I almost titled this post “Glengarry Glenn Beck”, but just didn’t have the heart. And it’s really the opposite of the point.
I adore the movie adaptation of Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. I’m afraid it’s the only Mamet that I am familiar with, although I retain a quite favorable impressionof him from an interview by Dennis Prager. That interview is not available online, at least through a cursory search, but I recall that Mamet was still, as the Weekly Standard refers to him in the last decade, in “mid-conversion”. That’s a great time to talk to people, by the way, as they are charged with new ideas, and in no small degree of inner turmoil, which makes for great conversation.
Here’s an embarrassingly long quote from a great article at The Weekly Standard, wherein Mamet goes from trying to convert Rabbi Finley to receiving a conversion.
Still safely with the herd, Mamet undertook to pry his rabbi away from his heretical politics. He began sending Finley books, potboilers of contemporary liberalism like What’s the Matter with Kansas?
“They were highly polemical, angry books,” Finley said. “They were very big on sympathy and compassion but really they weren’t”—he looked for the word—“they simply weren’t logically coherent. And Dave is very logical in his thinking. Dave thought What’s the Matter with Kansas? had the answer for why people could even think to vote for a Republican—it’s because they’re duped by capitalist fat cats. I tried to tell him that people really weren’t that stupid. They just have other interests, other values. They’re values voters.
“That’s one thing he began to see: The left flattens people, reduces people to financial interests. Dave’s an artist. He knew people are deeper than that.”
Before long, when Finley didn’t budge, the books from Mamet stopped arriving, and Finley asked if he could send Mamet some books too. One of the first was A Conflict of Visions, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the “constrained vision” of human nature—close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet’s greatest plays—and the “unconstrained vision” of man’s endless improvement that suffused Mamet’s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.
“He came back to me stunned. He said, ‘This is incredible!’ He said, ‘Who thinks like this? Who are these people?’ I said, ‘Republicans think like this.’ He said, ‘Amazing.’ ”
Finley piled it on, from the histories of Paul Johnson to the economics of Milton Friedman to the meditations on race by Shelby Steele.
“He was haunted by what he discovered in those books, this new way of thinking,” Finley says. “It followed him around and wouldn’t let him go.”
For years Mamet and Finley talked by phone at least once, sometimes twice a day. He became friends with Sowell and Steele, another Hoover Institution fellow. Mamet dedicated his most popular recent play, Race, to Steele.
Of course, he wasn’t really converted. Not really. Like most of those who supposedly convert to conservatism, instead he merely discovered that the values he had always held were not consistent with his politics. He then had the good fortune to encounter conservatism well-expressed (Sowell), well-represented (Finley), and well-received. And that’s why the awesome pun (if I do say so myself) just didn’t make the cut.
Ha! Very clever!