David Mamet Is Crazy About Sarah Palin

• Gee, liberalism is 'for the young'? Or 'young at heart'? Are freedom, 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 thought means one must settle down and accept the inevitability of feudal injustice, inequality, and second class citizenship for the poor, the marginalized, gays and 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 I think 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 The somewhat catch-all term, 'liberalism' is in actuality a historical reference denoting the most significant and ethically correct aspects of American foreign and domestic policy since the U.S. went to war against fascism in the 1940's.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 of supporting an entire global movement taking the human race onward beyond the dregs of 17th, 18th, and 19th century European feudalism, as Africa, Asia, and Latin America have caste their own struggles to end the effects of colonialism and post colonialism. For America's part, several presidents contributed to the struggle here in America for women's rights, the rights of the descendants of former slaves, the rights of displaced Jews following WWII, voting rights, freedom and prosperity for post war Europe, and desegregation here at home. My own people, African Americans, who have lain distaff roots lately within the right wing since at least 1964 when Carl Rowan became head of the reactionary US Information Agency (Judge ‘Uncle’ Thomas, Michael Steele, 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 are quick enough to criticize America, and this nation richly deserves our criticism for obvious reasons, but as an educator and a beneficiary of ardent liberal politics I find myself more and more compelled to account also for the righteousness of America where and when She deserves that acknowledgement, and so whatever else it means, whatever popular connotation has accrued to the word 'liberal' out of the mouths of ten thousand pundits and news broadcasters since 1975, the word does connote and denote a moral clarity in ACTION even if not always entirely in spirit. That action has come in the form of Liberal legislation and liberal oversight that has kept America, at least marginally, in step with the rest of the world on the most primitive level of humanism at least. As the rest of the world has struggled to create a global middleclass, to find alternatives to ruinous war, to end brutalities such as cliterodectomy, the bride price, involuntary servitude, caste inequality, child labor, legal murder of 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, moving forward along the path of progressive promotion and protection of minority rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and protection of the middle class. Where that forward movement has existed at all, liberals have been the engine of it. Since 1950, a hundred thousand liberal activists, countless progressive American congresspersons and senators, officials both local and national, university professors and students, union activists, lawyers, private citizens 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 the chief civil spirit keeping America moving out of the darkness of slavery, women’s inequality, endemic poverty, environmental degradation, food and water poisoning, and all the other markers of European feudalism that Jefferson and Adams founded America against in the first place. Those liberal presidents and their actions are well known to everyone who is old enough or who has read enough history to be aware of them: President Roosevelt who signed the Fair Labor Standards Act abolishing child labor; President Truman who desegregated the American military; President Eisenhower who put the GI Bill squarely on its feet, thus helping to create even the Anglo American middleclass and along with it a Black urban middleclass; President Kennedy who opened discourse at the national level regarding the enforcement of desegregation and who sent Bobby Kennedy to the south like a bulldog to stamp down the neo civil war posturing of Southern governors and to staunch irruptions of violence and murder directed against civil rights demonstrators; President Johnson who stewarded the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and founded the War On Poverty that spared my life; and even President Nixon, the ‘liberal’ Republican who shepherded legislation and funded government agencies that reversed the most egregious cases of rank environmental racism, redlining, and police brutality in Black urban communities. It seems fashionable now to act as if we cannot remember who we are and where we came from as Americans, preferring to make snide, simplistic puns about ‘growing up’ being somehow connected to the decidedly downward motion of returning to the Whigism and the Tory hard heartedness of the European monarchism we came to this continent to escape—the madness of King George. It seems most fashionable of all amongst our formerly progressive cultural elites who have begun to proclaim the ascendancy of the filet mignon at the Beverly Hills Hotel and the purity of self-serving intellectual cults such as Libertarianism. I beg to differ with Mr. Mamet’s claims of the progress of his brain from death to life. It is not the liberal who is ‘brain dead’ in America. It is the neo-conservative-libertarian celebrity who cannot remember who he is, who his immigrant grandparents were, and what marches he once walked in, 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, as was his heart. Both now, contrary to his misimpression of progress, have turned steadfastly backward, and have marched apace with Hollywood into an untimely death. May they both rest in peace, if for no other reason than the profound humanism and the inspirational liberal soul that they contributed to his pre-Hollywood, long ago masterpiece, “Glengarry Glen Ross.” And so it goes.

• mamet is getting old and liberalism is for the young or young at heart. As long as he keps making his true to life movies with the razorsharp dialog reminiscig of 40s filmnoir Mamet will remain current. If his next project is a biopic of the likes of Glenn Beck well know Mr Mamet has left the building 

• mamet is getting old and liberalism is for the young or young at heart. As long as he keeps making his true to life movies with the razor sharp dialog reminiscent of 40s film noir mr Mamet will remain current. If his next project is a biopic of the likes of Glenn Beck well know Mr Mamet has left the building.

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