David Mamet for President!
Related source » Like shooting fish in a barrel
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“It's like a middle-school baseball team playing the Yankees.”
— Craig Newmark, May 28, 2011 (newmarksdoor.com)
Related source » David Mamet Explains His Shift to the Right
[This related source is recommended in its entirety.]
“[NYT] While reading your new book, “The Secret Knowledge,” I thought, My God, in crucifying liberals, this guy is going to infuriate a huge chunk of the people who pay money to see plays. Are you concerned that you’re alienating your public?
[DM] I’ve been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When “American Buffalo” came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, “How dare he use that kind of language!” Of course I’m alienating the public! That’s what they pay me for.
[NYT] Years ago, you described “American Buffalo” as being about “how we excuse all sorts of great and small betrayals and ethical compromises called business.” In this book, you defend enormous payouts to C.E.O.’s working for failing corporations. You seem to have changed radically.
[DM] I have. Here’s the question: Is it absurd for a company to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to a C.E.O. if the company is failing? The answer is that it may or may not be absurd, but it’s none of our goddamned business. Because as Milton Friedman said, the question is not what are the decisions but who makes the decisions. Because when the government starts deciding what’s absurd, you’re on the road to serfdom.
[…]
[NYT] Sometimes in the book I thought you were just trying to anger some of your liberal friends, like when you wrote the West sees the Middle East conflict as “entertainment.”
[DM] No, I think that it’s true. There has always been a different standard for the Jews. We’re like “honorary Aryans,” as Hitler said of the Japanese. That means that we’re human beings only when it suits the world to treat us as human beings. There’s a pretty good book on the subject — the Torah.”
— By ANDREW GOLDMAN, May 27, 2011 (nytimes.com)
David Mamet really measures up. He is that rarest of Jewish Americans who was a traditional liberal while feeling his oats as a youth, and then became a mensch when he grew up and saw the liberal left for the insane asylum it had become.
It helps to read some serious non-fiction along the way to maturity. Obama's memoirs are not serious books. They are political campaign pamphlets, and it is not clear whether they qualify as non-fiction.
Post 1,639 Of Men and Menschen
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