Keep Your Mouth Shut and Your Eyes Open

With the caveat that I am not the world's biggest fan of political Road to Damascus confessionals (on the theory that anyone younger than 95 years old who was ever a Trotskyist, let alone a Maoist, just should not be preaching to me about political judgment), this David Mamet mea culpa is pretty entertaining, and not only because he's going libertarian on us. A selection:

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. […]

[My play is] about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

Whole thing here. Maybe it was all that time in Santa Monica.