David Mamet says he can’t believe it took him decades to give the conservative perspective so much as a thought.
“It shocked me that there I was, a know-it-all … and there was a whole branch of knowledge I didn’t know existed. I never investigated the claims or the precepts of the other side,” says Mamet, the acclaimed playwright behind “Speed the Plow” and “American Buffalo.” “I know I’m not alone in that regard.”
But Mamet, 63, eventually did open his mind to right-sided philosophies, a process captured in his now infamous 2008 Village Voice column, “Why I am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal.”
Mamet’s new book, “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture,” sprang directly from that fateful assignment.
“I started reading much more after the article. I wrote essays to distill it down and explain to myself the ideas I was reading,” Mamet says, adding he hopes the new book can “change the minds of the fair-minded” regarding the perils of big government and other liberal tenets.
The book reads like an intellectual journey, hop scotching from the personal hypocrisies he once lived to the fatal flaws in a redistributive economic model. He still sounds like David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, but now he’s marrying conservative arguments with his blunt, provocative prose.
“Knowledge” plums Mamet’s Chicago roots and describes conversations he’s had with his children about the real world implications of political thought. He also shares his views on how liberalism squelches free speech, hampers economic growth and imperils the country’s Judeo-Christian culture.
He credits time spent listening to radio talkers Hugh Hewitt, Dennis Prager and Michael Medved for greasing the wheels of his conversion.
No comments:
Post a Comment