his two new plays.
The first, playing now in Manhattan, is called "The Linguistics Class." Only 10 minutes long, it's part of a festival of 25 short plays at the Atlantic Theater Company, running alongside works by Ethan Coen and Sam Shepard. It's a coming home for Mr. Mamet: He founded the company with his friend, the actor William H. Macey, 25 years ago.
The play is about a teacher and a student who don't see eye to eye, and Mr. Mamet assures me "it has nothing to do with Noam Chomsky."
"The Anarchist," on the other hand, sounds like it will be red meat for conservatives. The two-woman show, which opens this fall in London, is about a prisoner, a former member of a Weather Underground-type group, and her parole officer. The play's themes have been developing since Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Mamet was in Toronto that day for a film festival. "I read an article, I think it was in that day's Toronto Star, that had been a reprint from the Chicago Tribune," he says. It was an interview with Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dorne, two former leaders of the Weather Underground. "They were talking about the bombings in the '60s. And the guy says to Bill Ayers: 'Are you regretful?' And he said: 'No, no, no.' . . . And I read it, and I thought, this is appalling and immoral," recalls Mr. Mamet.
"Then I got on a plane. And while I was on the plane they blew up New York City. The combination of the two things just started me thinking what have we—meaning my generation—done?" Mr. Mamet knows these characters intimately. They went to school with him at Goddard College in Vermont, or they passed through. "Some of the people I knew actually were involved in blowing up the building on 11th Street [in Manhattan by members of the Weather Underground in 1970]. . . . And I thought: how does this happen?"
Is it a coincidence that this play is arriving at the same time as Mr. Mamet's public conservatism? Does he worry that critics will see it as polemical? "I don't know," he contends, insistent that his job as a writer is not to worry about politics but to entertain and surprise his audience. "The question is can you put the asses in the seats and can you keep the asses in the seats. That's not me, that's Aristotle. I've forgotten the Greek for it."
Ms. Weiss is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal. A review of Mr. Mamet's book, "The Secret Knowledge," can be found on page C13 in today's Review section.
From The Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2011
Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'
By: David Mamet
John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, “When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?”
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.
Twentieth century’s greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.
When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.
Every playwright’s dream.
I once won one of Mary Ann Madden’s “Competitions” in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a “10” of anything, and mine was the World’s Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: “I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I’ve ever written. When you read this I’ll be dead.” That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.
My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year’s subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann’s “Competition”) I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.
But I digress.
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 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.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
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.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
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. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
Do I speak as a member of the “privileged class”? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?
I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.
The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.
Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.
See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.
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, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.
White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I’ve ever read about the presidency. It’s called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.
White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he’d seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they’re always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: ” . . . and yet . . . “
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.
From The Village Voice, March 11, 2008
Exclusive -- David Mamet: Trump Is a 'Great President,' Left's Reaction Has Been 'Psychotic'
By: David Ng
The acclaimed playwright and screenwriter David Mamet told Breitbart News on Thursday that he thinks Donald Trump is a “great president,” while liberal reaction to his presidency has been “psychotic.”
David Mamet’s body of work includes the seminal plays Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, and American Buffalo. Mamet has two new works out, including a book titled The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger.
He spoke with Breitbart News’ editor-in-chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot 125. The conversation covered Mamet’s career, his intellectual inspirations, and his take on President Trump.
“The reaction to Trump to me is fascinating,” Mamet said. “And one day I started looking at it and squinted my eyes. If you take a Freudian analytical concept, turn it inside out — flip cause and effect and see if the dream makes sense. So if we flip cause and effect, the reaction to Trump — which is psychotic — is equal I believe hydraulically to the reaction to a charismatic leader.”
Mamet equated liberal hysteria over President Trump to the same destructive energy that propelled Adolf Hitler to power.
“The same people growing up right after World War II, you say, ‘Wait a second. How in the world could civilized people say that this little wizened Austrian psychopath was a messiah?’ It’s insane,” he said.
“So the same force that, God forbid, would be devoted here to the adoration of a lunatic is devoted in the anti-Trump psychosis to the excoriation of a regular human being and, I think, a great president.”
Mamet made waves in the entertainment industry in 2008 by writing an essay for The Village Voice that ran with the headline: “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'”
Mamet told Breitbart News that the article’s title was concocted by Voice editors as a “scare hed” and that it didn’t capture the essay’s themes of political civility. But “the die was cast,” he said. “I found out who my friends were. There’s a couple of them left.”
The writer detailed his political conversion in more detail in his 2011 book The Secret Knowledge.
Aside from his new book The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger, Mamet’s new play The Christopher Boy’s Communion, starring William H. Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon, is scheduled to begin performances February 13 for a brief run at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles.
From Breitbart News, January 23, 2020
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Legendary Playwright David Mamet Satirizes Stormy Daniels Saga with 'The Diary of a Porn Star'
By: Jerome Hudson
Legendary playwright and screenwriter David Mamet joined Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot 125 on Thursday to talk about his new book titled The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger.
“The book is a joke and Priscilla is brilliant in the way that like most people that you meet who are the most interesting people in life who are autodidacts and ne’er-do-wells who make something of themselves,” Mamet said about the main character of his book, Miss Wriston-Ranger (or Leafy, the first person narrator of her own life, as we come to know her), who was loosely inspired, Mamet says, by the absurdity of the whole Stormy Daniels news saga.
“I would suppose, if you’re a porn star, there’s really nothing that has to do with the very limited number of ways people can do things to each other with their bodies that’s going to interest you. So the question was, what interests her? So I said, what interests her is what interests me. I’m going to imagine myself into these situations,” Mamet explained.
Mamet was sure to note that “there’s absolutely nothing pornographic or obscene in the book.”
“I always wanted to write a false interview, it’s very, very freeing. When the whole Stormy Daniels thing was coming down I was, as much of the country, intrigued,” he said about what, in some ways, inspired the character Miss Wriston-Ranger. “Because it was the intersection of so many different flavors — individual cupidity and perversity, our curiosity about sex. And I thought ‘well, wouldn’t that be fun?'”
“But then, from having had some experience, I worked for Playboy for a year. I found that the people who were really involved with merchandising sex, it’s the most un-aphrodisiac thing in the world,” Mamet said. “So I thought what would this porn star do in her off hours? And so it started out where she was rejected by Annapolis (U.S. Naval Academy). And then she went into the Forest Service. And then this guy hires her as his personal consultant to have sex with him. But he’s so bored because he’s a multi, mutli mega-billionaire. So he says, okay, we’re only going to do it at the South Magnetic Pole. So it’s that kind of thing.”
“She makes it to Bohemian Grove (‘where no women are allowed’ Alex notes), she dressed as a guy. And that’s where she meets Shimon Peres (former President of Israel) and he takes her trout fishing. And she’s responsible for saving the state of Israel from an attack by Iran. She’s just all over. She was the junior 9-ball champion of Michigan in her youth,” Mamet said. “As you can probably tell, I just had such fun imagining this most interesting of characters.”
In his interview with Breitbart, Mamet also declared President Donald Trump a “great” president and spoke to the “psychotic” reaction on the left to his presidency.
“The reaction to Trump to me is fascinating,” Mamet said. “And one day I started looking at it and squinted my eyes. If you take a Freudian analytical concept, turn it inside out — flip cause and effect and see if the dream makes sense. So if we flip cause and effect, the reaction to Trump — which is psychotic — is equal I believe hydraulically to the reaction to a charismatic leader.”
David Mamet’s iconic plays also include Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleanna, and American Buffalo.
From Breitbart News, January 24, 2020
David Mamet Calls Out 'Experts' and Questions Lockdowns: 'The Virus Here Is Government'
By: David Ng
Acclaimed playwright David Mamet has added his distinctive voice to the growing chorus of dissenters who are questioning the effectiveness of government-mandated masks and lockdowns to combat the coronavirus.
In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, the Glengarry Glen Ross playwright slams the so-called “experts” and advisers whose counsel has led to the destruction of large swaths of the U.S. economy. These people will likely never pay the price for their errors, but everyone else will, he noted.
“The virus here is government—or at least the incompetents who advise our rulers and cannot admit the legitimacy of dissension. Absent intervention, this virus may eventually kill the host organism,” Mamet wrote.
Those closest to the boss will have the most influence—and they often keep it, even in failure, writes David Mamet https://t.co/i9OVqCbQvQ
— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) November 28, 2020
“We all have to trust others for their expertise, and we all make mistakes. The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes, but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.”
The playwright noted that experts have issued contradictory messages about the effectiveness of masks, citing the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine that published an article saying masks are useless outside health-care facilities, only to issue a quasi-retraction.
He also cited the example of a friend who owns a restaurant and is going broke. “One is ‘permitted’ to sit at his tables and eat without a mask. Indeed, how would one eat while wearing one? Does the virus know that one is sitting down?”
David Mamet compares today’s coronavirus advisers to failed advisers of the past, citing the case of Prof. Frederick Lindemann, a confidant to Winston Churchill. During World War II, Lindemann downplayed the idea that the Germans were developing a rocket capable of bombing London, which became the V-2. He was wrong, but never paid a professional price for his mistake.
Mamet also cites Joseph Stalin’s science adviser, Trofim Lysenko, who came up with the idea of training crops to grow in winter. It was a disaster that contributed to mass starvation in communist Russia and China.
The playwright even brings up the debate around climate change. “Now we have climate change and its attendant alarmists,” he added. “The news media, backed by those parts of the ‘scientific community’ the media chose to honor, presented this analysis as though it were indisputable fact. In fact, it was riddled with problems.”
Today, millions of people face economic ruin as a result of the coronavirus and the policies crafted by experts who are advising the government, he wrote.
“A pandemic was allowed to destroy the American economy. Tens of millions are driven out of work, cover their faces, and walk down the streets in fear of their neighbors.”
From Breitbart News, December 1, 2020
Exclusive -- David Mamet Warns Americans Are Giving Up Their Rights Under Coronavirus Lockdowns: 'We've Forgotten the Constitution'
By: David Ng
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter David Mamet is warning Americans that they are giving up their Constitutional rights under coronavirus lockdowns, saying that questioning government authorities needs to remain a vital part of the country’s democratic tradition.
In an interview with Breitbart News’ editor-in-chief Alex Marlow on Breitbart News Daily on Sirius XM Patriot 125, David Mamet blasted the shut-down and stay-at-home orders that have once again taken effect in many states, leading to widespread economic devastation.
“It just doesn’t make any sense. It’s the first time in history that an entire economy has been shut down because of an infection,” he said during Wednesday’s broadcast. “And obviously everyone gets to pick his or her own experts and say whom they believe in. But that’s what you’re supposed to do with your health, right? We’re supposed to make our own decisions about our health.”
Mamet, author of The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger: As Told to David Mamet with an Afterword by Mr. Mamet, said feminists have long argued that women have the right to make choices about their bodies. “Now that can be argued either way, just as the virus can be argued either way. But the argument and the terms under which we undertake it are the essence of American democracy.”
During the interview, Mamet made the provocative claim that the west is in effect killing itself by submitting to fear.
“What we’re seeing is a populace that’s gone nuts and I’ve got a new book coming out called Journal of the Plague Year where I try to reason my way through the way that the west is committing suicide,” he said. “What we’re doing to commit suicide is we’ve forgotten the Constitution.”
He added: “Basically, we human beings have the capacity to be sheep. If we don’t believe in God and if we don’t believe in our country, we’re going to believe in any mumbo jumbo that comes along. And by the time we look around, it’s too late.”
Mamet recently penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he blasted the so-called “experts” whose often dubious advice has led to financial ruin for millions of Americans during the pandemic. In the article, he said experts who turn out to be wrong face few if any professional consequences while millions of people suffer as a result.
The Glengarry Glen Ross playwright told Breitbart News that the coronavirus has enabled the government to empower the bureaucratic class to make decisions about how we live our lives.
“You don’t want to put the woman behind the counter at the auto registry in charge of your life. And that’s what we’ve done,” he said.
Those people often turn out to be hypocrites, as is the case with California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who were both caught not wearing masks in violation of the coronavirus restrictions that they support.
“Of course they’re whores and hypocrites, fools, thieves, and thugs, as are almost all politicians,” Mamet said. “They don’t think it’s going to kill them. Because if they actually thought it was going to kill them, they’d be wearing the masks however protected they are. So for whatever reason, there’s a herd mentality to wear the masks, and there’s a herd understanding that to the largest extent, it’s a bunch of nonsense.”
Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow also asked Mamet about some of his recent projects, including an online masterclass, which the playwright said he enjoyed doing despite initial resistance. He said non-traditional learning provides an attractive alternative to colleges and universities, which have been overtaken by left-wing ideologues.
“The colleges have been dead for decades. There’s no reason to go to college,” he said. “You used to say there’s no reason to go to college unless you want to study medicine or law. But medicine and law have now been corrupted by the left. And I’m sure that they now have ‘socially justice-ly’ friendly engineering.”
He added: “I’ve taught at a lot of colleges. I’ve seen it from the inside out. As far as liberal arts goes, they’re not only a joke, they’re a complete scam.”
For aspiring writers, his advice is simple: disconnect and write.
“Get your devices and make sure they’re all updated. And lock them where you can’t get to them. Go someplace else, sit in a park, take a piece of paper and a pencil, and go fucking nuts.”
From Breitbart News, December 17, 2020