In what is easily the best article I’ve ever read on the Village Voice, David Mamet, screenwriter, playwright and author, committed career suicide by announcing that he is no longer a “brain-dead Libera.l” Here are some of the highlights:
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview (liberalism) 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….
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
I found not only that I didn’t trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
And I began to question my hatred for “the Corporations”—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the “Bad, Bad Military” of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not “Is everything perfect?” but “How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?” Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
Mamet is a brilliant writer, but I am amazed, as is so often the case, that otherwise intelligent people wait until they’re 60 years old to realize such simple, obvious truths. Very impressed that he had the balls to write this, though. He will certainly be a pariah at those Manhattan dinner parties and will likely struggle to find work. It’s very hard to offend the liberal elite, but being a conservative works every time.
Meanwhile, as much of America emerges from the coldest winter in a century, Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, wrote a great article containing an excerpt from a speech on global warming:
Climate alarmists pose real threat to freedom
He points out that CO2 emissions are affected by three factors: economic output, population, and density of emissions. Therefore, if we wish to limit these emissions we must “If we really want to decrease ECO2 we have to either stop the economic growth and thus block further rise in the standard of living, stop the population growth, or make miracles with the emissions intensity.
This, of course, has always been the goal of the global warmin alarmists – namely rolling back prosperity and making people more dependent on government.
As a politician who personally experienced communist central planning of all kinds of human activities, I feel obliged to bring back the already almost forgotten arguments used in the famous plan-versus-market debate in the 1930s in economic theory (between Mises and Hayek on the one side and Lange and Lerner on the other), the arguments we had been using for decades until the moment of the fall of communism. The innocence with which climate alarmists and their fellow-travellers in politics and media now present and justify their ambitions to mastermind human society belongs to the same fatal conceit. To my great despair, this is not sufficiently challenged, neither in the field of social sciences, nor in the field of climatology.
The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong. They believe in their own ability to assemble all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility of giving adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions.
We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. We need to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
That last paragraph is, in a nutshell, my purpose in political-life.
A good companion post as Scottsdale Sucks comparing global warming hysteria to communism and naziism:
Lastly, the issue that most scares me about Barack Obama:
Given the ages of the current Supreme Court, the next President will likely appoint 2-3 judges in each of the next two terms. What would a Supreme Court made up of 4-6 Obama justices look like? Not a pretty sight I’m afraid.
Obama clearly believes in a style of judging best-termed “personal opinion.” And his opinion is, of course, shockingly liberal. I venture that 80% of his supporters have no idea how much they disagree with him on most issues. Obama says, “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old–and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”
No, we need dispassionate judges who will rule based on the laws of the land.
The ending of the article offers this summary:
Beneath the congeniality and charisma lies a leftist partisan who will readily resort to sly deceptions to advance his agenda of liberal judicial activism. Given the likelihood of so many changes in the membership of the Supreme Court over the next eight years, it is particularly important that voters this November recognize the real Obama.
