Henniger on Mamet

If you found Daniel Henniger's article below interesting, hear him:

Eliott Spitzer

The Pew Study

The Pew Foundation has surveyed the "God Market," here is the Wall Street Journal's short take:

A Liturgical Novel: Fun!

Sequences

Michael Lawrence explores sequences on the New Liturgical Movement.

You can hear it sung on the same site.

Read David Mamet's Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'

David Mamet discovered he believed in a world infected with Original Sin. (See the next posting.) "And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama." [Read the whole article in the Village Voice.]


Which induces me to propose Harris' First Law of Humor:

First Law: A belief (conscious or unconscious) in Original Sin is a necessary condition for satire
The Dual: A belief in Original Sin is grounded in a belief that man is made in the image and likeness of God
First Corollary: Satire is inherently a conservative art form
Second Corollary: Liberals' attempts at satire degenerate into snideness

The Great Silence: David Mamet Abandoned Liberalism and Noone Noticed

David Henninger writes: "The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, 'Why I Am No Longer a "Brain-Dead Liberal."' Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the 'Mamet-word'), didn't himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: 'I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: "Shut the [Mamet-word] up."' Been known to happen.

'Toward the end of the essay, he names names: "I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.'"

I would say he converted to libertarianism ( nineteenth century liberalism) rather than conservatism.