David Mamet: the ideological journey of a former "brain-dead liberal"

But for the fact that I am not a famous and wealthy writer-director for stage and screen, who mostly works in iambic-pentameter, David Mamet's story of his ideological awakening could be my own. This is how he describes his initial realization of where his long-established assumptions had been wrong.

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."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it?

Read all about it at the Village Voice, David Mamet, Why I am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

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