It appears to me that David Mamet has joined the ranks of Dennis miller, Christopher Hitchens and some other downward-spiral once insightful individuals suffering from writer’s block: Go right wing and scribble a guest op-ed about it.

I mean, c’mon. Let’s look at it. Let’s go from Glengarry Glen Ross and The Postman Always Rings Twice, two classic pieces of writing worthy of admiration and study, to Joan of Bark: The Dog that Saved France (currently in production and soon to be straight to video) with lots of crap in between. One wonders exactly when in his writing career this happened. He hates liberal Hollywood now, eh? Did this occur before or after he tried create the Hannibal Lector franchise which likely led to the dip in phone calls his agent must have suffered. I like that the Internet Movie Database entry on this flick reads “This plot synopsis is empty. Add a synopsis.” Why bother? The first sentence said it all.

And The Unit? Sucked. Bad TV. Bad.

So why should this bother me? Well, like tons of stuff that bothers me, it really shouldn’t, actually. Discounting that, it’s because I like the smart writers. I can enjoy a clever writer, and there are far more of these, but I like the smart ones. For some unknown reason David Mamot gets his name on a few lists of smart writers out there and hasn’t been taken off of them in spite of the fact that he didn’t actually die at the top of his game, but has gone on to get old, cliche, and write some incredibly hack stuff that couldn’t even make that aforementioned clever writer list.

But mostly, I’m pissed off for two reasons; first, it’s as a Samuel Beckett devotee. Sooner or later, when people talk about the Beckett legacy, the drop Mamot’s name¹, and say he’s on the road paved by Beckett. This sort of thing gets on my nerves. Mamot had some early flashes of brilliance. Beckett was brilliant throughout. Note the difference. Mamot writes for the market. Beckett wrote for himself and demanded the market accept it or sod off.

Secondly, it might be agreed in some corners that I’m fairly lefty. And I hate it when people toss up stupid bumper sticker tokens to claim their so-called lefty status: “we stopped Vietnam, man.” No, you didn’t. You’re just an ass coasting on fake laurels. So you boogied to some Fleetwood Mac when Bill Clinton won the White House? Did you pay atteyntion when he essentially killed half a million Iraqi children with economic sanctions? Oh, couldn’t hear the news over the voice of your self-rightious ego blathering on, eh? That happens.

Also, I hate the trend of fake conversions to the right going on among the supposedly brilliant. I dub these fake because conversion implies that the subject was previously the opposite of what they are now. I don’t care what these people were calling themselves, they’ve always been what they are, they’ve just not ready to admit to hypocracy. It’s sort of like how Joe Lieberman calls himself a Democrat. He’s not yet fessed up to his true nature. Many other Democratic congress creatures are similar. You can usually spot them in list like U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 107th Congress - 2nd Session On the Joint Resolution (H.J.Res. 114). This one is simple. Where ever you see a Democrat voting “Yea,” cross out the ‘D’ next to her/his name and pencil in an ‘R.’

You can read David spout on about his supposed conversion in the now fake-left NY tabloid, the Village Voice. It’s titled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.” Original, yeah? I now realize who’s been ghost penning screeds for Ann Coulter all this time.

So David Mamet, writer’s block got you down? Hey, switch to the red-baiting crowd that flushed so many writers out of the entertainment business way back when and whose hobbies include vetoing anti-torture resolutions and sparking massacres in South America.

Let’s stop with the fake conversions. You just don’t like paying your taxes. Say it. It’s ok. I’d even admire you for the honesty. The other excuses are just lame. And stop trying to prove how left you really were. You weren’t.

Having been a fan of JFK and NPR doesn’t really get you a lefty pin, Dave. People who list those things along with their stupid hippie-dippy boomer “Woodstock, man!” cred to prove their lefty status should stop talking for a minute and look at how vapid their self-analysis really is. Then they should drink themselves into unconsciousness in order to stop the resulting emotional pain once they realize how pathetic they are.

I love it when he asks, oh so rhetorically, “But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?” Don’t worry dear reader, for the answer follows soon after: “I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to” Great!

This whole “systems don’t function, leave people to themselves, it all just works out” thing doesn’t really qualify as an epiphany. Let’s look at it. Mamet writes:

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.

1. So he learned this in a place that couldn’t be a better example of a “schoolroom teaching values.” Governmet regulation seperates church from state and keeps things like religious indoctrination out of public schools. A significant number of people who consider themselves on “the right” in the U.S. are against this. So, coincidentally are most rabidly fundamentalist theocracies in the world. Welcome to the right, David Mamet.
2. The workplace was marvelous before regulation. Just ask those children who were working in meat plants every day.
3. The marketplace was great before there were food safety standards.
4. The jury room: Does he know what sort of things governments are supposed to create? These don’t happen at the mall.
5. The freeway. Which, of course, would lead everywhere if left to the free market.
6. School-board meetings. Again, the question is asked: Does he know what sort of things governments do and what markets do?

It’s not a transformation. It’s called giving up. I think that’s what the rest of the world did when everyone decided that whole Rwanda thing would just blow over. If you want to develop a callous disregard for the world, do that. Just don’t bore us with some tedious justification that it has to do with getting older, or being disillusioned later in life. What a great time to embrace a system that aims at privatizing social security and dismantle all forms of public health care. Oh, wait, you’re rich!

Instead of going on for five pages of sob story about your weird transformation, why not just jot down “I’ve decided that I’m a selfish prick,” and send that in to the Village Voice. Gets the same point across and you’ll have to admit the writing is much tighter.

So the marketplace was actually your classroom instead of a school? One imagines you first learned how to write, the one skill you have to sell, in a school, not a McDonald’s franchise. But your career shows you honed your talents in the marketplace. Maybe that’s why since Ronin (which we can more or less dub John Frankenheimer’s directorial success as opposed to a strictly scripted one under your “ghost name”) your work has taken a big, fat dive. So long as someone’s paying, you’ll write whatever it is they want as opposed to what you thought up.

What a writer you are! You do the tradition really proud, man. Samuel Beckett would rise from his grave, corner you in an ally and shiv you in the gut if he read this crap and knew people considered you in his artistic lineage. I hate that you even dare to start out this piece of election-year propaganda with a reference to him. I don’t know why Harold Pinter isn’t already kicking your ass.

The term “left” never qualified. Unfortunately, the description “brain dead” may suffice.

P.S. “Wag the Dog” made no damned sense. At least admit to this.

1. this even happens in the commentary segment of the Beckett on Film DVD set [↩]

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