For what it's worth
Last week the Village Voice published David Mamet's quirky "goodbye to all that" essay explaining why he is no longer a brain-dead liberal. Mamet is of course the brilliant playwright who wrote Glengarry Glen Ross, the 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning update of Death of a Salesman. Mamet describes himself in the essay as a decades-long liberal. He recounts a moment of illumination listening to National Public Radio:
I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the **** up.Mamet explains:
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."Mamet doesn't situate this moment in time. Anyone who has followed his career, however, might have deduced that Mamet was guilty of heterodox thoughts at least as far back as 1992's Oleanna, in which he confronted the phenomenon of political correctness. Mamet himself traces his heterodox thoughts to the Year Zero (1968) of the boomer generation.
In his essay Mamet describes his liberalism as an ingrained mental habit intimately bound up with his self-understanding. Leaving it behind must have been wrenching. Thus the anger inspired by the suffocating voice of NPR.
In his Wonder Land column, Daniel Henninger provides a sympathetic take on Mamet's essay. It's a funny column, complete with an allusion to the Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth." Andrew Klavan also comments in a Los Angeles Times column cited by Henninger.
Henninger takes Mamet's public abandonment of liberalism as a leading indicator, foreseeing that "the years ahead likely will bring more Mamet drop-outs." One can hope, but I think this is a misreading. Mamet's rejection of "brain-dead liberalism" is the rebellion of the thinking man against the herd of independent minds. As such, it is less the precursor of a movement than the epiphany of an artist.
