Writer and director David Mamet has done some brilliant work over the years. He's the playwrite/screenwriter behind one of my favorite films, 1992's Glengarry Glen Ross. Even some of his lesser efforts, such as Spartan (from 2004) haven't been bad films. Now he's written something ... an essay for the Village Voice ... that might be his best work yet!

What follows are a few favorite selections from Mamet's essay, entitled Why I Am No Longer A Brain-Dead Liberal:

Here, Mamet writes about an instance when he became aware that he'd left liberalism behind as he and his wife listened to NPR in their car:

" 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."

On abandoning the principle liberal conceit:

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.

I think my favorite passage in the whole essay is when Mamet mentions some of the writers who've influenced his thinking as of late ... and he calls Thomas Sowell "our greatest contemporary philosopher." YES! As a blogger who's refered to Sowell as "the smartest commentator on America today" and as "America's greatest living thinker," I literally laughed with delight at that line. Sowell is a genius; his work infinitely readable, enjoyable and enlightening. If more people read him we'd have far fewer "brain dead liberals" in the world today.

PS - I've always assumed that Mamet had a bit of a conservative streak, given his participation in the writing of Wag The Dog, easily the sharpest piece of satire to lampoon the Clinton administration that I've ever seen:

Hoffman: This President will be a hero. He brought peace.

De Niro: But there hasn't been a war!

Hoffman: All the greater accomplishment.

Labels: Entertainment, Politics