I almost titled this post “Glengarry Glenn Beck”, but just didn’t have the heart. \u00a0And it’s really the opposite of the point.<\/p>\n
I adore the movie adaptation of Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. \u00a0I’m afraid it’s the only Mamet that I am familiar with, although I retain a quite favorable impressionof him \u00a0from an interview by Dennis Prager. \u00a0 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”. \u00a0That’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.<\/p>\n
Here’s an embarrassingly long quote from a great article<\/a> at The Weekly Standard, wherein Mamet goes from trying to convert Rabbi Finley to receiving a conversion.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas?<\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThey were highly polemical, angry books,\u201d Finley said. \u201cThey were very big on sympathy and compassion but really they weren\u2019t\u201d\u2014he looked for the word\u2014\u201cthey simply weren\u2019t logically coherent. And Dave is very logical in his thinking. Dave thought\u00a0What\u2019s the Matter with Kansas?<\/em> had the answer for why people could even think to vote for a Republican\u2014it\u2019s because they\u2019re duped by capitalist fat cats. I tried to tell him that people really weren\u2019t that stupid. They just have other interests, other values. They\u2019re values voters.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s one thing he began to see: The left flattens people, reduces people to financial interests. Dave\u2019s an artist. He knew people are deeper than that.\u201d<\/p>\n Before long, when Finley didn\u2019t budge, the books from Mamet stopped arriving, and Finley asked if he could send Mamet some books too. One of the first was\u00a0A\u00a0Conflict of Visions<\/em>, by Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution. In it Sowell expands on the difference between the \u201cconstrained vision\u201d of human nature\u2014close to the tragic view that infuses Mamet\u2019s greatest plays\u2014and the \u201cunconstrained vision\u201d of man\u2019s endless improvement that suffused Mamet\u2019s politics and the politics of his profession and social class.<\/p>\n \u201cHe came back to me stunned. He said, \u2018This is incredible!\u2019 He said, \u2018Who thinks like this? Who are these people?\u2019 I said, \u2018Republicans think like this.\u2019 He said, \u2018Amazing.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n Finley piled it on, from the histories of Paul Johnson to the economics of Milton Friedman to the meditations on race by Shelby Steele.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was haunted by what he discovered in those books, this new way of thinking,\u201d Finley says. \u201cIt followed him around and wouldn\u2019t let him go.\u201d<\/p>\n 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,\u00a0Race<\/em>, to Steele.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, he wasn’t really converted. \u00a0Not really. \u00a0Like 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. \u00a0He then had the good fortune to encounter conservatism well-expressed (Sowell), well-represented (Finley), and well-received. \u00a0And that’s why the awesome pun (if I do say so myself) just didn’t make the cut.<\/p>\n I almost titled this post “Glengarry Glenn Beck”, but just didn’t have the heart. \u00a0And it’s really the opposite of the point.<\/p>\n I adore the movie adaptation of Mamet’s play Glengarry Glen Ross. \u00a0I’m afraid it’s the only Mamet that I am familiar with, although I retain a quite favorable impressionof him \u00a0from an interview by Dennis Prager. \u00a0 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”. \u00a0That’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.<\/p>\n Here’s an embarrassingly long quote from … Continue reading