The oft-noted correlation between voting Republican and church attendance does have at least one parallel in the Jewish community. At a certain point in the life of many thoughtful but pugnacious male Jews who are not quite fully secularized, there seems to come a time when financial success, reflexive support for Israel, and the general realization that younger people in particular don’t give a damn what they’re thinking, winds up causing them to forget their lean and hungry days, forget that, without a counterbalance of some kind, corporations will run wild, and switch sides (all the while proclaiming a certain independence). This is always done best when the country is moving in the other direction — we male Jews are a contrary breed.
And so, while Dems and liberals may be gaining a country, we have apparently lost David Mamet who stopped being a self-described “brain dead liberal” to become what sounds to me like an equally “brain dead” moderate conservative (with neocon tendencies perhaps…”National Palestinian Radio”?…give me a break), who apparently relieves believes that Bush is no worse than JFK, this week anyway. Just because you’re switching sides doesn’t necessarily mean you’re “brain alive” or whatever the correct term is. What I really think is going on here is that Mamet is, like most of us I suppose, continuing a lifelong habit of simply shutting out certain information. Sometimes, changing your tune can be fun and can, at least, create the illusion of growth, and so some of us like to change to do just that.
And so it was with Paddy Chayefsky, who had he lived long enough might have come out the other end as a true believing Bush-hater, if nothing else. And who knows what was going on in Bob Dylan’s head when he briefly really switched sides and became a born-again Christian and then returned to a brand of Judaism probably not much different than Mamet’s. These change do seem to be associated with a certain degree of religiosity; truly secular Jews seem to be more immune to these ideological and philosophical shifts. I doubt Woody Allen, say, will ever be hanging with the Podhoretzim.
So, I’m not that surprised. I’m a huge admirer of Mamet’s work, but one of the things I actually find intriguing about his writing is a certain level of callousness that’s always made me slightly skeptical, as Mamet says his wife (Rebecca Pigeon) has been for some time, of just how liberal he is. I mean, to me the only really shocking thing in his piece was this:
As a child of the ’60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
If you’ve seen Mamet’s plays and movies (other than his terrific film version of Terrance Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy, which is almost Aaron Sorkian in its level of idealization) this is a little weird. But, he often seems to almost side against weaker, sweeter characters. Think of the torture endured by Shelley “The Machine” Levene in Glengarry Glen Ross. I’m not saying that Mamet necessarily sides with Blake, the rhetorical hitman played by Alec Baldwin, but he does seem to have a marked preference for the sole “winner” of the piece, Ricky Roma, though he allows Ricky a soft spot for the loser of the piece — but how much of that is because Shelley, too, was once a winner?
In any case, I’ve never really understood the assumption that liberals view humans as essentially good and conservatives view them as essentially sinful. It seems to me you can hold either view and still end up just about anywhere on the political spectrum, as long as you felt that we weren’t all evil and that some of us, at least, deserved protection against those who are.
As a self-proclaimed liberal since about age ten or so, I’ve never thought, even for one second, that people were essentially good, or essentially bad. And, in any case, I’ve never seen a connection between either system of thought and those blanket assumptions about humanity.
My personal liberal leanings in the economic spear come, not from an assumption that business is corrupt, but an assumption that corporations are amoral engines designed to make money and grow ever more eternally powerful, requiring government to step in as counterbalance to the oligarchical system it, almost without meaning to, seeks to establish.
Does that mean I assume that government is good? Not one bit — if history proves anything it proves that government can, unchecked, foment humanity’s greatest evils. that’s why I love the checks and balances of our government as much as any true and honest conservative. Government, however, is just the best and only counterbalance against corporations we’ve been able to come up with. As FDR proved — and as I hope it can be proved again if the electorate makes a few correct choices — it can at times be made good enough that it essentially saves the soul of our nation, but it is never perfect, never not seriously flawed or worse. (Internment camps come to mind.) I hope that simply becoming wealthier wouldn’t make me forget that, though I’m sure it’s no fun giving the tax man a lot of your money, perhaps depriving you of the ability to buy that private jet you’ve always wanted. Or maybe just the second or third private jet…or, to be more fair, just to give it to the charity of your choice — which I guess in Mamet’s case won’t include causes that speak up for Palestinians.
People are neither good nor bad. People are valuable, and that is enough. And that’s why I think I’m likely to stay some variation on a “liberal.” If I ever become a “brain dead liberal,” I truly hope it’ll be after the onset of an irreversible coma. “That’s Bob,” my survivors will say, “at last, he is a brain dead liberal. Time to pull the plug.”
H/t David Kurtz.
