The Fearless, Compelling David MametSometimes apostates see things more clearly than those to the manner born.
by LARRY THORNBERRY
July 2, 2022
Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch
By David Mamet
(Broadside Books, 223 pages, $28.99)
There’s political wisdom, humor, insights into the nature of the human species, and a walk down America’s Memory Lane in David Mamet’s most recent and very readable collection. Recessional, 39 previously published articles, mostly from National Review, is part memoir, part analysis, and part call to action. By turns it’s amusing and depressing as Mamet outlines our deliberate, but we must pray not inevitable, slide from freedom into slavery.
Mamet names names, pinning the tail on all the right donkeys. He calls out the climate hoax, feminism, transgenderism, racialist hustles like CRT, and the many other precincts of leftist humbuggery. He calls them attacks on reality and agents of chaos, a necessary tool of Marxist revolution. And those who don’t believe a Marxist revolution is going on now in America and throughout the West are just not paying attention.
Without being preachy, and eschewing the syllogistic tedium of the op-ed page ideologue, Mamet calls on free-thinking Americans to man up and show a little back-bone before personal freedom is deader than disco. Conservatives should stop apologizing for their beliefs and values. Saying such as, “This may not be politically correct, but…,” Mamet contends, “acknowledges and aids the thought control that the term represents.” The concept of political correctness is, after all nothing more than leftist political and cultural tyranny. This is where free speech dies. And absent free speech, all the other freedoms are doomed.
Mamet, now 74 and professionally a man of the show-biz world, may seem an unlikely voice to help find the key to release us from the current cultural madhouse we’re locked into. He’s a red diaper baby from Chicago. After attending a loopy liberal arts college in Vermont where he majored in sex, drugs, and rock and roll, he went on to become a successful playwright, screenwriter, and movie director. He won a Pulitzer Prize and received Tony nominations for his plays Glengary Glen Ross and Speed-the-Plow. His screenwriting credits include such hit movies as The Verdict, The Untouchables, and Wag the Dog.
For most of Mamet’s career he held the leftist views one would expect from someone of his background and which are required by a Show-Biz Union work rule. But then somewhere around age 60 Mamet was overtaken by clarity, helped along by his reading of such as Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell. In 2008 Mamet declared he was no longer “a brain-dead liberal.” A bit late in life, perhaps, but better that wisdom should come late than never. And those who read Recessional, which I cannot recommend more strongly, will see that the conversion is complete.
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Source:
https://spectator.org/the-fearless-compelling-david-mamet/
