Into the Sewer: the American right wing, 2011

new gingrich - paul ryan ~ fite!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/16/us/politics/16gingrich.html?ref=politics

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

rmde

also @ max's link: jfc

i like david carr but i dont really get why he was giving drudge such a bj there

i mean i "get" it i just wish he wouldnt

oh no guys, Trump is OUT!

never fear, you guys will never run out of sideshows

ya thank god you're not leaving us

btw guys I am also formally announcing today that I am not running for the GOP nomination for president in 2012.

I know there's been a lot of speculation out there, just wanted to put that to rest.

x-post -

David Carr should have gotten a quote from Media matters re false Drudge claims

mediamatters.org

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/converting-mamet_561048.html?page=3

ugh

haha yeah

And the essays in The Secret Knowledge do occasionally have the tone of a man locked alone in an office, talking to himself. “I was a monomaniac,” he said of the period he was writing the book. “Crazed.”

The prose moves very fast, and some of the arguments seem to be missing a few essential steps; premises rocket to conclusions on the strength of sheer outrage. The conversion is complete: This is not a book by the same man who told Charlie Rose he didn’t want to impose his political views on anybody. At some moments—as when he blithely announces that the earth is cooling not warming, QED—you wonder whether maybe he isn’t in danger of exchanging one herd for another. He told me he doesn’t read political blogs or magazines. “I drive around and listen to the talk show guys,” he said. “Beck, Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved.”

scocca and chait both good on the mamet piece

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/88454/house-games

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2011/05/16/david-mamet-shocker-rich-person-discovers-he-is-a-republican.aspx

david mamet is such a dick.

honestly i'm surprised that this happened... now. didn't he write a first-person version of this 'conversion' somewhere like 6 years ago??

and honestly i was surprised even then. when i was intro'd to mamet via glengarry and oleanna i figured the guy was a rightist anyway

yeah i would never have called him a liberal

the country in which he actually lived, where people interacted smoothly in the marketplace to their mutual benefit

really, now?

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

like scocca points out, i dont know that i want to be a member of a tribe that doesnt think thomas jefferson was a slaveowner

haha part of why i hate mamet is he came to speak at my college and gave this very "wake up, sheeple!" talk about how college is dumb and how much smarter he was than all of us and it was very offputting.

ronin is so good though

He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food.

he's been using this line for over a decade at this point

xp i love a lot of mamet movies; i was kind of heartbroken when i went to that talk

feel like my previous dismissal of Mamet has now been retroactively justified

ronin is so good though

― ban drake (the rapper) (max), Monday, May 16, 2011 3:04 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

he's so good at situations where grumpy men know how to do stuff

his movies without real female characters are less uh problematic

oleanna is a real p.o.s.

goole otm

the plays get more into the reason why they bother, which is that women are cunts.

spartan is good, redbelt is good... state & main? intolerable. low pigeon content is key to good mamet in this century.

xps lol

i've always assumed oleanna would infuriate me.

i don't really remember it tbh! it was sort of like 'disclosure' iirc, only with trademark weird halting dialogue.

The play premiered in May 1992 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as the first production of Mamet's new Back Bay Theater Company.[3] The premiere featured William H. Macy as John, a "smug, pompous, insufferable man whose power over academic lives he unconsciously abuses."[3] Rebecca Pidgeon played the female lead, Carol, described by one critic as, "Mamet's most fully realized female character, ...a mousy, confused cipher" whose failure to comprehend concepts and precepts presented in John's class motivated her appeal for personal instruction.[3] The part of Carol is said to have been written for Pidgeon.[3]

In October, a year after the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas hearings[1] which "crystallized and concretized"[3] Mamet's dramatization, it appeared off-Broadway at New York City's Orpheum Theatre, with Macy and Pidgeon reprising their roles. The production included a rewritten third scene.[3] Critic Frank Rich provides a summary of the play in his review of the off-Broadway production:

Mamet's most fully realized female character, ...a mousy, confused cipher

okay that's gold

oleanna is one of those... "we report... you decide" plays that "forces you to question the nature of sexual harassment" or whatever, except it doesnt, because none of the characters are real people

and the movie is just horrible

not at all shocking that this dude is a conservative, imo. thought i'd seen a decent number of his films but realized it's just wag the dog (don't remember it that well), the edge (BAD ASS), heist (ok i thought, nothing great), ronin (GOAT), and spartan (incomprehensible at the time of viewing due to [redacted], so i won't pass judgement).

which, maybe wag the dog aside, are all bona fide dude films. sort of assumed that if someone was v serious about making quality spy flicks (or novels or w/e, a la clancy), that meant that they were de facto libertarians if not outright conservatives. this is stuff made for if not exclusively consumed by middle-aged men who enjoy intelligence with their violence.

or: "grumpy men know how to do stuff

― goole, Monday, May 16, 2011 3:07 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark"

haha part of why i hate mamet is he came to speak at my college and gave this very "wake up, sheeple!" talk about how college is dumb and how much smarter he was than all of us and it was very offputting.

anybody who weighs heavy on the "sure you've got your book-learnin but it's out there in the REAL WORLD where you'll get your actual education" trope is my least favorite person

...particularily if they're paid a small fortune to chat shit at a commencement. Go tell it at a tech institute, Dave... except they wouldn't know who the fucking hell you are.

I saw Oleanna at the Royal Court and it was like being trapped in a middle aged white dude's butt-hurtedness at being told off for pinching an arse.

Not long after moving to the city, Mamet undertook his first foray into civic activism, when the City Council revived a 60-year-old ordinance and tried to force Mamet and his neighbors to cut the hedges around their homes, in accordance with a newly articulated “public right to the viewership of private property.”

First they came for the hedges and I didn't speak out.

it wasn't commencement tbf, but still. it was like, oh you're so daring, for coming to the belly of the beast that is higher education and speaking truth to power.

If he's remembered primarily as a film director rather than a playwright, t'will be some fine revenge.

I pretty much quit on him after the first Broadway production of Speed-the-Plow, where Madonna was the scheming gal, then there was that Homicide movie lunacy. American Buffalo and A Life in the Theatre have no perceivable politics.

minimalist writers are always conservative dicks

was Beckett? no idea

I think Robert Duvall originated the role of Teach in American Buffalo, so maybe they can hit the trail together next year for Herman Cain.

Mamet movies I own on DVD: Ronin, Spartan, The Edge, Glengarry Glen Ross, Heist. Mamet political opinions I give a dripping fart about: none of 'em.

bnw, what about Harold Pinter? Blows yr theory out of the water.

i should get around to seeing ggr huh

oh yeah, xp

can't believe the guy whose dialogue is the perfect distillation of intellectual machismo is a conservative dickhead

Is Vonnegut considered minimalist?

funny the playwright i think of as closest to mamet is caryl churchill but that' just how their words look on the page maybe