I knew that the playwright David Mamet had undergone (in the tradition of David Horowitz) a left-to-right political conversion, but I had no idea how far off the rails his change of heart had taken him.
Reviewing Mamet’s latest book for The New York Times, Christopher Hitchens writes:
This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:
“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”
Or this:
“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”
Among other things, Hitchens notes that the deranged Glenn Beck “is among those thanked in Mamet’s acknowledgments for helping free him from ‘the bemused and sad paternalism’ of the liberal airwaves.”
I can’t help wondering if the new Mamet would be capable of writing such an angry and brilliant screenplay as he did for “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
