David Mamet Is Crazy About Sarah Palin

Gee, liberalism is 'for the young'? Or 'young at heart'? Arefreedom, justice, and opportunity for the ‘young’ as well? Do the old wake up,as Mamet seems to be implying, and suddenly realize that maturity of thoughtmeans one must settle down and accept the inevitability of feudal injustice,inequality, and second class citizenship for the poor, the marginalized, gaysand lesbians, and immigrants, and for the middle class?  No offense, George, but what a flippant trivialization of the heart and soul of the main American contribution to the modern global humanist movement! Of course, I think you perfectly capture the spirit of Mamet’s own testimonial, you got it right, so you have been true to just what it is Ithink he ultimately meant.

But if I may. Lawrence O'Donnell has recently re-awakened a vital and necessary public debate on his MSNBC show, "The Last Word," when he hstened to claim unashamedly his pride over FACEBOOK internet posts proclaiming his years-old defense of liberalism. He recently embraced responsibility for those words, which he had written for an episode of the past TV show, "The West Wing." As an African American educator, a university professor, I hail Lawrence for his simple decency in writing those words in the first place and for reaffirming his pride in them in the hee and now.

The somewhat catch-all term, 'liberalism' is in actuality a historical reference denoting the most significant and ethically correct aspects of American foreign and domestic policy since the U.S. went to war against fascism in the 1940's. It denotes the actions American presidents have taken after Hitler to keep America firmly on a path ofsupporting an entire global movement taking the human race onward beyond thedregs of 17th, 18th, and 19th century European feudalism,as Africa, Asia, and Latin America have caste their own struggles to end theeffects of colonialism and post colonialism. For America's part, severalpresidents contributed to the struggle here in America for women's rights, therights of the descendants of former slaves, the rights of displaced Jewsfollowing WWII, voting rights, freedom and prosperity for post war Europe, anddesegregation here at home.

My own people, African Americans, who have lain distaffroots lately within the right wing since at least 1964 when Carl Rowan becamehead of the reactionary US Information Agency (Judge ‘Uncle’ Thomas, MichaelSteele, and Herman Cain being only the most recent spooky shoots to sprout),have often enough criticized America from the right, and on the left we arequick enough to criticize America, and this nation richly deserves our criticismfor obvious reasons, but as an educator and a beneficiary of ardent liberalpolitics I find myself more and more compelled to account also for the righteousnessof America where and when She deserves that acknowledgement, and so whateverelse it means, whatever popular connotation has accrued to the word 'liberal'out of the mouths of ten thousand pundits and news broadcasters since 1975, theword does connote and denote a moral clarity in ACTION even if not alwaysentirely in spirit.

That action has come in the form of Liberal legislationand liberal oversight that has kept America, at least marginally, in step withthe rest of the world on the most primitive level of humanism at least. As therest of the world has struggled to create a global middleclass, to findalternatives to ruinous war, to end brutalities such as cliterodectomy, thebride price, involuntary servitude, caste inequality, child labor, legal murderof wives by their husbands, war crimes, government corruption and influence,and repression of trade unionism, it goes without saying that the U.S.,whatever Her shortcomings, has been often enough to remark on it, movingforward along the path of progressive promotion and protection of minorityrights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and protection of the middle class.Where that forward movement has existed at all, liberals have been the engineof it.

Since 1950, a hundred thousand liberal activists, countlessprogressive American congresspersons and senators, officials both local andnational, university professors and students, union activists, lawyers, privatecitizens and ordinary Americans, all have done the hard footwork, organizing,protest, and transformative electoral politics that made it possible for ‘liberal’presidents to carry the banner of ‘liberal’ progressivism that has been thechief civil spirit keeping America moving out of the darkness of slavery, women’sinequality, endemic poverty, environmental degradation, food and waterpoisoning, and all the other markers of European feudalism that Jefferson andAdams founded America against in the first place. Those liberal presidents andtheir actions are well known to everyone who is old enough or who has read enoughhistory to be aware of them: President Roosevelt who signed the Fair LaborStandards Act abolishing child labor; President Truman who desegregated the Americanmilitary; President Eisenhower who put the GI Bill squarely on its feet, thushelping to create even the Anglo American middleclass and along with it a Blackurban middleclass; President Kennedy who opened discourse at the national levelregarding the enforcement of desegregation and who sent Bobby Kennedy to thesouth like a bulldog to stamp down the neo civil war posturing of Southerngovernors and to staunch irruptions of violence and murder directed againstcivil rights demonstrators; President Johnson who stewarded the Civil Rights Actand Voting Rights Act and founded the War On Poverty that spared my life; andeven President Nixon, the ‘liberal’ Republican who shepherded legislation andfunded government agencies that reversed the most egregious cases of rankenvironmental racism, redlining, and police brutality in Black urbancommunities.

It seems fashionable now to act as if we cannot rememberwho we are and where we came from as Americans, preferring to make snide,simplistic puns about ‘growing up’ being somehow connected to the decidedlydownward motion of returning to the Whigism and the Tory hard heartedness ofthe European monarchism we came to this continent to escape—the madness of KingGeorge. It seems most fashionable of all amongst our formerly progressivecultural elites who have begun to proclaim the ascendancy of the filet mignon atthe Beverly Hills Hotel and the purity of self-serving intellectual cults suchas Libertarianism. I beg to differ with Mr. Mamet’s claims of the progress ofhis brain from death to life. It is not the liberal who is ‘brain dead’ inAmerica. It is the neo-conservative-libertarian celebrity who cannot rememberwho he is, who his immigrant grandparents were, and what marches he once walkedin, what savage inequalities he used to contribute funds to the elimination of:it is in fact the case that Mr. Mamet’s brain was once quite alive and well, aswas his heart. Both now, contrary to his misimpression of progress, have turnedsteadfastly backward, and have marched apace with Hollywood into an untimelydeath.

May they both rest in peace, if for no other reason thanthe profound humanism and the inspirational liberal soul that they contributedto his pre-Hollywood, long ago masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

And so it goes.